European Lessons for a Paper Tiger

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The peripheral glow of the rising sun had barely crested the horizon when, from his vantage point over the English Channel Grenadier Heinrich Runder, was met with a horrifying sight. 

“A vast number of ships. Absolutely vast …I can tell you that my throat went dry, painfully dry, and my hands began to shake.”

Such was the experience for many Wehrmacht men across Normandy’s coastline on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, when out of the retreating fog came the ghostly silhouettes of the largest invasion fleet the modern world had ever seen. Thousands of ships, their black hulls interlaced in what must have looked like an endless wall of steel, produced from Runder the “effect of pure fear.” Several of the “very young lads” around him “began to retch as if they were going to be sick.” 

It is hard to conceive of such a sight. It was, I imagine, one of absolute awe—closely followed by terror as five battleships, 20 cruisers, 65 destroyers, and two monitors opened their guns on the German positions. The Wehrmacht defenders knew what was about to befall them. This was the Allied invasion of Europe. 

Known as D-Day, the events of the 6th of June constituted the first battle of a two-month-long operation to prise Europe free from the iron grip of the Third Reich. The amphibious assault saw five beaches engulfed by some 132,000 American, Canadian, and British soldiers, transported from Britain to France by over 4,000 landing craft. Preceding was a months-long campaign of deceit designed to obscure the Allies’ plans. A fictitious network of double agents under a Spaniard loyal to Britain had masterfully fed the Nazi high command false intelligence about a prospective invasion—or lack thereof—and a massive dummy army was positioned in the southeast of England. Finally, just after midnight, sorties of Allied bombers dropped clouds of aluminium foil (known as Window) over the English Channel to fool German radar operators into believing a large fleet was headed for the Pas-de-Calais.

A direct assault on the Atlantic Wall was no easy feat. At the operation’s conclusion, some 4,000 Allied soldiers had been killed, with a further 10,000 injured. Despite these losses, however, the largest seaborne invasion in history would prove a resounding success. It was the beginning of the end for Nazi rule in Europe. 

6,000 miles away another conflict was on hiatus. Two sworn enemies, the Kuomintang Republic of China (ROC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), having formed a loose alliance against Imperial Japan, would set upon each other with a vengeance as soon as ‌the Japanese had lost the Pacific War to the Americans. After four years of renewed fighting, Mao Zedong’s Communist revolutionaries were able to overcome the Kuomintang. A communist people’s republic was established in Beijing, and the defeated nationalists were forced to flee in exile to the eastern island of Formosa. 

Formosa, now known as Taiwan, has since the ROC’s exodus been a thorn in the side of the Communist Party’s hegemonic ambitions in the Indo-Pacific. This is clear in Xi Jinping’s characterisation of the ‘Taiwan Problem’, an issue he intends to solve before the 100th anniversary of CCP rule in 2049. For Xi, the ROC’s annexation is not least a strategic necessity, but a symbolic one, too. To claw the island and its peoples back under the sprawling belly of the Middle Kingdom‌, eliminating Western influence to its immediate east and winning control of a third of the world’s maritime shipping, is of equal importance with the actualisation of the Party belief that the Taiwanese people, and Formosa to a certain extent, are and always will be an inseparable part of the Chinese national homology. 

Under such a climate, it is unsurprising that Western media has parroted in recent years the imminence of the long-awaited Communist invasion of the island. The rapid proliferation of China’s military since 2015 lends credence to such prophecies: mounting incursions into Taiwanese airspace, increasingly provocative anti-Western war games, and a programme of island fortress-building in the South China Sea have all been identified as the first rumblings of a Cross-Strait war. 

On ‌‌such an eventuality, a Chinese victory to many commentators is all but certain. The United States’ disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in the autumn of 2021 did not set the best of precedents for the Western covenant’s supposed protection of ‘democratic’ regional partners, and China hawks and mainstream military strategists alike almost unanimously believe that the US would not engage militarily with China in Taiwan’s defence in the event of a Chinese assault. 

But for China, the Taiwan problem is flagrant and stubborn. Plans for a covert flash invasion have been known to Taiwanese authorities since at least 2008 (elite US-trained military units are now stationed around Taipei purely in the contingency of such attacks). Indeed, the only real option available to China for a forceful reunification with Taiwan is the landing of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces on the island’s beaches.

China’s D-Day?

