Second Taiwan Strait Crisis

Based on Wikipedia: Second Taiwan Strait Crisis

The Summer America Almost Started a Nuclear War Over Islands You've Never Heard Of

In the autumn of 1958, the world came closer to nuclear annihilation than most history books acknowledge. The crisis didn't unfold over Berlin or Cuba. It happened over a handful of small islands just off the coast of China, places with names like Kinmen and Matsu that meant nothing to average Americans but nearly triggered World War Three.

Secretary of State Christian Herter would later call it "the first serious nuclear crisis."

That assessment might surprise you. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 dominates our collective memory of Cold War brinkmanship. But four years earlier, American military planners had already drawn up detailed nuclear strike plans, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had determined they were prepared to use atomic weapons to defend islands that, on a map, look like specks of dust blown off the Chinese mainland.

Two Chinas, One Civil War That Never Ended

To understand how we got there, you need to understand that the Chinese Civil War never really concluded. It just paused.

When Mao Zedong's Communist forces swept to victory in 1949, the defeated Nationalist government didn't surrender. Instead, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek retreated with his army to the island of Taiwan, roughly one hundred miles off the Chinese coast. There, protected by the Taiwan Strait, he established what he insisted was the legitimate government of all China: the Republic of China.

The Communists, controlling the mainland, called their new state the People's Republic of China. Each government claimed to be the true China. Each considered the other illegitimate usurpers.

Here's where geography gets interesting. While Taiwan itself sits safely across the strait, Chiang's forces also held onto several tiny island groups just a few miles from the mainland coast. Kinmen, sometimes called Quemoy, lies only about six miles from the major Chinese port city of Xiamen. The Matsu Islands sit similarly close to the mainland.

These islands were, in military terms, virtually indefensible. They sat well within artillery range of the mainland. Any serious Communist assault could overwhelm them. Yet for Chiang Kai-shek, they represented something crucial: a foothold on mainland China itself, physical proof that he hadn't entirely abandoned his claim to rule all of China.

By 1958, the Nationalists had transformed these islands into heavily fortified military outposts.

The Bombardment Begins

On August 23, 1958, the People's Liberation Army opened fire.

Communist artillery batteries on the mainland began pouring shells onto Kinmen at a staggering rate. The bombardment was intense enough to effectively blockade the islands. Supply ships couldn't approach without risking destruction. The garrison, tens of thousands of Nationalist troops, faced the prospect of being starved into submission or annihilated by artillery.

The shelling wasn't random terrorism. It was a deliberate test. Mao Zedong wanted to probe how far the Americans would go to defend their Nationalist Chinese allies. The United States had signed a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan in 1954, but the treaty's exact terms left room for interpretation. Did America's commitment extend to these tiny offshore islands? Or only to Taiwan itself?

Within days, the Communist forces attempted something bolder than artillery: an amphibious landing. On August 24th and 25th, gunboats and landing craft approached the small island of Dongding in the Kinmen complex. The Nationalists repelled them in fierce naval clashes, but the intent was clear. The Communists weren't just shelling. They were testing whether they could actually seize territory.

The Nuclear Option

In Washington, the response was more aggressive than most Americans realized at the time—or have understood since.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, reviewing the situation, reached a stark conclusion: defending the islands might require nuclear weapons. This wasn't hypothetical contingency planning filed away in a drawer. It was an active determination, shaped by the military reality that Communist China's vast conventional forces could overwhelm any reasonable deployment of American troops in a sustained ground campaign.

The calculus was coldly logical. If America committed to defending Kinmen and Matsu, and if conventional forces proved insufficient, the military's answer was nuclear strikes against mainland China.

President Dwight Eisenhower didn't immediately authorize nuclear use, but he didn't rule it out either. On September 2nd, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles met with the Joint Chiefs to formulate strategy. The consensus: begin with conventional forces, but accept that nuclear weapons would "ultimately be necessary" if the situation deteriorated.

This was the posture America maintained through weeks of crisis: officially restrained, but with atomic bombs as the backup plan.

