FORMOSA: The Hammer & the Vise

All week long monster C124 and C-130 transports, the white star of the U.S. Air Force emblazoned on their flanks, lumbered down onto Formosan airfields. Tent cities sprang up along roadsides. Crated jet engines were stacked in banana groves; laborers toiled night and day to extend hangars left behind by the Japanese in World War II. The U.S. was staging the biggest military buildup since the Korean war.

Like most buildups, this one was fast, furious and frequently confused. Officers and units were grabbed wherever the Pentagon could find them. Captain Allen C. Lambard, a radio air control officer stationed in Guam, was yanked out of bed and ordered to pack his gear at 2 a.m. Air Force Brigadier General Avelin P. Tacon was flagged down by state police on a California highway. To General Tacon’s intense surprise, the cops showed no interest in the fact that he was doing 70 in a 55-mile-an-hour zone. Their mission was to tell him that he was wanted in Formosa—immediately.

By these and a thousand similar peremptory devices, the U.S. had poured 5,000 airmen, sailors, and marines into Formosa in the four weeks since Red China began its attack on Quemoy. (There were already 4,000 U.S. servicemen stationed in the island when the crisis started.) Items:

¶ At an airfield in northeast Formosa, men of a U.S. air base squadron, only ten days out of Johnston Island, wearily completed construction of an electrified tent city. Within revetments nearby stood stubby, missilelike F-104 Starfighters, the world’s fastest (1,400 miles an hour) operational aircraft. Never before deployed outside the U.S., the Starfighters were knocked down and flown into Formosa unassembled two weeks ago; last week they were already flying over the Formosa Strait. Said one pilot: “It must have scared the pants off the Reds when they saw this bird move across their radar screens the first time.”

¶ From a southern Formosan base, hardbitten pilots of Marine Air Group 11 were flying round-the-clock cover for Nationalist transport planes airdropping supplies to Little Quemoy. At night the marines used F4D Skyrays; during the day they relied on FJ Furies.

C| A few miles away from the Marine base, Matador missiles—capable of delivering nuclear warheads onto mainland China—stood on 24-hour alert, their crews constantly rehearsing countdowns. Elsewhere on the same field, a Chinese air force major, fresh from a kill of a Communist MIG, talked over combat tactics with an American captain who was about to take him up in one of the F-100 Super Sabres which the U.S. is providing to replace the slower Thunderjets and Sabres now flown by the Nationalists.

¶ At four sites around Taipei, engineers of the U.S.’s Vinnell Co. rushed construction of launching sites for Nike-Hercules ground-to-air missiles. Vinnell, which normally takes a year to build a Nike site in the U.S., has undertaken a crash program to finish the sites in 50 days, though it still had no formal contract nor any blueprints. Banking on Vinnell’s know-how, the Army last week flew in an advance party of a missile battalion from Texas.

Kills & Convoy. In the midst of all this preparation for a big war, the nasty little war went on unabated. Thanks to new convoy tactics, things were looking up on the cratered beaches of besieged Quemoy. Every day but one last week at least one Nationalist LST lumbered out from southern Formosa to the waters off Quemoy, there disgorged a flock of amphibious LVTs (Landing Vehicles, Tracked), which churned into the beach and quickly unloaded their cargoes. Small and elusive, the LVTs moved through the inevitable Communist artillery barrage with relative impunity.

¶ At midweek the Reds made their first serious effort to counter the new system, sent four fast torpedo boats out to intercept a pair of Nationalist LSTs. Before the Communist craft could reach their prey, Nationalist Sabre jets flashed down with cannon roaring and, by Taipei’s count, sank three of the four. Angrily, the Communists hurled two waves of 16 MIGs apiece out to punish the Sabres. In the swirling dogfights that followed, four Nationalist pilots knocked down at least five MIGs, sent the rest hightailing home. The kills brought the Nationalist total to 17 MIGs in three weeks.

The Undelivered Challenge. Pentagon planners began to talk optimistically of “an eventual solution” to the problem of supplying Quemoy. In their optimism, they seemed to be forgetting that while a conventionally loaded LST can carry 1,300 tons of cargo, it can carry at most 17 LVTs—and each LVT has room for only 2^ tons of cargo. Cold fact was that daily deliveries of supplies to Quemoy last week ranged at best from 50 to 150 tons, but to survive in fighting trim, Que-moy’s 150,000 soldiers and civilians need a minimum of almost 700 tons of supplies a day.

If the Communists should decide to convert their harassment of Quemoy into a no-holds-barred war, the U.S. was ready. Last week the disparate units and individuals on Formosa were reorganized into a unified combat command under Vice Admiral Roland Smoot. Between them, the new Formosa Defense Command and the Seventh Fleet’s Task Force 77 could hammer China with a destructive power unequalled in the previous history of warfare. But, barring an almost incredible improvement in supply techniques, the Chinese Communists held Quemoy in a vise so tight that they need never challenge the mighty force that the U.S. has assembled on Formosa.