Penghu Islands, where, suddenly, the rumble of battle grew steadily more faint, and the surviving Chinese bombers swung back toward the mainland. The flotilla of warships ceased their bombardment but closed rapidly, effecting a complete blockade of the islands. Anyone wanting to get in would have to fight the Chinese Navy.
With half the armed forces of Taiwan already well on their way south, Admiral Zhang, who had assumed command of the entire operation, moved to Phase Two. And as the sun rose bloodred out of the Pacific Ocean, he unleashed the massive missile bombardment of the west coast of Taiwan he had been planning for six months.
It started in the north with Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, the powerful SRBMs blasting craters in the runways, but surprisingly taking out only the air-traffic control tower. The regular passenger terminals were not targeted.
Zhang’s ballistic missiles slammed into the road system, blasting huge chunks out of the coastal highway. They hit the town of Chungli, where the main south-running freeway crosses Route 1. They obliterated that junction and took out 400 yards of the railroad track.
They blew apart a freeway road bridge west of Hainchu. They hit the Mingte Dam, west of Miaoli, and three times more they knocked serious hunks out of the south-running roads, freeways and railroads before they reached the majestic bridges that span the estuary of the Choshui River.
And there, with a withering salvo of missiles, the Chinese took out all four of them, blasting steel and masonry into the water, stopping Route 17 in its tracks, ending the long winding path of Route 19, splitting asunder the great north-south freeway, and closing down the south-running railroad.
The entire transportation system that crosses the pancake-flat, rice-growing plains of west-central Taiwan was in ruins. And that was before the Chinese missiles reached the southwestern city of Tainan, Taiwan’s provincial capital for more than 200 years until 1885.
Zhang’s missiles completely destroyed every runway on the airport. They hammered Routes 17 and 19 north of the river and blasted yet again the main highway south. There were three massive separate hits on the most important road-freight artery in the country as it swept west of the city toward the port of Kaohsiung, 30 miles farther south.
At that point it was just about impossible to move troops or anything else back to the north. Admiral Zhang’s brilliant feint to the Penghu Islands had drawn half the Taiwanese army 235 miles away from his main objective, Taipei.
And the Chinese warlord had not even begun. Again he launched his remaining 120 B-6/BADGER aircraft, and they headed out over the coast in three great waves of 40, again loaded with the new land-attack cruise missiles. This time their targets were strictly military, Taiwan’s air-defense installations, Air Force runways and Naval bases, places the PLAN had been watching and checking for years.
The BADGERs were accompanied by Air Force fighters, the Q-5B Fantan and more bombers, the newer JH-7s and the SU-30MKKs. Air-superiority aircraft, J-10 and J-11 Flankers, flew sortie after sortie, trying to protect the bomber force and downing several Taiwanese fighter aircraft in a sustained attempt to gain air superiority over the strait.
The opening attacks hit the brand-new, but untried, Modified Air Defense System (MADS), with its super- PATRIOT antiballistic missiles, which had been installed all around the capital. They slammed the airfields of the new Indigenous Defense Fighter aircraft in Taoyuan County and farther south in Yunlin. All along the flat west coastal plain they took out the Tien Kung air-defense systems. They hit the high slopes of the central mountains where the Taiwanese military had major west-facing air-command and-control centers, built especially to deal with a massive incoming attack from the mainland, as this most certainly was.
For years Chinese agents had reported to Beijing every detail of the key Taiwanese logistic centers and the military Intelligence headquarters (C-41). And now the land-attack missiles, launched from the air, were aimed at every one of them, backed up by the huge short-range ballistic missiles that were still thundering into the sky every few minutes from their launchers 100 miles across the strait in Fujian and Jangxi Provinces.
Brave little Taiwan shuddered under the withering onslaught of the Dragon from across the water. But they conceded nothing. Hour after hour, their pilots had fought those F-16s into the sky, attacking the incoming missile bombers. And by midday it was apparent that China had made an error of judgment in not locating Taiwan’s mobile short-range air-defense systems, CHAPARRAL, STINGER/AVENGER and ANTELOPE.