Reinforcements Arrive

Eisenhower ordered the Seventh Fleet reinforced. American naval vessels were dispatched to help protect Nationalist supply convoys. The U.S. Air Force deployed some of its most advanced aircraft to Taiwan: F-100 Super Sabres, F-101 Voodoos, F-104 Starfighters, and B-57 bombers.

The F-104s, Lockheed's sleek "missile with a man in it," presented a logistical challenge. These supersonic interceptors needed to reach Taiwan quickly. The solution was unprecedented: the Air Force disassembled the fighters and loaded them into massive C-124 Globemaster transport planes for the Pacific crossing. It marked the first time fighter aircraft had been moved this way over such a distance.

On the ground, the Army organized a provisional Nike missile battalion at Fort Bliss, Texas, and shipped it to Taiwan aboard the USS General J. C. Breckinridge. These surface-to-air missiles would bolster Taiwan's defenses against any Communist air assault. Some seven hundred American military personnel made the voyage.

The message was unmistakable: the United States was committing serious military resources to this fight.

Breaking the Blockade

The critical problem remained supply. Communist artillery had effectively cut off Kinmen. The garrison couldn't hold indefinitely without food, ammunition, and reinforcements.

By early September, American warships began escorting Nationalist convoys toward the islands. The escorts would accompany the supply ships up to three miles offshore—the edge of what the Communists claimed as their territorial waters.

This created a fascinating dynamic. The People's Republic of China desperately wanted to avoid direct conflict with American forces. Engaging U.S. Navy vessels risked exactly the kind of escalation that could spiral into the nuclear exchange Washington had quietly prepared for. So when Communist gunners spotted American ships accompanying the convoys, they held their fire.

The Nationalists quickly learned to exploit this. As long as American escorts were visible, supplies could get through. The blockade, while still dangerous, had been pierced.

Starting September 10th, Republic of China Marines in amphibious landing vehicles began regular supply runs to Kinmen. Despite continued shelling, they kept the islands fed and armed. Chiang Kai-shek would later award them a presidential banner for their service.

The Secret Weapon

Meanwhile, a covert American operation was reshaping the air war.

The Nationalist air force flew American-made F-86 Sabres, capable fighters but evenly matched against the Soviet-built MiG-15s and MiG-17s flown by Communist pilots. Dogfights over the Taiwan Strait had been brutal, with neither side holding a decisive advantage.

Under a classified program called "Operation Black Magic," U.S. Navy technicians modified Nationalist F-86s to carry something revolutionary: the AIM-9 Sidewinder, one of the world's first practical heat-seeking air-to-air missiles.

The Sidewinder was a genuinely new kind of weapon. Previous air combat had relied on guns, requiring pilots to maneuver behind their opponents and hold steady aim. The Sidewinder changed that equation. Its infrared seeker locked onto the heat signature of an enemy aircraft's engine exhaust. A pilot could fire from angles that would have been impossible with guns. The missile would guide itself to the target.

On September 24th, 1958, the technology proved itself spectacularly. Thirty-two Nationalist F-86s tangled with roughly one hundred Communist MiGs. The Sidewinder-equipped Sabres shot down twenty-five MiGs—the first "kills" ever scored by air-to-air guided missiles in combat.

The air battle was a slaughter. Over the course of the crisis, the Nationalists would destroy thirty-one Communist MiGs while losing only two F-86s.

The operation had an ironic consequence. One Sidewinder struck a MiG-17 but failed to explode. The Communist pilot managed to land his damaged aircraft with the American missile lodged in the fuselage. Soviet engineers extracted it, studied it, and reverse-engineered it into their own design: the K-13, which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would dub the AA-2 Atoll. America's secret weapon became the basis for one of the Soviet Union's most widely exported missiles.

The Soviets Get Nervous

The crisis wasn't just a Sino-American confrontation. The Soviet Union, as Communist China's superpower ally, had its own interests at stake—and its own anxieties.

On September 19th, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev sent a letter to Washington. The message was blunt: American actions threatened world war. The Soviet Union, Khrushchev warned, would be "forced to honor its commitments to the territorial integrity of Communist China."

This was, essentially, a threat of Soviet intervention. If America pushed too hard, Moscow might enter the conflict on China's side. The letter invoked the specter of escalation that had haunted American planners from the start.

