Word: yikiang
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Psychological Explosion. It was no fault of Admirals Pride and Kivette that they were holidaying while Asia was burning. Months ago, the U.S. had decided that it would not defend such outlying islands as Yikiang and the Tachens. This policy was publicly reaffirmed last week by Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles in similar statements to the press. Said the President: "No military authority that I know of has tried to rate these small islands that are now under attack, or indeed the Tachens themselves, as an essential part of the defense of Formosa and of the Pescadores...
...blows fell on Formosa, and on Chinese Nationalists everywhere, like hammer strokes. First there were the fall of Yikiang and the obvious threat to the Tachens, then the Dulles statement that the Tachens were not of strategic value and would not be protected by the U.S., then talk of a ceasefire, and the inference -quickly drawn by Asians-that Washington was headed toward neutralization of Formosa...
...There was a tang in the air and a stiff breeze; the water was choppy but not rough. A good day it was for yachting, a reporter in Taipei sardonically observed. There were plenty of surface craft in the sea off tiny (little more than a half square mile) Yikiang Island, but they were not yachts. The Chinese Communists were successfully invading Yikiang -their first combat seizure of a Nationalist-held island since...
...irregulars"-guerrillas, fishermen and observers-in the Yikiang garrison had no air or sea protection. They had been repeatedly shelled from Communist-held Toumen, six miles away. At mid-morning on the day of the assault, the Reds began shelling the tiny island from two destroyers, four gunboats and a swarm of patrol boats. At noon 60 Red planes-Russian-built light bombers and fighter-bombers, with MIG jets for top cover-began plastering the Nationalists with 500-lb. bombs. Under this rain of fire, the garrison clung to its burrows; while they were holed up, the invaders came ashore...
...attacking force at regimental strength (which would be 2,500 on the Chinese scale). They heavily outnumbered and soon overwhelmed the Nationalists. At dusk, the big Nationalist garrison on Upper Tachen, eight miles away, could still hear machine-gun fire. But later in the night silence fell on Yikiang. Next day the triumphant Reds sent 100 planes to bomb the Tachens-one of the largest raids of the island...