On the 17th of April, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. By midday they were emptying it. Two million people were marched out of the city at gunpoint, told the Americans were about to bomb, and that they could come home in three days. Phnom Penh stayed almost empty for the next four years.

How would you react to being forced out of your home at gunpoint, ordered to leave everything behind, and told to walk for days into the countryside toward a fate nobody would explain? And that was only the beginning.

Time period covered: 1969–1979

This first episode covers the fall of Phnom Penh, the evacuation of the city, and the discovery of the S-21 prison by the Vietnamese army in January 1979. It includes the recollections of Jim Laurie, Elizabeth Becker, Al Rockoff and Dith Pran, who were there. Under the Khmer Rouge, something like one in five Cambodians died in under four years. This series is a detailed narrative history of Cambodia and an attempt to explain how that happened. This episode is an introduction to the events themselves, before the series goes back to the beginning of Cambodian history to work out why.

Re-recorded and expanded in 2026.

Sources

Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son
Haing Ngor with Roger Warner, Survival in the Killing Fields
Jon Swain, River of Time
Jim Laurie, The Last Helicopter
Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over
Roland Neveu, The Fall of Phnom Penh
David Chandler, A History of Cambodia; Brother Number One; Voices from S-21
Philip Short, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime
Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy
Testimony before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
Interview with Dith Pran, 1983, American Archive of Public Broadcasting

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