The Guns Are Silent

As the Communist guns that ring Quemoy fell silent, the shell-pocked island exploded into industrious activity. Farmers worked round the clock getting in a belated harvest; housewives, blinking happily at the unfamiliar sun, pounded away at the backlog of laundry that had built up during Communist barrages. Off Liao-lo Beach an endless parade of vessels, ranging from huge, wallowing LSDs down to motorized junks, disgorged the sinews of war--food, oil, ammunition, spanking-new U.S. -made 155-mm. howitzers and replacement tanks.

Busy bracing themselves for another siege, the soldiers and civilians of Quemoy wasted little time speculating about the motives behind the seven-day cease-fire that Peking promised the island (TIME, Oct. 13). But others did, in chancelleries around the world. In Washington--which quickly met Peking's cease-fire terms by ordering the Seventh Fleet to stop escorting supply convoys to Quemoy--the prevailing opinion was that the U.S. firmness had paid off (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). By steadily increasing the quantity of supplies landed on Quemoy, so this reasoning went, the U.S. and Nationalist China had showed Peking that the island could not be subdued by artillery barrage.

Certainly Communist China had not been able to make good on the threat that it hurled at the Quemoy garrison on Aug. 27: "Your water routes to Formosa have been blockaded by us, and you have not the slightest hope of holding the island, being reinforced, or being able to withdraw." If the Reds had not abandoned hope of starving Quemoy out. they presumably would not have given the Nationalists an opportunity to cram supplies into the island unopposed. (By week's end Nationalist convoys had landed an estimated 28.000 tons of supplies on Quemoy--enough to meet minimum military and civilian requirements for nearly three months.)

"We Chinese." Yet more was obviously involved than a Red retreat. Peking was eager to exploit a wedge it thought it detected between Washington and Taipei. The cease-fire was announced by Peking's Defense Minister (and former Korean war commander) Peng Teh-huai. whom Chinese Reds delight in calling "the man who beat MacArthur.'' Addressing himself to "my compatriots'' in Formosa, Peng began: "We are all Chinese. Formosa, Quemoy and Matsu are Chinese territories. This is an internal Chinese matter between you and us. not between China and the U.S." Fact is. Peng told the Nationalists, "the day will come when the Americans will abandon you. The clue is already there in the statement made by Dulles on Sept. 30. Placed in such circumstances, do you not feel wary?"

To the U.S., the Red Chinese presented another face. If Washington was prepared to remove "the thorn in the side of peace" so long as force was not employed, what was Washington ready to offer now that force was no longer being used against Quemoy? The Reds challenged Secretary of State Dulles to make good on his implicit offer to persuade Nationalist China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to withdraw at least part of his forces from the offshore islands. Since Chiang and his ministers have repeatedly proclaimed they will do nothing of the kind, and in fact last week sent at least 1,000 more troops to Quemoy, the U.S. would presumably have to exert pressure on the Nationalists.

Not even Peng himself apparently expected Chiang to heed Peking's appeal for direct negotiations with the Nationalists.

(Chiang's immediate response was to announce that he rejected the appeal "firmly, vigorously and unequivocally.") In Taipei last week Chiang Kai-shek told crowds celebrating "Double Ten"--the Oct. 10 anniversary of the foundation in 1911 of Sun Yat-sen's Chinese Republic--that the cease-fire was just another piece of Communist "political treachery." But in Warsaw the U.S. pressed the unyielding Chinese Communist bargainers for an extension of the ceasefire, and at week's end Peking announced that it had decided to keep the guns silent for another 14 days.

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