The Testing Point

Twentieth century dictators are specialists in setting up awkward gambits for their opponents--confronting them with the choice of fighting over unattractive terrain for inconsequential gains, or making what proves to be a humiliating and costly retreat. Hitler was a master at it, but the Communists have dramatically advanced the technique. Last week they confronted Chiang Kaishek, the U.S., and the Western alliance with a hard choice over a tiny Pacific island named Quemoy.

A physical and psychological thorn in Red China's side for five years, Quemoy Island is a bleak, treeless patch of rock and sand, 70 square miles in area, which lies only five miles from the mainland, twelve miles from the Communist port city of Amoy. Off Quemoy last week a furious little skirmish between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists was being fought across a few thousand yards of choppy blue water in Formosa Strait.

Lonely Island. Three divisions of Chiang Kai-shek's troops, plus supporting units--about 50,000 men in all--are stationed on Quemoy. They have U.S. rifles, machine guns and mortars, U.S. 105-and 155-mm. howitzers and two airfields big enough for transports, but not for jets. Quemoy's peasants are a stoical lot who sit outside their baked-mud huts in the evenings, slapping at clouds of mosquitoes-and ready to dive for slit trenches if the Communist artillery opens up.

Quemoy was once a haven for pirates who preyed on coastal shipping out of Hong Kong. While Chiang's forces hold it, the Communists cannot use Amoy, their best port on the southern coast. In 1949 the Reds tried to take the island with 15,000 men in junks from Swatow. The Nationalists beat them off and burned their junks. The Communists tried again, with 700 men, the following year, but this force got lost in bad weather, and Chiang's men captured 300 seasick Reds.

Three weeks ago the Communists launched a quick raid on the island, then followed it with a heavy artillery plastering. In reply, for seven straight days last week, Chiang's forces attacked the mainland around Amoy with planes, artillery and fire from destroyers and gunboats. F-84 jets from Formosa joined the battle, pouring rockets and napalm on the enemy. The Communists answered with artillery and ack-ack. They did not use their MIGs --reflecting the caution they displayed in Korea, where MIGs did not venture over the front lines.

Rueful Admission. Flying home from the Manila Conference, U.S. Secretary of State Dulles spent three hours with Chiang in Taipei. Dulles promised moral support, but would not publicly say whether the U.S. commitment to defend Formosa and the adjoining Pescadores also covers Quemoy. At week's end, Major General William C. Chase, head of the U.S. military mission to Formosa, was in Quemoy on an inspection trip.

In Washington, "a high Pentagon spokesman"--whether talking in line with Administration views or just through his hat--passed the word to newsmen that the armed forces brass thought Quemoy not worth a major U.S. involvement so close to the hostile mainland. Viewed through the eyes of a simple soldier as no more than a piece of real estate, perhaps it is not worth fighting for; the Communists don't make things that easy. So far, the Communists (for all their noise) have not yet committed themselves too deeply, but they were plainly anxious to find out at what specific, awkward point the U.S. begins to care deeply.

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