Word: quemoy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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WHEN the world crisis shifted last week to the Formosa Strait, Kansas-born, Philippines-bred Jim Bell, chief of TIME'S Hong Kong bureau, was right on the spot. Riding a Chinese Nationalist supply ship for Quemoy, he had just clambered over the side into a landing barge when Communist gunboats launched a surprise night attack. Getting ashore after a hair-raising trip under Red fire, he "sprinted up the beach as fast as an aging correspondent in blue button-down collar, British slacks and a pair of loose loafers could sprint." Three days later, airlifted off Quemoy...
...response to a cry of help from Lebanon was swift, effective and-as the world's non-Communist governments were bound to note-unchallenged by the big-talking Communists. The Chinese Communist threats to conquer Formosa, and the stepped-up attacks on the offshore Nationalist island of Quemoy (see FOREIGN NEWS), last week brought an equally powerful presidential warning that the U.S. would not hesitate to counterattack, and it brought prompt deployment of U.S. fighting forces. New element in the Quemoy warning: the U.S. was prepared to retaliate by bombing the attacker's home bases if necessary...
Barely 72 hours later, the Communist military commander for the Fukien district of South China, who may not be a madman but hardly qualifies as a preserver of the peace, sent crashing out an entirely different message, addressed to the Nationalist Chinese garrison entrenched on Quemoy Island: "No military works can avoid complete destruction under the assault of our modern army and air force . . . The landing on Quemoy is imminent . . . Surrender...
Peking's ultimatum was backed up by the thunder of the heaviest sustained artillery barrage the world has seen since the Korean war. Day after day. Red Chinese batteries rained 152-mm. and 122-mm. shells on Quemoy and the smaller surrounding islands of Little Quemoy, Hutzuyn, Tatan and Erhtan. It was a heavy shelling, but hardly the 122,000 rounds estimated by Nationalist headquarters in Taipei. Nationalists reported about 700 civilian and military casualties, killed and wounded...
...very doorstep. (Tatan and Erhtan, with a combined area of 143 acres, lie smack in the mouth of Amoy harbor only 2½ miles from shore.) Moreover, since Formosa itself was under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945 and has a strong separatist tradition, the islands of the Quemoy complex-together with Matsu and a handful of other islets to the north-constitute the only indisputably Chinese soil remaining in Nationalist hands. To hold these largely symbolic specks Chiang Kai-shek has crammed them with 95,000 troops...