Word: tachen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Dispatched a special message to the officers and men of the Pacific Fleet who participated in the evacuation of the Tachen Islands (see FOREIGN NEWS), to tell them: "Yours was a difficult and delicate assignment. On behalf of a grateful American people: well done...
...momentousness of the news could be judged by the headlines it displaced. Until the bulletin from Moscow, the big news everywhere was of the U.S. Seventh Fleet steaming to within gun range of Communist China to evacuate, come war or high water, Chiang's Nationalists from the Tachen Islands. The British Commonwealth prime ministers assembled in London could talk of nothing else; Britain's Laborites cried that it surely meant war and demanded that Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden beg Premier Chou En-lai for peace. That kind of fear of imminent war in the Formosa Strait (an impression...
Among the stone-and-mud houses of Little Half Heaven, an old, toothless woman leaned on a stick and whimpered softly. Her husband explained: she had lived on Upper Tachen all her life, and could not understand what was going on. "She's deaf; she cries all the time." he said, and grinned, showing a single yellow tooth in his lower jaw. She was not the only one who found the evacuation of the Tachens hard to understand. Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, putting the best face he could on it, proclaimed that the Tachens' troops were being redeployed...
Spiked Spearhead. Meanwhile, the U.S. had diplomatic difficulties of its own in the form of a thorny negotiation with Chiang Kai-shek over the evacuation of the Tachen Islands. Last September the U.S. decided that the islands of Quemoy and Matsu were not militarily vital to the defense of Formosa. Later, as a condition to giving up the Tachens, Chiang demanded a public U.S. promise to defend Quemoy and Matsu. Politically, this was a reasonable condition, for with the Tachens gone, the other islands, as well as having tactical value, would become a test in the minds of free Asians...
This affray above the Yellow Sea differed from its predecessors in that it was the biggest and best organized Communist air ambush since Korea; also in that the Communists did not even bother to protest. Six hundred miles southward, in the storm center around the Tachen Islands, the Seventh Fleet took wary note. "I want tight formations, no straggling," one Navy flight leader told his pilots. "Test your guns as soon as you get into a clear area. Make certain they are ready. Remember this-we are not out looking for a fight. But if trouble is brought...