Will China invade Taiwan? America once planned to, but balked at the cost
24 October 2024 5:08am BST
A record number of Chinese warplanes surrounded Taiwan on October 14. The Chinese Communist Party described the aerial manoeuvres, which involved more than 150 aircraft, as a “stern warning” to Taiwan as the island democracy’s new president, Lai Ching-te, delivered a speech vowing to protect Taiwanese sovereignty.
The Chinese show of force once again underscores the threat Taiwan faces from its much bigger and more powerful neighbour, positioned just a hundred miles away across the Taiwan Strait. It’s not a totally unprecedented threat, however. During World War II, Japanese troops occupied Taiwan – then called Formosa – and fortified it against a possible invasion by US troops.
The planned American invasion, Operation Causeway, never took place. American commanders wanted Taiwan as a base for an eventual assault on the Japanese home islands, but balked at the cost of the effort. Planners concluded it would take more than 700,000 troops to wrest control of the island from the 170,000 Japanese defenders. Tens of thousands of Americans might have died.
There were easier ways to position US and Allied forces for an attack on Japan proper – an attack that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered unnecessary. In a sense, however, Japan deterred an American invasion of Taiwan. And it’s for that reason that Taiwanese commanders “have sought to extract lessons from the past as they consider how to enhance plans for the future,” according to Ian Easton, an expert on the Chinese military.
As Easton explains in his study, published by the US Naval War College, Taiwan’s defence plans in 2024 map neatly onto Japan’s defence plans from 1945.
Most superficially, the Taiwanese military still uses bases the Japanese military built more than 80 years ago. The Japanese prepared thousands of underground fortifications and intended, in the days leading up to an invasion, to disperse combat units across the island – spreading them out and sending them underground to reduce their exposure to pre-attack bombardment. The Taiwanese anticipate doing the same thing, and in some of the same underground facilities the Japanese prepared in the 1940s.