My story

My Story (10) - Battle of Dachen (2) Break at Nanji On May 29th, 1954, the ship sailed to Nanji ( 南麂 )Island. The island is about 82 nautical miles south of Dachen ( 大陳 ) , a journey about seven to eight hours for our slow moving ship. It was an en route stopover to Matchu ( 馬祖 ), one of the islands near the mainland that was firmly held by the Nationalists, even until now. The excuse to go there was to re-supply, but the real reason was to take a breather from the breathless tension of battle field. W ater sources on that small island were very limited, and hardly any vegetables could be grown in its infertile soil. For agriculture, the arid farm land could only grow sweet potatoes. For fishing, they could only catch a kind of very tiny kind called Ding-Xiang Fish, similar to small herring, 1-to-2 inch long with the thickness of a chopstick. These were dried under the sun and stored to make the island people's staple food year round. As a political officer, I also was r...

My Story (9) – Battle of Dachen  (1) Although Chinese Nationalists lost all their territory in Mainland China, they still controlled some of the adjacent off-shore islands, most notably Jinmen and Matsu. Dachen, with a group of small islands, 230 nautical miles from Taiwan, was the farthest. After the US aided Taiwan’s defense at the outbreak of the Korean War, they pressured the Nationalist Government to withdraw from those islands because they were so near the Communist controlled Mainland, they were indefensible. But Chiang Kai-shek, the President of the Nationalist government, steadfastly refused in the hope of someday using those islands as stepping stones to recover the Mainland. The recovery of Mainland China was never realized; and even though the US refused to include the islands within the scope of their defense, Taiwan, after some well-known battles, still managed to hold Jinmen and Matsu.   Dachen, after several years of struggle, was lost. Working as a p...