Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 by Sky Masters (v1.1) Read Free Book Online Page A

.
                As time progressed, several nations— Indonesia ,
                Malaysia , and the Philippines —all tried to develop the islands as a major
stopover port for sea traffic. But it was following World War II that the
Chinese considered the Spratlys as well as everything else in the South China Sea as their territory. *
                As oil-drilling platforms, fishing
grounds, and mining operations began to proliferate, the Chinese, aided by the
North Vietnamese, who acted as a surrogate army for their Red friends, began
vigorously patrolling the area. During the Vietnam War radar sites and radio
listening posts on Spratly Island allowed the Vietcong and China to detect and monitor every vessel and
aircraft heading from the Philippines to Saigon , including American B-52 bombers on strike
missions into North Vietnam .
                But the most powerful navy in the
postwar world, the United States Navy, exerted the greatest tangible influence
over the Spratly Islands . Through its sponsorship, the government of
the Philippines began patrolling the islands, eradicating
the Vietnamese espionage units and using the islands as a base of operations
for controlling access to the western half of the South China Sea . The Chinese had been effectively chased
away from the Spratlys, ending five hundred years of dominance there.
                That became a very sore point for the Chinese.
                After the Vietnam War, the American
presence weakened substantially, which allowed first the Vietnamese Navy, and
then the Chinese Navy, to return to the Spratly Islands . But the Philippines still maintained their substantial
American- funded military presence there, although they had ceded most of the
southern islands to China and Vietnam .
                The lines had been drawn.
                The Philippines claimed the thirty atolls north of the nine
degrees, thirty minutes north latitude, and the territory in between was a sort
of neutral zone. Things were relatively quiet for about ten years following the
Vietnam War. But in the late 1980s conflict erupted again. During the war, Vietnam had accepted substantial assistance from
the Soviet Union in exchange for Russian use of the massive
Cam Rahn naval base and airbase, which caused a break in relations between China and Vietnam . Vietnam , now trained and heavily armed by the Soviet Union , was excluding Chinese vessels from the oil
and mineral mining operations in the Spratlys. Several low-scale battles broke
out. It was discovered that the Soviet Union was not interested in starting a war with China to help Vietnam hold the Spratlys, so China moved in and regained the control they had
lost forty years earlier. Faced with utter destruction, the Vietnamese Navy
withdrew, content to send an occasional reconnaissance flight over the region.
                That was when Admiral Yin Po L’un
had been assigned his Spratly Island flotilla. To his way of thinking, these
were not the Spratlys, or the Quan-Dao Mueng Bang as the Vietnamese called
them—these were the Nansha Dao, property
of the People's Republic of China . China had built a hardsurfaced runway on Spratly Island and had reinforced some stronger reefs and
atolls around it enough to create naval support facilities. Their claim was
stronger than any other nation. Several other nations had protested the
militarization of Spratly Island , but no one had done anything more than
talk. To Admiral Yin, it was only a matter of time before all of the Nansha Dao
returned to Chinese control.
                But the Filipino Navy, such as it
was, still held very tight control over their unofficially designated
territory. Yin’s job was to patrol the region, map out all sea traffic, and
report on any new construction or attempts to move oil-drilling platforms,
fish-processing vessels, or mining operations in the neutral zone or in