Word: mainlanders
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sabre jets were flying cover for reconnaissance planes one morning, three swarms of MIG-17s buzzed in from the north, south and east, tried to box the Nationalists against the mainland. The Sabre jets were outnumbered, 100 to 32. But in a stop-and-go, five-hour battle that extended along a 400-mile arc along the coast (and 50 miles inland), the Sabres danced a jig around the MIGs. When the Nationalist pilots rolled back to Taipei to be saluted with firecrackers and garlanded with flowers, the scorecard read: ten MIGs downed, at least three others crippled. Nationalist losses...
...first five or six years after the retreat to Formosa, the Generalissimo regularly spoke of reconquering the mainland "next year." Today it has become "soon" or "when the time is ripe." Aware of U.S. fears that a Nationalist attack on the mainland might lead to World War III, Chiang has also come to emphasize that "there is no need for a world war or for the U.S. to participate, directly...
Chiang is under no illusion that he can reoccupy mainland China by sheer force of Nationalist arms. What he is waiting and hoping for is a fullscale, Hungarian-style uprising. He wants to be ready to support it-as the West was not ready to support Hungary. Says he: "The Hungarian type of revolt is not only possible in the future, it has been happening increasingly in Sinkiang, Tibet, Chinhai and on the borders of Yunnan and Szechwan . . . The time will come for a national revolution against Communism...
...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...
...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...