White Sun War

Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2023 by CASEMATE PUBLISHERS 1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, USA and The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, UK Copyright 2023 © Mick Ryan Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-63624-250-7 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-63624-251-4 A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing. Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Typeset in India by Lapiz Digital Services, Chennai. For a complete list of Casemate titles, please contact: CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (US) Telephone (610) 853-9131 Fax (610) 853-9146 Email: [email protected] www.casematepublishers.com CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (UK) Telephone (0)1226 734350 Email: [email protected] www.casematepublishers.co.uk For Jocelyn, Dana and Kara Contents Foreword Preliminary Operations Prelude The Massacre Phase I 1 Flood and Fire 2 The Successor’s Dilemma 3 Lethal in the Littoral 4 A Knife in a Space Fight 5 Plum Blossom 6 Fortuna Fortes Juvat 7 Stormfront Approaching 8 Grey Wizard 9 Overall Defense Concept 10 The Beetles Phase II 11 Tiger of the Land, Dragon of the Sea 12 Butcher’s Bill 13 Retreat, Hell 14 Adaptation Battle 15 The High Ground 16 Break In 17 Resolve 18 Courage and Wisdom 19 Remote War 20 What Happens in Nevada Phase III 21 Save Our Dream 22 New Strategy, Old Strategy 23 Liberators 24 Monsoon 25 The Pledge 26 Wild Ride 27 The Mission 28 Battle for Taichung I 29 Battle for Taichung II 30 Morakot the Second 31 One Heart, One Soul 32 The Bitter Plain 33 Mors Honesta Epilogue Author’s Afterword Foreword Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China and formerly called Formosa, is a small island that has seen a succession of rulers over its long history. It is originally thought to have been settled six millennia ago by Austronesian speakers who were the ancestors of indigenous Taiwanese. Successive waves of people have populated the island in the last several hundred years including the Chinese, the Dutch in the 17th century, followed by the Chinese again during the Qing dynasty. Thereafter came the Japanese in the 1890s, who used the island as a major base during the Second World War, and then the Chinese in the wake of the Pacific War. It became the final, and enduring, refuge of the Chinese republicans from 1949. Therefore, the island of Taiwan is no stranger to invasion. Indeed, war has been an important part of its history. Interestingly, an invasion of Formosa was one of the options considered by Admiral Nimitz in 1944. Codenamed the Causeway Joint Staff Study, a massive force of American air and naval might would bombard the island before landing a force of over 236,000 soldiers and Marines to defeat the 98,000 Japanese defenders. Operation Causeway never came to be. Instead, the American Central Pacific drive focused on the seizure of Okinawa as a preparatory step for the expected invasion of Japan. But, as the Causeway planning study makes clear, this was an operational problem that had both combat and logistic complexities. However, this was not the only study of such an invasion. Between 1949 and 1951, the new Chinese Communist Party government in Beijing conducted intensive planning for a similar operation. Aimed to bring the Chinese civil war to a conclusion, successive iterations of the plan described the requirement to land nearly half a million Chinese troops in Taiwan and its outlying islands. The planning was well advanced when a combination of the outbreak of the Korean War, the 1950 unearthing of a massive Chinese spy ring in Taiwan, and the presence of the US Seventh Fleet postponed the operation. The operational challenges explored by American and Chinese planners in the 1940s feature in the more modern arrival of invading troops told in these pages. Initially, I was tempted to write this story as a historical tome. It would have been a book informed by years of research and hundreds of interviews. The book would have been rich in footnotes, maps, and direct quotes from participants. I would have undertaken a traditional book launch, done the normal speaking events at universities and war colleges, and then moved on to my next research project. But something was nagging at me about this approach. Perhaps it was that most people no longer have much of an interest in history books and their arcane lexicon and pages of notes. Maybe it was the fact that we know more now about how people learn and adapt. Possibly it was my experience in using fiction to prompt different and more creative responses from my students. It therefore occurred to me that there might be a better way to tell this story. A way that was accessible to many more people. As a young man, I read and had immediately been impressed by Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels. Published in 1974, it won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for its depiction of the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg. It is a story filled with real historical figures, a character-driven narrative that explores the emotions and decisions of commanders on the field of battle over those three decisive days in 1863. It was a hugely influential book, receiving multiple other awards besides the Pulitzer. The Killer Angels had a significant influence on how contemporary Americans thought about the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg. It shone new light on characters such as Joshua Chamberlain and James Longstreet, individuals whose deeds had either faded into history or who may have been treated unkindly by earlier historians. I believe it was so popular, and influential, because humans respond much more powerfully to stories. It is hard coded into us. From the earliest development of language, humans have used storytelling to pass