Military History | 古寧頭戰史館 — Why the Line Stopped at the Waterline

Nine years before the shelling, the People's Liberation Army tried to take 金門 by landing on it. Three regiments of a first echelon, something over 9,000 men by PLA reckoning, crossed on the night of 24 October 1949 in roughly three hundred requisitioned wooden junks. Fighting began around midnight off 壠口 and along the beaches west to 古寧頭.

The crossing decided the battle. The Tenth Army Group had no navy and no air cover, and it had gathered only enough hulls to lift one echelon; the boatmen were pressed local men who did not know the channel. Those junks grounded on a falling tide and stayed grounded, so nothing went back for the second wave, and by PLA accounts about ten platoons of reinforcement reached the island in total. ROC aircraft had destroyed several hundred craft assembling near 廈門 a week earlier. 胡璉's 12th Army Group, meanwhile, had been coming ashore since 8 October; 葉飛 was told it had arrived and did not believe the report.

The landing force fought for three days and was destroyed. Casualty and prisoner figures are contested and have been revised on both sides since.

What followed matters more than the tally. Neither side could put an army across this water after 1949, so pressure had to be applied some other way, and the instrument to hand was artillery. The strait settled into a line that nobody crossed and both sides shelled, which is the condition 1958 inherited.

The 戰史館 stands at 林厝, on the ground the western landing came ashore over. A series of large oil paintings inside carries the ROC account of the three days, and 金門之熊, an M5A1 of the type that engaged the boats, is displayed outside. The beach is a short walk away, still ranked with anti-landing rails.

📸 Cover: the museum forecourt at 林厝, with battle reliefs along the wall. Second image: 古寧頭 beach about 800 m north-east, the anti-landing rails visible on the tidal flat. Photos by 施宛吟 (CC BY-SA 4.0) and rheins (CC BY 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.