In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek’s attitude was to render possible logistical and material support to the Nationalist exiles in northern Burma at a minimum cost, thus maintaining a semblance of mainland strategy. To achieve this end, Chiang ordered his military staff to supply the irregulars with gasoline and spare parts, although privately he had already had serious doubts about whether the ongoing American attempt to use Li Mi against Communist China would really work.70 While the need to keep Nationalist military presence in the Asian mainland was widely perceived as necessary in Taipei’s political quarters, at the diplomatic front, the pressure had grown to such an extent that Chiang was pressed to give Li Mi’s cause a second thought. In March 1953, shortly after repelling Li Mi’s forces, now consisting of not only the Nationalists but also the Karens and the Mons, from a full-scale invasion of eastern Burma, the Burmese government charged the Nationalist government with unprovoked aggression before the United Nations. Despite Washington’s efforts to sidetrack the issue and Taipei’s denial of any responsibility for Li Mi, Rangoon produced reams of photos, captured documents, and testimony convincing enough to win a vote of censure for Nationalist China.71
As a result of this international embarrassment, Washington began putting pressure on Taipei for a complete withdrawal of the Nationalist remnants from Burma. Initially Chiang Kai-shek refused to compromise for two primary reasons. Taipei realized that it actually exercised little control over Li Mi’s irregulars from a distance, and whether Li and his followers would be willing to comply remained questionable.72 Moreover, as Chiang confessed to Karl Rankin, the withdrawal would indicate a virtual abandonment of Nationalist China’s last visible military foothold on the Asian mainland, and he thought it next to impossible to organize any similar anti-Communist forces in the future.73 However, when Li Mi asked Taipei to send more munitions to support his resistance in eastern Burma, Chiang and his top aides saw no point in becoming further embroiled in a cause about which very few in Taipei knew the details. In May 1953, the Nationalists accepted the convention of a four-nation military commission (Burma, the United States, Taiwan, and Thailand) in Bangkok to deal with the issue. In November that year, some 2,000 evacuees began marching to the Burmese-Thai border and were later flown to Taiwan by General Chennault’s Civil Air Transport. Chiang, again using the government budgetary constraints as an excuse, secured Washington’s support in subsidizing half of the expenses for the entire withdrawal operation.74 As a client state under American patronage, Taiwan and its leaders were forced to comply with the decisions made in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, Chiang once again showed his adeptness at enlarging his maneuvering room with the United States.
9.1 Li Mi’s Nationalist guerrillas are warmly received by local Taiwanese people after the guerrillas’ withdrawal from Burma in the fall of 1953. (Courtesy of the KMT Party History Institute)
Conceivably, the withdrawal of the two Nationalist exiled forces from Vietnam and Burma in 1953 was closely related to the situation on the Korean Peninsula. As the war in Korea drew to an end, these two Nationalist forces were no longer seen as useful in distracting the Chinese Communists. To Chiang Kai-shek, the psychological and symbolic blow was stronger than its substance. Henceforth, there would be no Nationalist military presence on the Asian mainland visible and hefty enough to convince the world and the people of Taiwan that, even without foreign assistance, military conquest of the Chinese mainland was still possible. Perhaps this was exactly what Chiang Kai-shek had desired up to this point—making the island of Taiwan both a secure power base and a safe haven for “Free China.” This might be true, although it would take another formal treaty with Washington to complete the formation of Nationalist China on Taiwan.
