Probing Action

"It is impossible to answer for the madmen of the imperialist world," said Nikita Khrushchev in a speech broadcast by Moscow radio last week. "But at the present time it seems to me there is no cloud from which thunder might crash out."

Barely 72 hours later, the Communist military commander for the Fukien district of South China, who may not be a madman but hardly qualifies as a preserver of the peace, sent crashing out an entirely different message, addressed to the Nationalist Chinese garrison entrenched on Quemoy Island: "No military works can avoid complete destruction under the assault of our modern army and air force . . . The landing on Quemoy is imminent . . . Surrender!"

Peking's ultimatum was backed up by the thunder of the heaviest sustained artillery barrage the world has seen since the Korean war. Day after day. Red Chinese batteries rained 152-mm. and 122-mm. shells on Quemoy and the smaller surrounding islands of Little Quemoy, Hutzuyn, Tatan and Erhtan. It was a heavy shelling, but hardly the 122,000 rounds estimated by Nationalist headquarters in Taipei. Nationalists reported about 700 civilian and military casualties, killed and wounded.

From a strategic point of view, the targets that Red China's gunners worked over were not worth anything like the ammunition expended. Even if all of them fell into Red hands, the Nationalist bastion of Formosa, about 120 miles to the east, would still be screened by the Pescadores Islands (see map). But the Nationalist garrisons of the offshore islands mock Mao Tse-tung on his very doorstep. (Tatan and Erhtan, with a combined area of 143 acres, lie smack in the mouth of Amoy harbor only 2 1/2 miles from shore.) Moreover, since Formosa itself was under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945 and has a strong separatist tradition, the islands of the Quemoy complex--together with Matsu and a handful of other islets to the north--constitute the only indisputably Chinese soil remaining in Nationalist hands. To hold these largely symbolic specks Chiang Kai-shek has crammed them with 95,000 troops.

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 of the Army Wilber M. Brucker turned up in Taipei to confer with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, his aides, and top U.S. brass in the area.

Pentagon strategists clung to the belief that neither Khrushchev nor Mao wanted at this moment to stir up a shooting war with the U.S., and the U.S. made clear last week that it took a strong interest in the defense of the two big islands of Quemoy and Matsu (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). French diplomats in the Far East earnestly argued that Mao's chief purpose was to stir up patriotic enthusiasm among his overworked, underfed subjects. In London the prevailing diplomatic opinion was that Mao was trying to demonstrate that he could bring the world to the brink of war as fast as Khrushchev or Nasser, thus impress on the West that any attempt to reach an international settlement that excludes Peking is doomed to failure. Some U.S. officials, painfully aware that Britain, France, India and other nations regard the U.S.'s nonrecognition of Red China as unrealistic stubbornness,* believe that one of Peking's simplest motives is to put new strains on the U.S.'s relations with its allies.

Prestige & Practice. But in Taipei, Chinese Nationalist leaders gloomily pointed out that if Mao was merely setting up a diplomatic ruckus, he was going to great pains to do so, and risked loss of face if he failed to follow up his shells and his threats. Nationalists were particularly concerned by the first appearance in Quemoy waters of Communist torpedo boats--fast, 47-ft. craft well suited to harrying Nationalist shipping engaged in supplying the beleaguered islands.

At week's end, Chiang Kai-shek's men braced themselves for an assault on one of the smaller islands in Formosa Strait--probably Tatan or Erhtan. Either, if worth little, would be hard to defend. By capturing even so insignificant a piece of Nationalist real estate, Peking could boast that it had Nationalist China on the run, with less likelihood of sparking U.S. intervention than an attempt to seize Quemoy or Matsu proper.

*Though Nehru's argument that the U.S. foolishly seeks to deny the existence of Communist China is somewhat weakened by the fact that India, for political reasons of its own, similarly refuses officially to recognize the existence of Israel.

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