Word: quemoy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dulles' dogged policy of calculated ambiguity served to keep the Communists relatively quiet for three years. Then came crisis: in August 1958, the Communists opened a tremendous artillery attack on Quemoy from their positions seven miles away. Day after day, they lobbed thousands of shells onto the dreary islands, killing and maiming more than a thousand soldiers and civilians, disrupting the supply lines from Formosa...
...President sent a task force from the waiting Seventh Fleet into action. U.S. convoys escorted Chinese Nationalists toward the three-mile limit of Quemoy, and sent the Chinese the rest of the way in LSTs and LSMs. Overhead, Chinese Nationalist ace pilots, in U.S.-built planes, bloodied the Communist MIGs. Little by little, Quemoy was provisioned and armed to the beaches with 155-mm. howitzers, mortars and tanks. From Moscow, Khrushchev demanded the fleet's withdrawal on pain of an all-out war. But the U.S. naval escort, keeping carefully outside the international three-mile limit, maintained the needed...
...home, the argument went on. Cried former Secretary of State Dean Acheson: "We seem to be drifting, either dazed or indifferent, toward war with China." Under Secretary of State Christian Herter claimed that the offshore islands were "not strategically defensible," labeled Chiang's preoccupation with Quemoy's fate "almost pathological." Into the State Department poured about 5,000 letters, 80% of them critical of Ike's policy. The President went on nationwide radio-TV, declared that the Quemoy attack was "part of an ambitious plan of armed conquest ... I assure you that no American boy will...
While the U.S. joined Chinese Communist representatives in Warsaw for peace talks (at Chou En-lai's request), international and domestic criticism of U.S. risk-taking over Quemoy grew louder. Pressured mightily, Ike and Dulles hinted that the U.S. was softening its line. At a headline-making press conference in September 1958, Dulles called Chiang's dream of reconquering the mainland "problematical." The U.S. apparently hoped to neutralize both sides on the Quemoy issue by pressing for a cease-fire and large-scale withdrawal of Quemoy troops to Formosa. If there were a "dependable ceasefire" in the area...
Though the President advocated a reduction of Quemoy forces provided that the Communists pledged a ceasefire, he did not waver on the question of Communist expansion. "The basic issue, as we see it," he said in October, "is to avoid retreat in the face of force...