Word: quemoy
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ARTILLERY BATTLE : Communist China's gunners laid down on Quemoy one of the most intense and longest-sustained artillery bombardments ever directed against a single objective. High point: the Communists fired 60,000 rounds from 300 guns on Sept. 11. The bombardment caused serious disruption on the supply beaches, smashed up two Chinese Nationalist airstrips, outgunned Nationalist artillerymen-but it had little effect on the morale of the dug-in Nationalist troops, many of them Formosans. As bombardment wore on, the Nationalists got emergency schooling from U.S. officers and noncoms on fast unloading techniques, deployed underwater demolition teams...
PROPAGANDA BATTLE: The Communists keyed their bombardment to a ceaseless propaganda attack, listed 40 specific charges of U.S. aggression in the Formosa Strait, whipped up a homeside hate campaign by accusing Chinese Nationalists of using poison-gas shells. By loudspeakers and leaflet shells the Communists offered the Quemoy garrison attractive surrender terms; by letters routed through Hong Kong, they offered top Nationalists big bribes if they would desert. At the same time they beat on the theme that with the U.S. elections due on Nov. 4, there could be no support in the U.S. for helping Nationalist President Chiang Kaishek...
...September's end it was clear to Red China that there would be no cheap victory at Quemoy. On Oct. 6 the Communists declared their first cease-fire-"out of humanitarian considerations," as they put it. The Nationalists coolly used the letup to unload tens of thousands of tons on Quemoy. On Oct. 20 the Communists canceled the ceasefire, laid down erratic shellfire until Nov. 3, when they put down about 40,000 shells in a bombardment that had so little military meaning that U.S. observers conclude it must have been aimed at U.S. voters...
...specific book of rules can be written out of the Formosa experience, since the Communists can mix their efforts into whatever formula they feel will best serve their designs. But Quemoy proved the success of certain U.S. policies. For one, the U.S. established the cold-war value of anti-Communist Asian forces ready to fight for what they have. Military-assistance investments of many years were justified and paid out in the Quemoy crisis of 1958. The second and never-to-be-forgotten lesson is that the Communist intentions remain as they have been in the past-to eliminate...
Such setbacks came at an inopportune time. Unrest and conspicuous uprisings in communes like that of Lappa Island opposite Macao (TIME, Dec. 22) added to the national loss of face from the failure of Red guns and planes to "liberate" Quemoy and the offshore islands (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). The antlike life of the communes had been greeted abroad by coolness in the Soviet Union, by horror in the West, by outspoken distaste in India. Crossing the border to Hong Kong, an Indian population expert last week said that Red China "was like...