Maos Sealion, Part 2

New, daily updating edition

Mao’s Sealion:

The Abortive Chinese Communist Plot To Invade Taiwan During World War III

By Chris Oakley Part 2 (based on the “Stop ‘Em At The 38th Parallel” series by the same author)

Summary: In the first chapter of this series we reviewed the situation that prompted Mao Zedong to began planning Special Operation A-13, the proposed invasion of Taiwan, just after the Korean conflict escalated into World War III. In this segment, we’ll look back at Mao’s decision to cancel A-13 and its consequences.

******

By the autumn of 1951, the already slim chances the Chinese army would be able to successfully execute Special Operation A-13 had grown even slimmer. Not only were U.N. forces in Korea continuing to push up towards the China-North Korea frontier, but the most senior naval aide to Chinese dictator Mao Zedong had abruptly resigned his post in deep frustration over Mao’s refusal to listen to or implement his ideas for fixing the landing craft shortage that threatened to prevent A-13 from being put into effect. There wasn’t much hope of getting assistance from the Soviet Union-- the Soviets had their own military problems to attend to between the huge setbacks the Red Army’s expeditionary force in Korea had suffered and the misfortunes Soviet troops in Europe were enduring in their fight to eject NATO forces from Germany.

As for the top brass in Communist China’s other military sectors, they too still had reservations about Special Operation A-13-- though none of them were quite yet ready to go so far as to resign from their posts. They felt the time and energy being channeled into A-13 would be better used shoring up their army’s strength in Korea in advance of a future campaign to eject U.N. ground forces from the peninsula. Then there were the thousands of ordinary Chinese soldiers who were, to put it plainly, simply sitting on their hands waiting for orders to begin embarking for the Taiwanese coast; they were tired of just sitting on the sidelines while their comrades-in-arms were earning for themselves and the People’s Republic on the battlefields of Korea.

Morale among the troops assigned to the invasion force had begun to erode, along with their discipline. According to a top secret PLA internal memo declassified by the Chinese government late last spring, the invasion force’s commanding general confided to his superiors back in Beijing that he was concerned a mutiny might eventually break out among his men if they were kept penned up too long inside the staging areas where they’d been posted to await the “go” signal for invading Taiwan. There had already been a score of fistfights among the men in the camps from the invasion was supposed to be launched, and three PLA noncoms had been court-martialed for even more serious offenses-- one such court-martial being for attempted murder when a PLA sergeant who was notorious for his short temper tried to shoot his bunkmate after the two men got in an argument over accusations that the sergeant had been carrying on an illicit affair with the bunkmate’s wife. PLA brigs were jammed almost to overflowing with military prisoners who had been arrested inside the invasion staging areas for one offense or another.

Then on September 22nd, 1951 the other shoe finally dropped for the men who’d expected to be part of the main body of the landing force in Special Operation A-13. Mao Zedong ordered that Special Operation A-13 be temporarily postponed in light of the critical strategic situation the Communist bloc faced in Korea; he assured his soldiers A-13 would take place sometime in 1952. Most of them, though, were understandably skeptical about those assurances. The state of their morale after Mao made his decision public was nearly as low as that of Wehrmacht troops in France had been after Adolf Hitler had called Operation Sea Lion in 1940. Many of them took the news as evidence the Communists’ old dream of reuniting Taiwan with the Chinese mainland was dead, or at the very least dying.

The PLA political commissars attached to the units which had been assigned to the now-scrubbed A-13 had their hands full trying to keep the dissatisfaction among their troops from mushrooming into outright mutiny. And as bad as that dissatisfaction was among the enlisted men, it was equally serious if not more so with their officers; within the first few weeks after Special Operation A-13 was called off at least a half-dozen platoon leaders and three battalion commanders had resigned their commissions. There were even rumors that a senior general in the PLA high command had threatened to quit, but in the notoriously closed and Byzantine atmosphere of the upper echelons of the Communist regime in Beijing it was a tricky proposition to try and get reliable news on that score.

Mao’s decision to cancel A-13 was greeted with a discreet sigh of relief by the senior commanders of the U.N. expeditionary force on the Korean Peninsula. One of their biggest fears since the war started had been the possibility of a Chinese Communist assault on Taiwan; simply by making an attempt to invade the island, Mao could have compelled a major change in U.N. strategy, and if he had succeeded in establishing a foothold on Taiwanese soil it would have been a devastating blow to the U.N. combat forces’ morale. With that menace eliminated, the U.N. field commanders in Korea could now focus their full attention on the task of defeating the North Koreans. The news of Special Operation A- 13’s cancellation was also welcomed by ROC leader Chiang Kai-Shek, who had been concerned that if a PLA invasion attempt against Taiwan, even if it were repulsed, would inflict horrendous casualties on his armies along with the Taiwanese civilian population.

