RAIN OF ARTILLERY, ROAR OF JETS

The first and second crises over the Taiwan Strait's small islands were crucial battles in a decade of relentless fighting

- MIGUEL MIRANDA

During the 1950s the Taiwan Strait became the Cold War's deadliest flashpoint and a potential theatre for a nuclear showdown. Since 1949, when the Kuomintang (KMT) retreated to Formosa (Taiwan) and other offshore islands, the communists in Peking (Beijing) slowly overwhelmed these garrisons. The greatest prize was the capture of sprawling Hainan in 1950 just months before one million Chinese troops, dubbed 'people's volunteers', attacked UN forces in Korea. By 1951 President Harry S Truman's administration pivoted back to supporting the KMT after its abandonment in the late 1940s. The cherry on top was assigning the US Navy's 7th Fleet to sail its aircraft carriers across the strait separating the main island of Formosa from the Chinese coast, which effectively blocked any invasion attempt.

The Truman administration, then the Dwight D Eisenhower administration later on, maintained a pro-KMT stance with the caveat that fighting would not embroil US air and naval assets in Japan and the Philippines.