Posted on 10/30/2022 5:30:59 PM PDT by RomanSoldier19
Around 1:30 a.m. on October 25, 1949, some 9,000 Chinese Communist soldiers stormed ashore on the island of Kinmen, barely 6 miles from China's coast.
They were the first of what was meant to be a 20,000-strong People's Liberation Army force sent to capture the island from Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist forces, known as the KMT.
Fresh off a string of victories and with high morale, the PLA expected the battle to be its next triumph, bringing even more territory into the newly established People's Republic of China and moving the PLA one step closer to its final target: the KMT bastion of Taiwan.
PLA commanders believed the defending force to be weak with low morale and expected the fighting to be over within three days. The timing was the only thing the PLA got right.
Three days later, Kinmen was still in KMT hands, three PLA regiments had been effectively annihilated, and the Chinese Communist forces had suffered the first check on their seemingly unstoppable advance.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Invading islands manned by determined defenders has always been difficult. Just ask the U.S. Marines!
Just ask the men who landed on Normandy or Iwo Jima.
These short folio histories of the Marines’ efforts in the Pacific in WWII are well worth reading. And free.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/22173
They serve as great examples why women shouldn’t be in ground combat.
Berlin fell and the British channel islands were still held by the Germans. Not worth the cost of taking them back.
This is the “Quemoy” of the 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy.
“An embarrassing defeat 73 years ago...”
While I realize that the Neocons don’t realize that China has changed, just a bit, in the past 73 years, most others, who are NOT hell-bent on starting WW3, realize that China is FAR MORE FORMIDABLE today than back then, particularly against the gutted and neutered military of the US and other Western countries.
Chicoms have nukes now. That changes the equation, as it has for the Ukraine.
Bkmk
Nobody has successfully invaded Britain since 1066.
The Clinton’s hadn’t given the red Chinese all of our military technology yet, back then.
The PLA navy was still in its infancy with few ships or trained sailors, so the troops could only be transported by motor-less wooden fishing boats and junks commandeered from local fishermen. The PLA air force was also nascen... Chiang... sent an additional 20,000 men from the elite 18th Army and a battalion of 21 M5A1 Stuart tanks, operated by troops who had fought in World War II, to Kinmen. (The PLA invasion force had no armored units.) the PLA force was soon outnumbered five-to-one. At dawn, KMT warships and B-25 aircraft joined the fray. The PLA now has the largest navy in the world, with more than 355 warships. It has a roughly 40,000-strong marine corps with.. six amphibious combined arms brigades comprising 30,000 personnel with 2,400 vehicles.Hardly analogous.
73 years is a long time. The world has changed much since then. China now is not the same as it was 73 years ago. And their philosophy of war, willing to suffer huge losses because “they can”, should make any reasonable person concerned.
Before you get to bragging too much about China, ask yourself why the US Navy “hopped” Formosa in WWII.
Short answer is that the war department estimated 500k US casualties to take that island then due to the terrain and lack of a decent landing site.
Yes, militaries have improved, but so have the Taiwanese. The PLA would likely have to plan for the loss of at least 2 million men today.
If it were easy, they would do it.
In addition...to Kinman...more recently in ‘79 the Vietnamese handed them their ass without the excuse of an island assault.
Then there is the debate about who really one the little skirmish with India just a short few years ago...most accounts indicate China lost that little skirmish as well.
Either way it won’t be an easy walk for either side if it happens.
“Yes, militaries have improved, but so have the Taiwanese. The PLA would likely have to plan for the loss of at least 2 million men today.”
Perhaps that’s our estimate, but we’re not exactly the best at predicting how wars go. China may simply decide to go all-in, with all they have, and be done in a week, and with far less than 2M.
...and, by the way, what’s 2M to China, given their population and particularly their surplus of men?
Appears that there are 4,130,000 muzzies in Britain as of this year.
I have been on that Island - and you can indeed see mainland China from the beach. There are “telephone poles” covering every vacant field to thwart paratroopers. There are fortified stations at nearly every intersection. But not sure how well they could defend against a full invasion. They are very proud people.
What those men (mostly Marines) went through to secure those islands in order to build a bridgehead to Japan is beyond belief.
China, back then, was nowhere near as powerful as it is now in their ability to wage TOTAL war, let alone conventional war. TOTAL war is something not bound by the Geneva Convention, or Western Civilization’s sensibilities or morals.
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