10
The Making of an Island State
CHIANG KAI-SHEK was correct when, as war erupted in Korea in June 1950, he thought that the fate of his government on Taiwan would be closely tied to the situation on the peninsula. When negotiations over the Korean armistice entered their concluding stage in the early summer of 1953, Chiang was no less insecure than South Korean president Syngman Rhee, who had demanded a mutual security treaty with the United States as a precondition for his acceptance of the cease-fire.1 For the past three years, the armed conflict in Korea had been Chiang’s deliverance, and, ironically, the Taiwan-based Nationalists’ interests lay in the war’s extension, not its termination. In a series of three personal letters to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in April and June 1953, Chiang revealed his own concern about the “traps” awaiting Washington in any negotiations with the Communists.2 When receiving Senators Everett Dirksen and Magnuson Warren in Taipei, Chiang tried hard to persuade the visitors that a truce in Korea could by no means solve all the problems threatening the free world. “What is at issue is not on the Korean Peninsula, but on the Chinese mainland,” Chiang exclaimed. And Chiang did not hesitate to make it known to the Americans that he deemed it an honor to take the lead in annihilating the Communist regime in China.3
However, when considering the military and political reality, Chiang might have found it hard to believe what he had said. An ultra-confidential report on Nationalist intelligence activities submitted to him in early 1953 revealed that, while Taiwan’s security was markedly increased, the strength and capability of the Nationalist underground network on the mainland was rapidly disintegrating, if not disappearing altogether. Chiang was dumbfounded to learn that, by the end of 1952, only 12.2 percent of overall intelligence came from the mainland, compared with 49.9 percent from Nationalist-held territories and 18.1 percent from Hong Kong and Macao. The report candidly recognized that the Nationalist secret service was particularly weak in north, northwest, and northeast China.4 In addition, only 29 out of 107 radio stations installed on the mainland in the previous years were still operating, with 8 suspended, 30 losing contact, and the remaining 40 out of order or only partially functional. Contrasted with a vigorous plan for training, financing, and dispatching secret agents to infiltrate the mainland immediately after the war in Korea, Chiang’s top intelligence chiefs now confessed that they found it more and more difficult to establish a sound network in Communist-controlled areas capable of gathering accurate information, a prerequisite for the Nationalists to take effectual military or political action there.5
Chiang’s awareness of the situation helps explain why, when the new Eisenhower administration declared a “deneutralization” of the Taiwan Strait in February 1953, thus removing restraints on Nationalist operations against the mainland, it was not entirely a blessing to Taipei. As one British field report pointed out clearly, the Nationalists were actually not prepared for the “unleashing.” Having gone from being an unattainable but useful propaganda weapon, the British consul in Tamsui, Jacobs-Larkcom, suggested that the counterattack plan had suddenly become a concrete “problem” for Chiang Kai-shek, who now asserted that there would be no attack until his government was fully prepared.6
With a mainland military offensive all but impossible, a pinpointed, relatively small-scale maritime effort stood out as one of very few options Chiang could use to attract worldwide attention and aid. The small peninsula of Dongshan, located between Quemoy and Swatow, jutting out of the southern Fujian coast, which was transformed into an island at high tide, became the target of a Nationalist plan. The idea was to drop a regiment of paratroops to neutralize the local Communist battalion, take control of the isthmus, and hold off Communist reinforcements from the mainland. An amphibious landing would then follow to wipe out the opposition.7
On the early morning of July 16, 1953, about 600 Nationalist paratroopers were dropped onto Dongshan, where they at first met little resistance and were able to hold their beachhead. But because of a mistake made in calculating the tide, the scheduled amphibious landing of 5,000 Nationalist troops was delayed for several hours, and until they arrived, the paratroopers bore the brunt of the opposition alone. Even with the arrival of the Nationalist regulars, the overwhelming number of the PLA f
orced the Nationalists to withdraw the next day. The raid ended by claiming 3,300 Nationalist soldiers, in addition to the loss of two tanks, two fighter planes, and three LVTs.8
Despite domestic and international news coverage reporting the Nationalists’ bold thirty-six hour raid and the short-lived occupation of Dongshan, the entire operation, the last WEI-advised raid, was deemed a catastrophe even by Chiang Kai-shek.9 The deficiencies that had become evident in the course of the operation, along with the end of the armed hostilities in Korea, marked the raid as a turning point for the Nationalists and the CIA. It was the beginning of the end for WEI and its support for the Nationalist guerrillas. Irregulars could now be converted to regular army status and be supervised by MAAG.10 Significantly, the episode accelerated the U.S. redefinition of the scope of Nationalist military operations and reinforced the idea of the Nationalist military as being defensive, not offensive, in nature. As a result of the disastrous raid, MAAG tightened up its position, strictly urging Taipei that no action should be taken against the Communist mainland without prior clearance from the United States. General Chase told the Nationalists that any operation involving 500 or more men, or a coastal raid of battalion, regiment, division, or any larger size, would require American approval in advance.11 The Nationalists grudgingly accepted this, thus substantially making their maritime-oriented military markedly more defensive than offensive. Finally, Chiang Kai-shek, having obtained a much clearer picture of Nationalist military capability, would never again attempt an amphibious attack on the mainland.
