Word: fleetly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Defensive Arm. "In June 1950, following the aggressive attack on the Republic of Korea," he said, "the U.S. Seventh Fleet was instructed both to prevent attack upon Formosa and also to insure that Formosa should not be used as a base of operations [by the Chinese Nationalists] against the Chinese Communist mainland. This has meant, in effect, that the U.S. Navy was required to serve as a defensive arm of Communist China ... There is no longer any logic or sense in a condition that required the U.S. Navy to assume defensive responsibilities on behalf of the Chinese Communists. This permitted...
...therefore, issuing instructions that the Seventh Fleet no longer be employed to shield Communist China. Permit me to make crystal clear-this order implies no aggressive intent on our part. But we certainly have no obligation to protect a nation fighting us in Korea...
President Eisenhower's decision to remove the Seventh Fleet as defense for the Communist China mainland marked a complete repudiation of one of the strangest policies in the history of the U.S.: the Truman-Acheson policy of suppressing the Chinese Nationalist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek...
There is a popular belief that the Truman Administration reversed its policies toward Chiang in June 1950, when the Korean war began. In one sense it did: by ordering the Seventh Fleet to patrol the Formosa straits, and by sending Chiang a new batch of U.S. military advisers, Harry Truman recognized that a Communist Formosa would be a military hazard at the rear of the U.N. forces in Korea...
...more basic sense, there was no policy change at all toward Communist China: the Seventh Fleet was ordered to stop the Nationalists from making air raids on the Communist mainland, and to abandon their efforts to blockade the mainland coast. When the Chinese Communists joined the attack in Korea in November 1950, this old order obviously lost whatever excuse it ever had-but it was never changed. The U.S. fought the troops of Communist China in desperate battles, and still guaranteed the coast of Communist China against attack...