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...