BAITUAN: CHIANG’S JAPANESE MILITARY ADVISORS
With historical hindsight, it can be seen that in the early 1950s Chiang Kai-shek was opportunistically trading the issue of a military reconquest of the Communist mainland, thus relieving the pressure on the Korean Peninsula, for a long-term security and defense promise from his American patrons. While Chiang might be considered an opportunist in this regard, he was a nationalist too. To achieve his ultimate goal of consolidating his Taiwan base without being entirely under U.S. control, Chiang at one point counted on a secret Japanese military unit to help train his ground forces, draft military plans, and carry out military ideological education so as to counterbalance the strong MAAG influence and, more significantly as it turned out, to checkmate such Nationalist military leaders as Sun Liren, who had American support.
Recall that, while Chiang was still struggling to defend Southwest China in November 1949, a former Japanese officer named Tomita Naosuke was with him and assisted the Nationalist military planning at this critical juncture (see Chapter 5). This was by no means accidental. Earlier, in September 1949, when Tang Enbo was making a last-ditch effort to defend the indefensible Amoy against the PLA, he submitted a detailed proposal to Chiang about organizing a “new army” (xin jun) as a completely trustworthy and loyal force to serve Chiang’s anti-Communist cause. Tang’s proposal incorporated the idea of General Cao Shicheng, a high-ranking Nationalist officer serving in the Nationalist Chinese Mission in Tokyo, to employ former Japanese officers to train this new army. The scale of the army, according to Tang, was designed to be at a divisional level, consisting of about 9,000 soldiers, 300 horses, 50 vehicles, and 1,200 “foreign instructors.”12 Meanwhile, a liaison office should be set up in Tokyo as soon as possible to conduct covert communications with, and recruitment of, those Japanese ex-officers who were willing to serve in this new army and serve Nationalist China. Each instructor would be paid $30 a month, with an additional $20 as a travel subsidy. General Cao Shicheng would be responsible for managing the liaison office and recruiting the instructors.13 Two months later, Tomita Naosuke, the first instructor of this kind, arrived in Sichuan, even though the building of the planned new army remained an empty slogan.
No “new army” such as Tang proposed was formed in the subsequent months. However, by February 1950, with tacit consent from SCAP headquarters, seventeen Japanese ex-officers followed Naosuke’s footsteps and reached Taiwan surreptitiously from Yokohama via Hong Kong. These officers, under the leadership of Naosuke, who had now taken a Chinese, Bai Hongliang, formed a group dubbed Baituan (literally meaning “Bai’s group”), and began their military education and training program in the Nationalist army.14 A military officers’ training corps was soon established at an obscure spot near Yuanshan, where the Japanese instructors launched their program. In the months before the Korean War, this unofficial Japanese military advisory unit played a somewhat similar role to Charles Cooke’s STP team, at the very time when Chiang had been virtually abandoned by the Truman administration, and when any foreign involvement in the Nationalist military and security policy planning had to go underground, and thus was inadvertently privatized.