CHAPARRAL consists of four modified AIM-9C Sidewinders mounted on tracked vehicles; the STINGER/AVENGER SAMS is a pedestal-mounted system with two pods, each one containing four STINGER missiles, mounted on the back of a High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV). ANTELOPE, developed and perfected at Taiwan’s Chung Sang Institute of Science and Technology, fires from an HMMWV four Tien Chien-1 missiles with a 14-mile range. A deadly low-flying intercepter, it has an outstanding target acquisition system.
The Taiwanese moved these three systems along their west coastline to lethal effect, launching their missiles doggedly and accurately, from anywhere they found cover. They fired from the rice fields, from behind barns, woods and coral walls. They fired from any of the foothills of the coastal mountains they could reach. And by midafternoon they had devastated the Chinese fleet of BADGER bombers. Of the 120 that came in from the mainland, fewer than 70 made it back.
But they had only stopped the aircraft, not the missiles, and by nightfall Taiwan’s entire transportation system in the west was wrecked. The communications systems, both civilian and military, were nonoperational. And their permanent air-defense systems were essentially destroyed. There was nothing left of the much-vaunted SKYGUARD installations. The AIM-7M/SPARROW antiaircraft missiles had scarcely left the ground.
In the entire history of aerial combat, the monstrous struggle for supremacy above the Taiwan Strait was right up there with the battle of Britain, except that both Admiral Zhang and Taiwan’s Air Force C-in-C, General KeChiang Wong, had it all over H. Goering and Adolf.
By nightfall on May 23, China had achieved the destruction of many of its objectives, but somehow Taiwan had fought them off. In addition to the battering of the BADGER fleet, China had lost 10 Fantans, plus 12 more bombers and nine Flankers.
The Taiwanese had lost a total of 43 combat aircraft, which meant, in a sense, they were somehow winning the air battle. But China had 2,200 fully operational fighter and bomber aircraft, while Taiwan had a total of only 400 combat aircraft. As in every war in its long history, China was perfectly prepared to suffer massive attrition in pursuit of her goals, safe in the knowledge that ultimately she had more of everything, especially people, and these days, aircraft and ships.
The fact was, at this rate of killing, China could go on losing this air battle twice as long as Taiwan could go on winning it. The absence of the always-expected heavy U.S. air support was a death blow to the island, which suddenly found itself fighting for its life.
And the situation at sea was, if anything, worse. The Chinese Navy comprised 275,000 personnel, with more than 50 destroyers and frigates, 60 diesel-electric and six nuclear submarines, nearly 50 landing ships, plus several hundred auxiliaries and smaller patrol vessels.
Taiwan had an excellent Navy of 22 destroyers, 22 frigates, 50 fast-attack craft, but only 10 submarines. Their 40 landing ships were plainly not required in a conflict with China.
Unsurprisingly first blood on the water went to China. In the middle of the afternoon a PLA Naval Aviation long-range maritime patrol aircraft, a Y-8X Cub, flying down the center of the strait, picked up the small flotilla carrying the first wave of Taiwanese Marines going in to reinforce the Penghus.
The Cub signaled back to Southern Fleet HQ, and two hours later, two Chinese Kilos moved in and made a fierce underwater attack upon Taiwan’s warships. They slammed a torpedo into each of the Newport-Class LSTs and hit the
And with every hour, more and more Chinese warships arrived on station around the Taiwan coast, securing their sea-lanes, plainly preparing to protect the Chinese landing force, which everyone now knew was inevitable.
The atmosphere in the Oval Office was subdued. Indeed an air of melancholy hung over the entire capital, as America’s friends, colleagues and partners on the other side of the world fought for survival.
The President was worried, mainly that he might somehow be blamed, and he was beginning to see himself
