|
New, daily updating edition |
|
|
Join Writer Development Section Writer Development Member Section
This Day in Alternate History Blog
|
Mao’s Sealion: The Abortive Chinese Communist Plot To Invade Taiwan During World War III By Chris Oakley
Part 1 (based on the “Stop ‘Em At The 38th Parallel” series by the same author)
****** When World War III broke out with the June 1950 invasion of South Korea, concerns immediately arose among the United States and its principal allies in the Far East that the Soviet Union’s main Pacific partner, Communist China, might take the opportunity to make an assault on the vulnerable island nation of Taiwan, where longtime U.S. supporter Chiang Kai-Shek had fled with his cabinet following his regime’s collapse in 1949 at the end of a long and bitter civil war with Mao Zedong’s Communist guerrilla forces. And certainly Mao was eager to add Taiwan to the list of trophies acquired by his armies during the long years the Communists had fought to gain and then keep control of mainland China. But circumstances would conspire to prevent his goal of reunifying Taiwan with the mainland from being fulfilled in his lifetime-- indeed, more than half a century after World War III ended, public sentiment in mainland China has since turned radically against the idea. The last Chinese political leader to even hint at such a proposition was forced to resign to his post as a result of the controversy it triggered. At the time Special Operation A-13 was first conceived, however, it enjoyed the near-unanimous backing of Mao’s top generals. To them the idea of reclaiming what the Communist regime in Beijing regarded as a lost province of China was irresistible not only in the political sense but also in the military one-- they were sure it would force the United States and its allies to divert manpower and resources from the Korean theater, thus allowing the Communist bloc to finish the job it had started with the invasion of South Korea. This was just the first of a host of miscalculations which handicapped the proposed invasion and would cause military analysts in the post-World War III era to say the plan would have been doomed to fail from the start had it actually been attempted. Their second miscalculation was in underestimating the number of naval vessels-- landing craft in particular --which would be required to attempt even a small-scale amphibious operation, let alone the kind of massive assault the PLA high command envisioned. At the end of the Second World War the United States had become the dominant naval power in the Pacific region, and the way events had unfolded so far in this third global conflict was doing little to change that status. China at that time barely had a navy at all, and at least half the naval craft it did have were either obsolescent or needed to keep traffic flowing on the country’s rivers. More to the point, the Communist Chinese armed forces had little training in amphibious warfare techniques; most of the fighting they’d done during their long struggle to evict the Japanese from mainland China and crush Chiang Kai-Shek’s rival Kuomintang organization had been done in mountainous terrain. While the People’s Liberation Army had plenty of troops to spare, especially given China’s substantial pre-war population, none of those troops knew the first thing about how to establish a beachhead or disembark from a landing craft. Few them had even been anywhere near a beach in their lives-- a fact one PLA platoon sergeant bitterly complained about in his reports to his superiors: “Half of them stand around like statues,” he said, “and the other half are so clumsy they trip over their own feet.” From the perspective of the PLA’s generals, the only thing worse than their soldiers’ inability to properly disembark from a landing craft was the inadequate supply of such craft in the first place. The entire Chinese Communist army put together barely had fifty landing craft to its name, whereas a typical U.S. or British army unit could draw on a supply of hundreds if not thousands of amphibious vehicles for beachhead landing operations. To make up the shortfall in that department would require an almost superhuman industrial effort on Beijing’s part-- an effort the Mao regime was ill-equipped to make. But the CPC leader refused to be deterred by this obstacle and gave his shipyards direct orders to begin turning out more landing craft at once. Anyone who understood the reality of the inadequacies of the Communist Chinese shipbuilding infrastructure and the precariousness of Beijing’s overall military situation could have warned Mao he was setting himself up for disaster. But the Communist ruler had little interest in such warnings: he was determined to reclaim the island he called “a lost province” of China for Beijing. He told his military advisors and his shipbuilders to keep going with their preparations to put Special Operation A-13 into effect. Yet even as Mao exhorted his military to make themselves ready to seize Taiwan from the Kuomintang the already slim chances of ever being able to implement Special Operation A-13 were growing slimmer still. Mao’s Soviet allies were seeing their forces in the Far East sustain massive setbacks against General Douglas MacArthur’s troops in Korea just as Red Army ground forces in Europe were meeting heavy resistance from NATO; this meant the PLA could not count on any help from the USSR in mounting a landing on the Taiwanese coast. Indeed, the Soviet military attaché in Beijing bluntly told Mao that the plans for Special Operation A-13 were “a recipe for the most hideous kind of strategic disaster”. Still, Mao was determined to go forward with the invasion, not realizing that by the autumn of 1951 circumstances would send the A-13 campaign plans to the back burner permanently.... To Be Continued
Please Comment In The Discussion Forum
|