The Eisenhower administration rejected the letter.

But Khrushchev's concern was genuine. The Soviets dispatched Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to Beijing to counsel caution. Moscow was not eager for a war with the United States over islands the Chinese hadn't held for nearly a decade anyway.

A Very Strange Ceasefire

By early October, the People's Liberation Army faced an awkward reality: they were running out of artillery shells.

The bombardment had been intense enough to consume stockpiles faster than they could be replenished. American escorts had broken the blockade. The air force was being decimated. The amphibious landing attempt had failed.

On October 6th, Beijing announced a unilateral ceasefire.

Then, on October 20th, the shelling resumed. The stated reason was that an American warship had violated the three-nautical-mile zone the Communists claimed as their territorial waters. The more likely reason was that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had just arrived in Taipei for consultations. The renewed bombardment was a pointed message about Communist displeasure with American involvement.

What emerged from the chaos was one of the strangest military arrangements in modern history.

By December, both sides settled into a bizarre routine. The Communists would shell Kinmen only on odd-numbered days of the month. The Nationalists knew exactly when the attacks would come, which areas would be targeted, and could shelter safely in bunkers during bombardments. On even-numbered days, supplies could flow freely.

This wasn't a peace treaty. It wasn't even a formal armistice. It was a gentleman's agreement between armies that were, technically, still at war.

The scheduled shelling continued for twenty years.

The Long Echo

Over those two decades, the odd-day bombardments became almost ritualistic. Both sides would fire shells, but increasingly the projectiles contained propaganda leaflets rather than explosives. It was theater, military communication by other means.

Occasionally the theater turned deadly. In June 1960, when President Eisenhower visited Taipei, Communist forces reverted to full-intensity bombardment. Over one hundred thousand rounds slammed into Kinmen in a matter of days, killing seven Nationalist soldiers and six civilians, wounding dozens more, destroying homes, schools, and a hospital. After Eisenhower departed, the Nationalists retaliated with their own artillery barrage against the mainland.

The strange arrangement finally ended in 1979, when the United States established formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. The shelling stopped entirely.

An Odd Footnote

Among the American military personnel who served during the crisis was a young Marine Corps radar operator named Lee Harvey Oswald. From September 30th to October 5th, 1958, his unit, Marine Air Control Squadron One, was stationed at Ping Tung, Taiwan, rerouted from the Philippines as support during the emergency.

Five years later, Oswald would assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy himself had debated the Taiwan Strait situation during his 1960 presidential campaign. The defense of Quemoy and Matsu was a major topic in the famous Kennedy-Nixon debates. Kennedy questioned whether the islands were worth risking nuclear war. Nixon argued they must be defended as a matter of principle.

What It All Meant

The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis ended without the nuclear war that planners had contemplated. The status quo ante bellum—the state of things before the fighting—was restored. The Nationalists kept their offshore islands. The Communists kept the mainland. The American alliance with Taiwan held.

Secretary of State Dulles called it a victory. But he also recognized something troubling: the United States could not permit such a situation to arise again. America had risked alienating allies, dividing its own public, and stumbling into nuclear conflict over islands of marginal strategic value.

The Taiwan Strait remained tense but stable. The third major crisis wouldn't come until 1995-96, when China conducted missile tests near Taiwan and the United States dispatched carrier battle groups in response.

In 2019, on the sixty-first anniversary of the bombardment's beginning, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen visited the Taiwushan martyrs' shrine on Kinmen to honor those who died in 1958. The islands remain in Taiwanese hands. The strait remains a potential flashpoint. The questions that crisis raised—about American commitments, about the risks of escalation, about how far great powers will go for symbols—remain unanswered.

Kinmen today is a quiet place, known more for its knife industry (forged from old artillery shells) and its sorghum liquor than for its military significance. Tourists visit the old bunkers. The artillery positions have become museums.

But the crisis they witnessed—the weeks when the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up nuclear strike plans, when Sidewinder missiles first tasted combat, when superpowers played chicken over islands most Americans couldn't find on a map—that crisis shaped the Cold War's boundaries in ways we're still living with.