A Map of Betrayal Read Online Free PDF

dollars in aid, assuming they’d be able to hold the Communists in check, if not to root them out. But all the money vanished in the fire and smoke of lost battles and in some top officials’ pockets, and the whole of China went Red in just four years. It was whispered that the White House had been seriously looking for someone in the Nationalist army to replace Chiang. Gary could also see that the Americans had no plan for defending Taiwan at all. This meant that on their own the Nationalist forcescould hardly defend the island state, so mainland China should attack it as soon as possible.
    In addition, the native Taiwanese didn’t like the Nationalist regime, which had been ruling the island with terror and blood. Thousands of educated natives had been rounded up and killed; many disappeared without a trace. Even some mainlanders who’d fled to Taiwan resented the brutality. The previous summer hundreds of middle schoolers from Shandong, to whom the Nationalist government had promised uninterrupted education, had been forced to join its army; a number of student representatives had protested to the officers but only got bayoneted. Later the military court tried the activists involved in resisting the coerced service—two middle school principals and five students were sentenced to death. The deaths of those men and teenage boys from his home province made Gary hate the Nationalist regime all the more.
    Everything in Taiwan indicated that the government was quite shaky and could be toppled easily. Gary wanted to see his country unified soon so it would be more powerful in fighting imperialism and colonialism. He was excited by the tidbits of intelligence he had gathered, considering them valuable to the mainland, and he even wrote a long summary of what he’d found, a kind of analysis of the current situation in East Asia, but since he was still altogether isolated, he had no idea where to send the intelligence. He felt frustrated and even wondered if his comrades, consumed with building the new country, had forgotten him.
    In the meantime, the storm of war was gathering on the Korean Peninsula. It was reported that Kim Il Sung had claimed he was going to overthrow the U.S.-backed puppet government in Seoul, but no one took his threat seriously. Then, in late June, he launched a full-scale attack with ten divisions, all equipped with Russian-made weapons. Seoul fell in three days. The South Korean forces and the U.S. troops couldn’t stop the invading army and began retreating south toward Pusan. Kim Il Sung proclaimed that his soldiers, “Stalin’s warriors,” would drive the enemies all down intothe Pacific in a matter of weeks. But his army soon became battle-fatigued and depleted, unable to break the U.S. final defense line—their T-34 tanks’ rubber-clad wheels were melted by napalm, their troops were slaughtered by American bombers that came from the ocean, and within two months they’d lost more than fifty thousand men. Although they managed to surround Pusan in late August, they couldn’t finish the battle; their offense bogged down.
    Then, in mid-September, General MacArthur succeeded in landing eighteen thousand marines at Inchon. From there the American troops proceeded to cut the North Koreans’ supply lines and attack them from the rear. The Communist army crumbled instantly and had to retreat helter-skelter. MacArthur declared that the U.S. forces would go after them and wipe them out wherever they were. In no time Seoul was taken back, and all Kim’s soldiers were fleeing north. Still, the U.S. army wouldn’t stop pursuing them. It looked like the war would soon reach the bank of the Yalu. In response to the crisis, Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, told K. M. Panikkar, the Indian ambassador to Beijing: “China will not sit back and watch if the U.S. army crosses the Thirty-Eighth Parallel to invade North Korea.” His warning was dismissed by the White House. Indeed, how could a weak,