Word: strait
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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...
...later, in response to the Communist blockade, two U.S. heavy cruisers and six U.S. destroyers escorted a pair of Nationalist supply ships to Quemoy's three-mile limit in broad daylight. Said Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek: "Now the problem of keeping the sea lanes open in the Formosa Strait is up to the Seventh Fleet...
...fact should be recognized and acted upon peacefully." The British government, moved by its fisheries "war" with Iceland (see below) to take a stern stand against Peking's new claim to a twelve-mile limit, publicly announced that it "fully shared" U.S. concern over events in the Formosa Strait. But in private, British Foreign Office spokesmen made no bones of their lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of active U.S. participation in defense of the offshore islands...
Show of Force. Studying the reports of artillery duels, the inconclusive sea skirmishes and occasional dogfights between MIGs and Sabre jets, the U.S. sought to decide how serious were Communist intentions in Formosa Strait and concluded that even a probing action required an unmistakable response. The dispatch to Formosan waters of the U.S. carrier Essex-which in mid-July was helping to land marines in Lebanon-and the dispatch from Pearl Harbor of the big Midway the next day were ordered to make a show of force and to dramatize U.S. concern. As an added evidence of U.S. activity, Secretary...
Along Washington's coastline, from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Columbia River, "only the 43 miles between the Ozette River and the Hoh remain unshadowed by a road and still bordered by unspoiled forest land. Yet, in the entire country, this is the biggest such stretch we have left." The speaker: William O. Douglas, 59, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the nation's foremost man scout. Occasion: a three-day hike from Lake Ozette to Lapush, paced by the Justice-leading his wife, daughter, twelve newsmen and 55 Boone companions-in demonstration...