The creation of Baituan, as it turned out, served an additional purpose for Chiang. Just as Chiang might have utilized Charles Cooke and the retired admiral’s STP team to reign in such key Nationalist military chiefs as Chen Cheng and Zhou Zhirou, he was introducing Japanese influence to offset Sun Liren, the all-time American favorite. In the spring of 1950, Chiang purposely designated the 32nd Division stationed at Hukou in Hsinchu County, which was then being viewed as the best ground force unit available on the island, for the Baituan to train, exercise, and experiment their military theories on. Chiang also allowed the Japanese to play a great part in planning Nationalist social and military mobilization, a decision that bypassed Sun, who theoretically commanded all the ground forces. Doubtlessly, Sun was humiliated and furious.15
After the MAAG was officially instituted in the spring of 1951, the presence of the Baituan, whose number had grown from eighteen to seventy-six, became one of the most pressing issues General William Chase wanted to settle with the Nationalists.16 The MAAG and the U.S. Embassy realized Chiang’s use of the Japanese was intended to show Sun Liren and the Nationalist armed forces under Sun’s command that he would never allow the Americans to monopolize Taiwan’s military. It was also a reflection, as the Americans saw it, of the “divide-and-rule” policy Chiang perennially applied.17 Moreover, as the Americans became aware that one of the main purposes of Baituan military training was to demonstrate that American methods were unsuited to China politically and militarily, and that the Nationalists could learn more from Japan than from America in the military field, Washington saw ousting the Baituan as imperative. What made the Baituan’s existence even more intolerable to Washington was when Sun Liren complained to the MAAG that a large number of military commanders were taken away from their units for three to four months to join the Baituan training program, at a time when they were specifically needed in connection with the MAAG effort.18
Faced with strong U.S. pressure, in July 1952 Chiang ordered the Baituan to go underground. The training camp at Yuanshan was shut down, and its staff reduced to about thirty. But shortly thereafter, in November, the training program resumed in another place, Shipai, under the pretext of conducting research.19 Amazingly enough, the relocated training corps operated quietly for another seventeen years. It was not until early 1969 that the last four Japanese instructors were asked to close their program and return to Japan. It is estimated that in the almost two decades of Baituan’s existence on Taiwan, over 10,000 higher-ranking Nationalist officers attended its training programs.20
THE TWIN PLANS
Until now, the historical significance of the former Japanese officers in Chiang’s military has largely been ignored in the scholarship. One hitherto unnoticed story about Baituan was the role it played in Chiang Kai-shek’s secret military planning and the resultant implications for Taiwan’s relations with the United States. In May 1953, half a year after going underground, the Japanese military instructors drafted a lengthy and detailed proposal regarding a Nationalist military counteroffensive against the Communist mainland. The plan, dubbed “Guangrong” or “Guang” (literally meaning “Glory”), advocated a five-year preparation period, after which the Nationalists could be ready to launch independent military operations against Communist China eve
n in the absence of foreign aid. The main idea was for the Nationalists to occupy and hold South China for six months as the first step toward recovering the entire mainland or at least territories south of the Yangtze. The Pearl River Delta was carefully picked by the Japanese experts as the preferred target for a Nationalist amphibious landing and the creation of a preliminary base of operations. To achieve this end, in addition to the envisioned 1,650 fighter planes and 298,200 tons of naval ships to be procured and developed in the years to come, the plan called for the building of a strong Nationalist ground force, consisting of sixty divisions—fifty-two infantry and eight cavalry. The rearmament was expected to be completed by the spring of 1958, when, according to the plan, the Nationalists would be able to launch their first counteroffensive against the Chinese Communists.21
Two weeks after the Guang plan was formulated, on June 11, Chiang Kai-shek brought his top aides to Shipai, where Tomita Naosuke and his team detailed their military proposal. Chiang was outwardly satisfied, confiding in his diary on that day that the general direction of the plan “hit his heart well,” and this was exactly what he had in mind.22 What made Chiang appreciate the Guang plan was no so much its grandiose but unrealistic call for a military recovery of the mainland, but its usefulness when he was bargaining with Washington for more military aid. In late 1952, during the weeks following Dwight Eisenhower’s election to the presidency, Chiang contemplated possible strategies to deal with the new Republican administration in Washington. Chiang was rather uncertain whether the new administration would ask the Nationalists to contribute to the Korean War effort, either by sending reinforcements to the peninsula or by opening a second front on the Communist mainland so as to relieve the pressure in Korea. In the case of the former, neither Chiang nor his close advisors saw how throwing their best troops into the war effort would serve their regime’s best interest.23 In a conversation with General William Chase and Karl Rankin on December 8, 1952, Chiang fretted about Taiwan’s vulnerability and expressed his disbelief that the Seventh Fleet in its current position could provide the much-needed air defense of the island. Chiang told the American representatives that Taiwan’s security remained his greatest concern when it came to the issue of dispatching Nationalist forces to join the Korean War.24
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