Foreign News: QUEMOY: AUTUMN NIGHTMARE

After three weeks, TIME Correspondent James Bell returned to beleaguered Quemoy last week:

SUMMER had broken, and the slim cedars along Quemoy’s roadways bent before the first buffeting gusts of autumn. In the fields, the silver, feathery heads of mao-tsao, a grain used for fuel and fodder, swayed like the plumes of medieval knights. At night the moon was almost full, and the pearl and coral-colored bluffs loomed like phantoms above the beaches, pounded by a foamy sea. In other times it was the loveliest of seasons, it was the loveliest of sights. But this year autumn on Quemoy was a nightmare.

In three weeks a quarter of a million rounds of Communist artillery fire had raked the island. Roads were slashed up. Entire rows of cedar trees were blasted away. Quemoy City, scarcely scathed when I left, bared its broken windows. Fewer civilians, more soldiers padded through the streets, and the cheerful horde of children was gone. Parents keep the kids indoors, and civilians, who once seemed amused at the sight of long-nosed foreigners, now pass quickly and silently. Since Aug. 23, Red shells have killed 65 civilians on Quemoy, wounded at least 200 others. Military casualties exceed 1,000.

Underground Village. At Kuning-tou, on the northwest tip of the island, I found a village of 2,000 people virtually deserted. Three weeks ago the streets were full of children, pigs, chickens and ducks. Now the pigs snort angrily in their concrete pens, the chickens scatter hysterically at the slightest noise, but the villagers are gone from dawn to darkness in search of safer places.

The harvest season is at hand, but there are no farmers in the fields. Two hours before we arrived, a hunk of shrapnel had blown the head off 40-year-old Li Wen-pi as he tried to lead his horse to safety. Even in the late afternoon, when no shells were falling, Kuning-tou’s deep, dank underground shelter was crowded. The Communists are calculating their artillery fire to harass Quemoy’s nerves—there is always fire at mealtimes and just after bedtime. Any crossroads is an unhealthy place to pause.

Strewn Shore. Liaolo Beach, where the convoys come when they can, was pockmarked with shell holes. At one end a battered LSM, its back broken by Communist artillery, lay dead in the shallow water. With bluffs above eroded by wind and shellfire, the area looked like a valley of the moon. You feel appallingly naked as you drive along this lonely shore—watched by the tense eyes of Nationalist soldiers dug into their caves and by Communist eyes, natural and radar, on the mainland only a few miles away. There is no cover here.

Scattered over the pitted landscape are white, blue and red parachutes from the latest airdrop. Cases of food and medical supplies are strewn about uncollected by the island’s defenders. Amphibious tracked landing vehicles (LVTs) piled high with oil drums still have not been unloaded, 48 hours after their arrival.

The 53rd General Hospital has been hit repeatedly by shots aimed at Nationalist convoys and planes. I went to see young Captain Kua China, the hospital’s only real surgeon, who on my previous visit seemed a rock of physical endurance and calm. Now it hurts you to see him. He is exhausted. His eyes are vacant and always near tears. His hand is still steady at the operating table, but trembles when he lights a cigarette. “Every day and every night shells fall here,” he says wearily. “We’ve had to put all patients except the walking wounded underground.”

Midnight Ride. As we drove in the moonlight down Green Valley, which is one of Quemoy’s main targets, three air bursts from Red artillery exploded 200 yards to our left. Communist artillery was going over us to the beach, and behind us into Green Valley. The driver tramped on the gas, and soon our weapons carrier was careening down the blacked-out road at 55 m.p.h. Luckily, there was no one coming the other way.

All through the night, artillery pounded the beach, the road crossings and the Nationalists’ artillery positions. At 4 a.m. Columnist Joe Alsop and I headed down to the beach to catch a plane back to Formosa. Two rounds struck within a quarter of a mile, one jolted us from only 150 yards away. At dawn, as our plane taxied in, the Red batteries came alive, and 20 rounds smacked in. Geysers spouted from the sea, and two holes were blasted in the airstrip. On signal, we scrambled out of our ditch and aboard the plane. Minutes later we were over the white-capped Formosa Strait.

Alligators, Now & Later. For three days last week no Nationalist snips got through to Quemoy. The monsoons are coming on, and high seas in the Strait held back the convoys. But then the sea dropped, and the Nationalists punched through the Red blockade. On successive days and under a blizzard of shells, the amphibious LVT “alligators” waddled onto the beach from mother landing ships that stood four to six miles offshore. By also utilizing a big LSD (Landing Ship, Dock) to carry extra landing craft and supplies, the Nationalists put a record 790 tons on the beach in one day—90 tons more than the minimum needed to maintain present supply levels on the island.

Estimates are that Quemoy can hold out past Christmas unless the Reds drastically step up their bombardment. Vice Admiral Wallace M. Beakley, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, declared last week that with the start of the monsoon season, the Reds have missed any chance to invade Quemoy this year. But the monsoon also hampers the effort to supply the island. And to the weary, frustrated defenders of Quemoy, even the arrival of all the alligators, oil drums, food cases and medicine packages in the Far East would not be a completely effective answer to the relentless fire from the unmolested Red guns on the mainland.