Despite our natural inclination to compare hypothetical amphibious invasions with D-Day—there are few other well-known comparisons of its scale in the history of conventional warfare—the Battle of Normandy and a prospective Chinese invasion of Taiwan are two exceedingly different scenarios. The Normandy landings occurred across five beachheads over a flat 40 mile-long stretch of rural terrain in northern France; the most deadly beach, Omaha, was flanked by German gun emplacements built into bluffs between just 100 and 170 feet high. Taiwan‌, a rugged, mountainous country over 240 miles long and 90 miles wide, provides just 15 landing zones appropriate for littoral ships and amphibious craft operations. Most are bounded by enormous cliffs and mountains many hundreds of metres high, while others back onto dense urban areas and jungles. 

As for the weapons systems available to the 190,000 active-duty personnel and up to two-million reserves in the Taiwanese military, Taiwan’s active defence comprises Hsiung Feng II and III land-and-sea-based anti-ship cruise missiles, two hunter-killer submarines, coastal multiple-rocket batteries, artillery systems of various calibres, 1,200 modernised American M-60 tanks, and a plethora of shoulder-mounted guided-missile and TOW missile launchers. 

Even without fortification, Taiwan’s geography is ideal for the defence of the island. This unsurprisingly is the cornerstone of Taipei’s military doctrine—unlike the Nazis in northern France, it has had 73 years to craft and construct an immense and intricate network of bunkers, tunnels, and passive coastal defences. This is further compounded by the hundreds of smaller islands around Taiwan. All fielding their own defences, Chinese forces would be required to neutralise these island fortresses and their anti-access/area denial (A2AD) capabilities before establishing a foothold in the area. 

China, to its credit, has numbers on its side. At its disposal stands a colossal—and it is, at least by most measures, colossal—military of between one and two million combat troops, thousands of aircraft, and at least 500 active naval vessels of various sizes. The People’s Liberation Army Air Force, five times larger than that of the Taiwanese Air Force with 4,630 combat aircraft to Taiwan’s 814, itself poses a significant risk to Taiwanese forces. With the ballistic and cruise missiles of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, the PLA could inflict significant damage on Taiwanese fortifications and infrastructure. 

Despite China’s overwhelming numerical advantage, however, resigning oneself to the prediction that Beijing will one day soon annex the ROC in a sudden fit of conquest may not be justified. 

Lessons from Ukraine

Without mentioning Taiwan’s formidable air and naval assets, the difficulty for any would-be attacker to contend with the island’s natural defensive capacity is astronomical. Still, much about ‌a conflict between Taiwan and China is unknowable, with the sheer numbers involved on both sides of the equation frustrating attempts at a reliable prognosis. 

We can expect that the US, unlikely to go to war with China in Taiwan’s direct defence, will coordinate a programme of Western military aid of a size greater than what we have seen in Ukraine. These deliveries would long precede the initial Chinese assault; a mass military build-up easily visible with modern satellite surveillance would give ample warning of China’s intentions. As we have seen in Eastern Europe, the once-feared ‘Russian Bear’ has proven largely ineffective not because of the sheer resolve of the Ukrainian forces, but thanks to a potent cocktail of years of chronic corruption and advanced Western anti-armour weapons and training. 

For Beijing, matters are complicated further thanks to the stark distance of Taiwan from the PLA’s staging areas. Unlike Russia, it simply cannot roll its infantry and tank columns across the border. (Surrounding Ukraine from three out of four compass points and hundreds of miles of land border has still failed to aid Russia in achieving its goals.) The potency of any Chinese invasion force would depend on a series of decisive victories in the air, at sea, and, later, on the ground itself. With much of modern warfare decided by airpower, Western shoulder-launched and portable anti-air systems could scupper the operations of any Chinese aerial force, ‌leaving its invasion fleet vulnerable to Taiwan’s formidable anti-ship arsenal. The highly advanced Russian air force, after all, has been drastically less effective than projected in Ukraine despite operating in a much kinder combat environment than that of the Taiwan Strait.

So, with the world’s eyes on the Russian Bear’s folly in Eastern Europe, we must ask, ‘Is China A Paper Tiger?’ We might never know. What is for certain is that an assault on Taiwan will be no repeat of the successes of D-Day. In his quest for Chinese reunification, Xi Jinping must make some unquantifiably difficult decisions. China, as the instigator of a Cross-Strait conflict, will become an international pariah; exclusion from the world economy, or the ultimate humiliation of military defeat, will not bode well for the future of the CCP.