Word: amoy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...physical and psychological thorn in Red China's side for five years, Quemoy Island is a bleak, treeless patch of rock and sand, 70 square miles in area, which lies only five miles from the mainland, twelve miles from the Communist port city of Amoy. Off Quemoy last week a furious little skirmish between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists was being fought across a few thousand yards of choppy blue water in Formosa Strait...
Quemoy was once a haven for pirates who preyed on coastal shipping out of Hong Kong. While Chiang's forces hold it, the Communists cannot use Amoy, their best port on the southern coast. In 1949 the Reds tried to take the island with 15,000 men in junks from Swatow. The Nationalists beat them off and burned their junks. The Communists tried again, with 700 men, the following year, but this force got lost in bad weather, and Chiang's men captured 300 seasick Reds...
Three weeks ago the Communists launched a quick raid on the island, then followed it with a heavy artillery plastering. In reply, for seven straight days last week, Chiang's forces attacked the mainland around Amoy with planes, artillery and fire from destroyers and gunboats. F-84 jets from Formosa joined the battle, pouring rockets and napalm on the enemy. The Communists answered with artillery and ack-ack. They did not use their MIGs -reflecting the caution they displayed in Korea, where MIGs did not venture over the front lines...
Last week the Peking bullyboys -according to their own account -carried off a small. Commando-type raid of Nationalist-held Quemoy, a 70-sq.-mi. bastion (not part of the Pescadores) that lies off the port city of Amoy, only four or five miles from the mainland. Quemoy bristles with Nationalist troops, is said to be heavily fortified with concrete pillboxes, artillery and interlocking fields of machine-gun fire. Peking claimed that a party of 40 Red raiders attacked a sleeping garrison on Quemoy. killed ten, captured one, withdrew. The occurrence of the raid was confirmed from Taipei...
...British freighter Nigelock, a converted wartime corvette loaded with fruit and vegetables, steamed through the China Sea one velvet night last week, outward bound from Communist Shanghai to Communist Amoy. At-first light, a gunboat appeared on the port bow and ordered the Britisher to heave to. Not me, said Nigelock's captain, and rang for full steam ahead. His radio crackled an S O S to the British destroyer Cockade, on patrol in the Formosa strait...