All week long monster C124 and C-130 transports, the white star of the U.S. Air Force emblazoned on their flanks, lumbered down onto Formosan airfields. Tent cities sprang up along roadsides. Crated jet engines were stacked in banana groves; laborers toiled night and day to extend hangars left behind by the Japanese in World War II. The U.S. was staging the biggest military buildup since the Korean war.
Like most buildups, this one was fast, furious and frequently confused. Officers and units were grabbed wherever the Pentagon could find them. Captain Allen C. Lambard, a radio air control officer stationed in Guam, was yanked out of bed and ordered to pack his gear at 2 a.m. Air Force Brigadier General Avelin P. Tacon was flagged down by state police on a California highway. To General Tacon's intense surprise, the cops showed no interest in the fact that he was doing 70 in a 55-mile-an-hour zone. Their mission was to tell him that he was wanted in Formosa—immediately.
By these and a thousand similar peremptory devices, the U.S. had poured 5,000 airmen, sailors, and marines into Formosa in the four weeks since Red China began its attack on Quemoy. (There were already 4,000 U.S. servicemen stationed in the island when the crisis started.) Items:
¶ At an airfield in northeast Formosa, men of a U.S. air base squadron, only ten days out of Johnston Island, wearily completed construction of an electrified tent city. Within revetments nearby stood stubby, missilelike F-104 Starfighters, the world's fastest (1,400 miles an hour) operational aircraft. Never before deployed outside the U.S., the Starfighters were knocked down and flown into Formosa unassembled two weeks ago; last week they were already flying over the Formosa Strait. Said one pilot: "It must have scared the pants off the Reds when they saw this bird move across their radar screens the first time."
¶ From a southern Formosan base, hardbitten pilots of Marine Air Group 11 were flying round-the-clock cover for Nationalist transport planes airdropping supplies to Little Quemoy. At night the marines used F4D Skyrays; during the day they relied on FJ Furies.
C| A few miles away from the Marine base, Matador missiles—capable of delivering nuclear warheads onto mainland China—stood on 24-hour alert, their crews constantly rehearsing countdowns. Elsewhere on the same field, a Chinese air force major, fresh from a kill of a Communist MIG, talked over combat tactics with an American captain who was about to take him up in one of the F-100 Super Sabres which the U.S. is providing to replace the slower Thunderjets and Sabres now flown by the Nationalists.
¶ At four sites around Taipei, engineers of the U.S.'s Vinnell Co. rushed construction of launching sites for Nike-Hercules ground-to-air missiles. Vinnell, which normally takes a year to build a Nike site in the U.S., has undertaken a crash program to finish the sites in 50 days, though it still had no formal contract nor any blueprints. Banking on Vinnell's know-how, the Army last week flew in an advance party of a missile battalion from Texas.