The Taiwan Express (The Battle of Taiwan April 1923)
On the morning of April 20, the entire war fleet of the Alliance of Pacific Powers left Manila Bay and began to sail northwards.
For any shrewd observer, what it implied was evident: the UPNG Navy and its allies had, after many days of inaction following the Californian disasters of Keelung and Kaohsiung, decided enough was enough. The dominance of the Chinese Navy over the Taiwan Straits had to be challenged, and the blockade surrounding the island broken.
In reality, the plan was not one the political masters of the officers commanding this fleet would have approved.
The Granadan officers and their comrades-in-arms from California, Peru, and all the members of the alliance were sadly certain that the plan they had been told to enforce was a disguised suicide. But orders were orders. They had to obey...or at least feign to do so, and then try to preserve the majority of the fleet from the illogical decisions of high command.
The sad truth was that for all the electronic devices installed upon their warships gave them a greater chance to detect enemy ships before the reverse was true, it was only when electronics were pitted against the more rustic systems of China. When it came to air scouting, the Asiatic-build fleet had it, and the APP didn’t.
Worse, everyone knew the six months they had asked may all be too optimistic; it took a lot of time to train pilots, but it would take far longer to train a ship crew, especially one of a type which had never been used before. And the less said about pilots learning how to land upon a small airfield far from immobile and surrounded by the ocean, the better.
Two days after their departure of Manila Bay, the Granadan-commanded armada of Rafael Medina encountered the enemy. Or rather, a small portion of it did. In accordance with his intentions to obey the orders but not the spirit behind them, the UPNG-born officer sent forwards a squadron of four heavy cruisers and eight destroyers while the rest of the fleet slowed down behind them.
Charging as fast as their engines allowed them, the target of those twelve warships was a small scouting Chinese squadron enforcing the blockade south-east of Taiwan, which was about to return home.
A Chinese HY-1 seaplane of course noticed this reckless manoeuvre, but the light cruiser and the two destroyers were not the brand-new units. They were able to operate far from their bases, and had been recently modified to hunt the Californian submarines operating in ever greater numbers between Taiwan and the UPNG-held Philippines.
The APP squadron fell upon them like a pack of wolves upon a group of sheep, and it was a massacre. In mere minutes, the light cruiser and one of the destroyers sank. The second destroyer, after a ferocious resistance of fifteen minutes, disappeared in a colossal explosion.
The Granadans, Californians and the other allies which had participated in this one-sided massacre had no time to rejoice, however.
The enemy had not stayed idle. As the Chinese destroyer took with him under the waves the majority of its crew, the sky was filled with strike fighters and bombers of the Chinese Navy. They were too late to save the scouting squadron and their friends, but they could avenge them.
And avenge them they did. The first wave was not terribly accurate, but still one cruiser and one destroyer were mission-killed; the latter’s crew couldn’t be evacuated before sinking.
As the heavy cruisers had been modified in extreme urgency to carry a few anti-air guns, the APP squadron managed to kill one bomber and seriously damage three others – one would crash before being able to return to its carrier.
For everyone who had the eyes to see and enough intelligence to acknowledge the sky was blue, it was sufficient to confirm that without carriers of their own, challenging the enemy openly was sheer madness.
Admiral Rafael Medina ordered the retreat, both of his own fleet and the ‘raid squadron’. Something that was extraordinarily prescient, for less than ten minutes later, the Chinese scouting planes detected the UPNG battleships and the rest of the combined APP fleet. Fortunately for Medina, he was nearly out of range, and the Chinese Admirals decided not to take insane risks, not when they were already busy launching a second strike.
For if the main fleet was out of range, the ‘raiding squadron’ was not.
And without any aviation to oppose them, it was a massacre...another one-sided slaughter, except this time, the lack of accuracy of the Chinese pilots and the ability of the ships to evade meant a considerable quantity of torpedoes and bombs was expended for unimpressive returns.
Nonetheless, when the night came, the three UNPG heavy cruisers were only accompanied by four destroyers. All survivors were damaged. And obviously, one heavy cruiser and four destroyers had perished, with most of their sailors killed in action.
In terms of ships lost, it could almost be presented as a draw: the Chinese had lost three, the APP had lost five. But both in tonnage and in numbers of military sailors, the UPNG and California along with their allies had endured the greatest losses.
And nothing could disguise the fact that in the ‘Encounter of April 22’, the Combined Fleet of the Alliance of Pacific Powers had run like hell after its raiding squadron was decimated, the battle-line doing so without seeing the enemy once.
This time, when Admiral Rafael Medina explained how vulnerable his fleet was to aerial attacks, he was listened to.
Of course, after two days of deliberation, the first decision – which was rapidly turned into an official document – was to fire him from his duties of fleet commander. There would be no court-martial, but for the morale of the service, the different governments of the APP had to be reassured that no, their warships wouldn’t run away like coward each time they encountered the enemy.
Minor consolation: the politicians were willing this time to adopt Medina’s proposed strategy, though obviously it would be his replacement, Admiral Rojas, who would have to implement it.
In basic terms, this new strategy wanted to combine two goals into one. First, the reinforcement of the airpower and the ground forces based on Taiwan. Secondly, since it wasn’t possible to challenge the Chinese carriers, the best they could do – for now – was to strike at the rest of the armada. And to avoid overwhelming strikes like the one they had endured on April 22, the naval actions would have to be done at night, so that when dawn came and the carriers unleashed bombers and other aircraft, the APP warships would be out of range.
Some politicians wanted to try to surprise the Chinese carriers during such night raids, but Admiral Rojas was able to convince them it would be sheer folly. First of all, the carriers were escorted by the Chinese battleships at all times. Then there was the point that when they couldn’t operate their aircraft, the enemy was staying near the Taiwan straits or its home bases, meaning that if they failed to sink every carrier but one during the night, the result would be a humiliating defeat once the sun reappeared over the horizon.
Interestingly, when Medina and Rojas had written down the plan, they called it Operation San Bernardino. But what was to begin as an intensive succession of night-time sea battles and convoy resupply actions would be called by historians and sailors alike the Taiwan Express.
