Military History | 料羅灣 — The Siege Was a Supply Problem

After the opening week the guns stopped trying to destroy 金門 and started trying to starve it. Fire shifted onto the piers, the airfield and the beaches, and whether the island held became a question of whether stores could be put ashore. 料羅灣 on the south-east coast is where that was settled.

Ships could not be protected at the waterline. The chartered tank landing ship 台生 was sunk in the bay on 24 August 1958 and 中海 was badly damaged. On the night of 1–2 September, in what PLA accounts call the largest naval action of the campaign, torpedo boats and gunboats crippled the ROC submarine chaser 沱江; losses that night are disputed, with the PLA acknowledging two torpedo boats sunk and ROC accounts claiming ten or more. On 8 September coastal artillery hit the landing ship 美樂 while it was unloading, and that convoy got roughly 70 tons ashore. The garrison needed something near 300 tons a day.

From 18 September the answer was to stop bringing ships to the beach at all. Under 鴻運計畫 the tank landing ships anchored outside artillery range and tracked amphibians swam the cargo in over the last few kilometres. When the PLA suspended fire for seven days from 6 October, that method put more than 22,000 tons ashore in a week and carried over 6,000 students and wounded off the island. Transport aircraft ran in parallel, dropping supplies onto the airfield through late September and early October.

The 八二三戰役運補展示館 stands at 料羅 today. Outside it a group of painted figures hauls drums and sacks up a beach still lined with anti-landing rails, and the LVT that did the real thing is parked three kilometres inland at the 戰史館.

📸 Cover: the sculpture group outside the 八二三戰役運補展示館 at 料羅, depicting the beach unloading. Not a 1958 photograph. Photo by Ping an Chang, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.