Most of the PLA divisions which had been committed to the now- scrapped Taiwan invasion would eventually be re-deployed to Korea in an attempt to halt or at least slow down the U.N. push towards North Korea’s border with China. Many of the rest would be either disbanded altogether or reassigned to the task of preventing civil unrest from breaking out among mainland China’s increasingly restive population. And to be sure, there was certainly plenty of civil unrest for the PLA to deal with; despite Beijing’s best efforts to convince the Chinese people the Communists were winning the war in Korea, the grim truth of the Sino-Soviet alliance’s military situation on the Korean Peninsula had gradually seeped through to the masses by word of mouth(helped in at least a small measure by the Voice of America and the BBC’s Chinese language broadcast service) and resentment was starting to build among their ranks. The monolithic face of Communist China was, for the first time since Chiang Kai-Shek’s overthrow in 1949, starting to show a few cracks and Mao was desperate to repair those cracks before they became too obvious to the outside world.

One such crack in that façade appeared in early January of 1952, when a group of university students in Shanghai defied a typical bone- chilling Chinese winter and the wrath of the secret police to stage a demonstration calling for the Mao regime to withdraw its occupation forces from Tibet. After two years of trying to pressure the Tibetan people into accepting Chinese Communist rule while at the same time prosecuting a war on the Korean Peninsula, Beijing was no closer to an end of hostilities with the West than it had been before the first nuclear bombs started exploding in Europe, and the students were all getting heartily sick of it. Many of them were also afraid that, in spite of the largely agrarian nature of Chinese society as opposed to the largely urban way of life that prevailed in Europe and the U.S., the Western powers might still decide to inflict nuclear devastation on China if things got hard enough in the Korean theater.

Accordingly, the dissidents marched through downtown Shanghai carrying antiwar banners and chanting slogans that called not only for an end to the Tibetan occupation but also for negotiations to conclude a peace treaty with the West. This the Mao government would not tolerate, and PLA troops were swiftly dispatched to squash the protests. The demonstrators, while seriously outnumbered and largely unarmed, wouldn’t back down to this show of naked force and pledged to stay where they were until either their demands were met or they were all dead. For twelve full hours the two sides remained locked in a tense standoff; the deadlock was ended in a dramatic and bloody fashion when the commander of the PLA contingent ordered his troops to open fire on the protesters. While a few soldiers were reluctant to shoot unarmed civilians, most of the PLA troops obeyed the order without hesitation and a massacre ensued. By the time the smoke had finally cleared more than half the protestors were dead or dying and many of the other half were under arrest, confined to prisons where they would be subject to the tender mercies of Mao’s secret police.

Those demonstrators who managed to escape the carnage were badly shaken by the atrocities their fellow countrymen had waged against them, but they would not waver in their determination to get China out of the war with the West. The massacres in Shanghai would only serve to drive the dissidents underground-- and in the process plant the seeds for a broader political protest movement...

******

By early 1953 it was clear to all but the most die-hard Marxist fanatics that the Soviet Union and its allies were doomed to lose the Third World War. Moscow and Berlin, two of the major nerve centers of the worldwide Communist movement, had been obliterated by atomic bombs and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, for years the most powerful man in the Communist bloc, had long since passed away, removing an important unifying force in the Communist coalition. In Asia General MacArthur’s U.N. expeditionary forces had driven North Korean tyrant Kim Il Sung into exile and were now fighting Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army on its own turf. Only a miracle could turn the fortunes of the Soviet- Chinese alliance around, and miracles had been in short supply for at least a year.

Accordingly, on April 21st, 1953 Communist diplomats met with their Western counterparts in Geneva, Switzerland to sign a cease-fire agreement officially ending the Third World War. The next decade would see the United States and its allies enjoy a stronger position in the postwar world while the Soviet Union withered into oblivion and China found itself confronted with mounting domestic turmoil as the younger younger generation continued to push for broader political and social freedom. That turmoil would reach its apex on June 4th, 1958 when Mao Zedong was assassinated in an attempt by dissident PLA troops to take over the Chinese government; the revolt, which was crushed by soldiers loyal to the Communist regime within a matter of hours, would be seen in later years by historians throughout the world as an ironic example of Mao’s own favorite proverb “Political power flows out of the barrel of a gun”.

Mao’s foreign minister and longtime second-in-command, Zhou Enlai, was appointed as his successor and immediately went to work crushing opposition to Communist rule in China wherever he found it. But despite his fiercest efforts to tamp down dissent, there were a handful of courageous souls who still dared to speak out against the repressive Marxist dictatorship in Beijing. This handful would form the nucleus for a new protest movement agitating for political reform in China-- and, tragically, would also become the victims of the worst act of mass murder perpetrated by a totalitarian government since the Holocaust...

To Be Continued

Please Comment In The Discussion Forum