The two Taiwanese backup bombers, running in four miles astern, were not acquired by the stricken Sovremenny, and they raced past the already burning warship and banked hard left, straight to the frigate that was supposed to be riding shotgun for the bigger ship, but had made no move to fire her missiles.
The ops room of the frigate, distracted by the carnage on the destroyer, finally launched her shorter-range missiles. But it was too late. One malfunctioned, and the other blasted off way after the F-16s had launched their four weapons and turned away.
Nonetheless the CO was well trained, and he offered the incoming bombs the beam of his ship, as indeed the destroyer should have done. The first one flew harmlessly overhead; the second one flew almost harmlessly but smashed the mast and radar equipment as it came through. The third one came in low, crashed through the hull and went straight out the other side, demolishing almost the entire central deck area.
The fourth bomb detonated in the water before it reached the ship, and miraculously no one was killed, though two sailors were wounded, mostly by bomb splinters. Equally miraculously, the frigate was still floating; crippled, largely useless, but still floating. Generally speaking, Admiral Feng-Shiang considered it a very good hour’s work by the Taiwan Navy fliers, since it was not yet time for breakfast. But one of the downed pilots was his nephew, age only 20, and it was 15 minutes before he could bring himself to face his senior commanders.
Admiral Zhang was furious. The sheer numbers of the bombs that had hit his Russian-built ship meant that plainly there had been a monumental mistake. And Zhang Yushu had been in the Navy sufficiently long to believe the most common mistake by Naval commanders in all of modern warfare: the realization that any bomb, hurled forward at low level by an aircraft making over 600 knots, hardly drops at all. It is flung forward with enormous force, and when it finally catches a wave, it slows right down, then ricochets upward, maybe 80 feet, and onward. Still on line, but high.
In Zhang’s view, to stay alive in the path of this ship killer, you should offer your beam, which will afford a fair chance of the lethal bouncing bomb whizzing over the top, since the deck is only about 50 feet wide. Offer your bow, especially on a ship as large as the Sovremenny, and you present a target the entire length of the ship, 500 feet from bow to stern, 10 times more surface area than its width: a 1,000 percent greater chance of being hit and sunk.
Admiral Zhang knew the overriding temptation to turn bow-on, presenting a target so narrow it must be safer. But he remained convinced of his theory, since the incoming bomb’s line trajectory is pinpoint accurate to about three inches. Zhang’s Law on Bombing said, the only issue is the length of the target, not the width.
And now his commanding officer had paid for his error not only with his life, but also with the lives of his ship’s company. Not to mention the $500 million ship itself.
“What a complete and utter…,” ranted the Admiral, employing a Chinese colloquialism normally heard on the lower decks of his ships, rather than in the offices of the military’s highest command in Beijing.
He simply could not believe the price he was paying for the rebel island of Taiwan. He could not believe the manpower, the death rate, the number of lost ships, the near-destruction of dozens of his aircraft. And now the great destroyer.
Zhang Yushu was going to end this war. And he was going to end it fast. If this goes on, the damned U.S. Navy will get here, and then there’ll be all hell to pay. I cannot allow this to go on. We have to move, and move big.
Meanwhile, the airborne troops were piling out of the transporters high above the drop zone, three miles northwest of Tainan airport, and the Taiwanese Army was awaiting them on the ground, raking the landing fields with a steel wall of ordnance. All attacking armies, down the centuries, have sustained far greater losses than the defensive forces. But this was getting right out of hand. It took a succession of air strikes, sustained for more than two hours, finally to clear the Taiwanese Army out of the area.
Wind speed for the airborne landings was around 15 knots, and there were heavy Chinese casualties because wounded men were being blown off course from the central area. The commander on the ground had set up his “hospital section” way upwind, and several troops became involved in bringing the wounded in for emergency treatment. Eventually they would be transported on for evacuation, to the airport, which was of course China’s immediate objective.
The opening assault force was late reaching the airport. It was broad daylight now, and due to a total failure of communications — as usual, Taiwan’s weakest link — the Chinese, by some miracle, achieved an element of surprise. They stormed the perimeter fence and swarmed onto the runways, capturing entire sections of the complex.
They moved 2,000 troops into the roads surrounding the airport, securing the area. They dug in and established their portable low-level air-defense weapons, principally the QW-1 surface-to-air missile. They blasted their way into the control tower and occupied it. They also secured the fuel farm, and commandeered a vast supply of gasoline and jet aviation fuel. They seized every airport vehicle and sent a task force back to the drop zone to evacuate the wounded paratroopers.
By midday Tainan Airport was in Chinese hands, their first major airhead on the island. Within a half hour, massive troop reinforcements and equipment began to fly in. Almost two complete divisions were on the ground by 1400, and they were accompanied by 30 attack helicopters, checked, refueled and armed, ready for the assault, first on Tainan, and then on to the great Taiwanese port of Kaohsiung.
By this time, a division of Marines was attempting to land on the beaches at Luerhmen, and scores of landing craft, protected by warships from China’s East Sea Fleet, were driving forward into the shallows, only to be met by a strong, well-disciplined force of Taiwanese militia.
Again the Chinese commanders on the landing beach had little option but to fight, and the two forces met on the main road at Tucheng. The early advantage went to the home troops, and they mowed down the invaders, firing at will from rural positions more in tune with guerrilla warfare than a formal confrontation of twenty-first-century armies.
With hundreds more troops pouring onto the beaches, the Chinese began to crash forward in a major breakout early in the afternoon. They left more than 500 dead on the field, but the remnants of the Taiwanese militia, bombarded now by Chinese mortars and howitzers, were forced to retreat, and the newly landed Marines kept moving up, marching on toward the airport to join the massed divisions of the Army, which would surely now capture the southern part of the island.
Meanwhile, back in Beijing, Admiral Zhang Yushu stared in dismay at the reports coming in from the front. He could see there had been a long delay in the attack on the airport; he could read the reports of more heavy casualties, and what seemed like carnage both in the drop zone and on the Luerhmen beaches. He weighed all this against the crushing loss of the Sovremenny. And, with fury in his heart, he ordered a total abandonment of the new beachhead at Tainan and instructed his commanders to maximize the airhead at Tainan airport. He also demanded to know the precise position around the city of Taipei.
And from here, things almost went into slow motion. Again, on the outskirts of Tainan, the Taiwanese fought heroically. China’s huge army was stopped dead, just as it had been on the outskirts of Keelung. And again there was bitter fighting, block by block, street by street, as houses, shops and industrial buildings were systematically cleared. But there was a huge price to pay, both in manpower and a colossal expenditure of ammunition.