The 823 Artillery Bombardment was a shock to Taiwan as well as the international community, but it did not deter reporters from wanting to go and get first-hand information, former war correspondent Yao Cho-chi (姚琢奇) said on Thursday at the Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei ahead of the 53rd anniversary of the battle.
On Aug. 23, 1958, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) launched an intense artillery bombardment on Kinmen, sparking the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis — also called the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis — as the PRC attempted to seize Matsu and Kinmen from the Republic of China (ROC).
Yao, then a war correspondent for United Press International (UPI), was present on Kinmen when the ROC Armed Forces landed.
“We all knew it was dangerous, but all the war correspondents wanted in anyway,” Yao said, adding that during the ROC landing, there was an incident in which six correspondents went missing.
On Sept. 26, 1958, a group of reporters first took an ROC Navy landing craft and approached the outer waters of Liaoluo Bay (料羅灣), where they then transferred onto an amphibious Landing Vehicle Tracked (LVT), which was to take them to the beach amid the bombardment.
However, a failure with the landing mechanism on the LVT resulted in the vehicle sinking. Of the eight reporters onboard, only Youth Warrior Paper (now known as the Youth Daily News) war correspondent Yan Chung-tse (嚴重則) and a Japanese reporter with UPI survived.
The Japanese reporter eventually swam to shore after four hours, while Yan was rescued after floating in the sea for 30 hours.
To mark the anniversary of the bombardment, the Ministry of National Defense said President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Minister of National Defense Kao Hua-chu (高華柱) have invited all the correspondents who reported from the front lines during the bombardment to Kinmen, in recognition of their contribution in reporting on an important part of the nation’s history, to revisit the island.
A memorial was held on Thursday last week at the Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei in commemoration of the six correspondents who went missing in the line of duty.
Yao, who led the commemoration, said he never forgot the six reporters, and after great effort, had finally succeeded in getting them enshrined in the Martyrs’ Shrine in 2008.
Returning to Kinmen and paying his respects to these brave colleagues touched him deeply, Yao said, adding that the events on Kinmen should remain fresh in people’s memory.
Yao said while reporting from Kinmen, he witnessed how the navy’s seamen all worked together to defend the island from invasion, recalling that he even saw a medic helping other wounded soldiers despite having been hit in the stomach by a stray bullet.
“At that time, everyone helped each other and didn’t think about life or death: It didn’t really matter,” Yao said. “It might sound strange now, but at that time it was the norm.”
According to Hung Chin-tseng (洪縉曾), a Broadcasting Corp of China correspondent who had been with Yao in Kinmen, an indicator of how bad the situation was was the fact that everyone had to sign a form saying they understood the life and death situation they was entering.
Hung said before the plane he took to Kinmen landed, the exploding artillery was causing water to splash up against the windows, and the moment they had got off the plane military personnel shouted at them to run to the end of the runway to try and find a spot were the artillery could not hit.
TRANSLATED BY JAKE CHUNG, STAFF WRITER
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS