To Win or to Lose?

Nationalist China's tough old Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was increasingly impatient.

Three weeks ago, when Communist shells smashed an LSM on Quemoy's beaches and left it a smoking wreck, Chiang made up his mind. Quemoy could never be saved by bigger and better convoys, he argued. Under the hail of Communist fire, the convoys could never be made big enough to keep the island supplied. The only solution, he insisted, was to knock out the Communist guns. He proposed to do it with Nationalist planes. All he asked was U.S. consent.

Others in his government, notably Chief of the General Staff "Tiger" Wang and Defense Minister Yu Ta-wei, counseled patience and restraint. The U.S. launched the Warsaw talks, and Chiang, who privately viewed the talks with undisguised distrust, agreed to wait until they had proved a success or had conclusively failed.

Last week, as Quemoy endured the fifth week of its ordeal and the Warsaw talks showed no progress, Chiang's attitude hardened. The last advocate of restraint among his advisers had fallen silent. Chiang reportedly urged his case in a series of lunches and meetings in Taipei with U.S. Ambassador Everett Drumwright, Admiral Harry Felt, commander in chief of U.S. Forces in the Pacific, and Vice Admiral Roland Smoot, U.S. commander in the Formosa area.

Chiang argues that the Nationalist air force can do the job alone. He also insists that the decision must come soon. No patriotic Chinese can accept the idea, he says, that the troops and civilians on Quemoy must, for some abstract moral reason, take artillery pounding until they starve to death.

U.S. officials recognize that the Communists would in all likelihood retaliate by attempting to bomb Formosa itself, which the U.S. is committed to defend, and where U.S. fighters are already flying protective patrols. The first Red Chinese bomber shot down by U.S. planes would create new, and dangerously explosive, problems.

Chiang cannot and will not do anything without U.S. consent. So far, the U.S. was not in a mood to give that consent. But Chiang's impatience was a sharp reminder that the West could not shelve or solve Quemoy's problem simply by demanding that its defenders sit and take it (see box, opposite), in a battle they could not afford to lose and were not allowed to win.

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