Talk:Capture of the Tuapse

Clarification on some details

"The New York Times reported that 67 foreign civilian ships were attacked by local pirates between September 1949 and October 1954, as half of them were British vessels, whereas actually 141 incidents were reported by the Royal Navy, and recorded in the UK diplomatic protestation document."

Are the "local pirates" the ROC navy? If so, is the characterization of "local pirates" your own or from the New York Times? Is the New York Times claiming half of the 67 were British ships?

"On 16 August 1953, Nigelock was captured by the ROC Navy to the Magong military port in Penghu"

Did the Nigelock actually arrive in Magong Harbor, or was it being brought there by the ROC Navy when it was rescued by HMS St Brides Bay?

"The Italian civilian freighter Maribu was also attacked by gunboats on 31 July 1953, and the Danish civilian freighter Heinrich Jessen on 9 August - both were hijacked first to the Kinmen sea area to shift members"

What is the Kinmen sea area? Did they land at a port in Kinmen? By shifting members, does that mean there was a crew change? Were the Italian and Danish crews brought off the ship at Kinmen?

"3 staff officials were executed, 1 died in prison, and 5 died due to sickness or accidents."

What's a staff official?

"On 21 June 1954, the civilian tanker Tuapse with 49 crew members, which sailed from Odessa and was loaded with over ten thousand tons of kerosene from Constanța in the Black Sea with the scheduled delivery to Shanghai and Vladivostok, arrived in Victoria Harbour in British Hong Kong to resupply."

So I understand that the ship left from Odessa, and was sailing with kerosene that it was going to offload at Shanghai and Vladivostok. Where does Constanta come into this? Is the kerosene form Constanta? Did the ship make a stop in Constanta?

"Tanker Tuapse was renamed ROCS Kuaiji (AOG-306, 會稽), commissioned in the ROC Navy with 22 commissioned officers and 88 enlisted rank seamen on 20 October 1955, to deliver aviation fuel for ROCAF monthly alongshore before the transit pipeline across the island was constructed."

If I understand this correctly, the Tuapse delivered aviation fuel once a month to ROCAF bases located along the shore before an oil pipeline was built to supply them instead, at which point the Tuapse was no longer used to deliver fuel?

"The communication barriers with the Tuapse crew exposed the issue of lacking interpreters and translators in need, so Major-general Pu Dao-ming (卜道明少將), who was processing the case, gave the detainees a radio to listen to the news, and received special permission to found the first Russian language course in Taiwanese history at the Foreign Language School of MND in 1957. The exceptional permission was extended later to the public institutes with scholarships offered for specified services, till the taboo finally disappeared with decades of accumulated outstanding practice merits, and the East European cultural and linguistic education are open to the civilian society and academies such as the academies of NCCU, CCU, TKU and FHK today."

What are "outstanding practice merits"?

@Hussierhussier1: Good morning, Thank you for the inquiry, hereby submit the answer to your questions as follow:

"The New York Times reported that 67 foreign civilian ships were attacked by local pirates between September 1949 and October 1954, as half of them were British vessels, whereas actually 141 incidents were reported by the Royal Navy, and recorded in the UK diplomatic protestation document." - Are the "local pirates" the ROC navy? If so, is the characterization of "local pirates" your own or from the New York Times? Is the New York Times claiming half of the 67 were British ships?

Please refer to the notes of the articles, British diplomats' statement, and Royal Navy's escort reports, including the HMS Unicorn article. I did not state that the "local pirates" are "ROC Navy", nonetheless they did work together, and violating the international law to abduct the foreign civilian vessels in the high sea by firing machine guns and bombardment, even murdering a British captain, does consist the piracy activity clearly in eyes of many scholars and leaders of the international community. Please also see Page 6 of the Note 1: "《紐約時報》的報導指出，從 1949 年 9 月到 1954 年 10 月，共有 67 艘在中國大陸從事貿易的外輪遭到國軍截阻，其中半數為英國籍船隻；英國方面的統計也顯示，同期英輪被國民黨武裝部隊干涉(interfere)多達 141 次。10在其探討 1950 年代中英關係的專著中，曾銳生特闢一節專論”Conflicts over the closure of Chinese ports”，頗有助於理解英國政府如何看待「國民黨政府」的「干涉外輪」行徑。" on https://nccur.lib.nccu.edu.tw/bitstream/140.119/49868/4/15300104.pdf - I will add the note to this paragraph to assist readers' understanding in my next edit patch of historical data tomorrow.

"On 16 August 1953, Nigelock was captured by the ROC Navy to the Magong military port in Penghu" - Did the Nigelock actually arrive in Magong Harbor, or was it being brought there by the ROC Navy when it was rescued by HMS St Brides Bay?

Nigelock was hijacked to reach the area but rescued by St. Brides Bay before entering the military port. Thank you for the reminder requiring clarification. I will modify the locational preposition "to" to "toward" to avoid confusion in my next edit patch as well.

"The Italian civilian freighter Maribu was also attacked by gunboats on 31 July 1953, and the Danish civilian freighter Heinrich Jessen on 9 August - both were hijacked first to the Kinmen sea area to shift members" - What is the Kinmen sea area? Did they land at a port in Kinmen? By shifting members, does that mean there was a crew change? Were the Italian and Danish crews brought off the ship at Kinmen?

No, the ACNSA gunboats could only operate along the coast, but unsafe to sail long range to cross the sea without the proper coordination and communication, particularly that the targeted victim ships often could no longer speed up after suffering from the personnel casualty and hull damages after the siege, therefore the piracy pattern in common practice is to hijack the victims away from the first scene quickly to avoid the the possible incoming rescue, to reach the nearest rendez-vous point under the friendly fire range for the authority to take over the details and recover/replace the loss and damages, where would be the the southern sea area in these 2 cases, but not landing in the port, because:

1. Even the biggest port of Kinmen could not harbour a merchandise ship without getting stranded, then would need to wait for the next tide for almost 12 hours to be towed out.
2. All the ports of Kinmen are under the PLA artillery firing range - you should have known that already after visiting them yourself.

"3 staff officials were executed, 1 died in prison, and 5 died due to sickness or accidents." - What's a staff official?

The "staff" of the original text "3 staff being executed" was deleted as "3 were executed" without explanation, so I added the rank back. They were the leaders within the crew formation:

1. Miaozhou Yao: Second Officer of Praca, being executed for "Treason" after asking the interrogator to help sending a family letter home.
2. Shidong Zhou: Third Officer of Prezydent Gottwald, being executed for Escaping the Prison.
3. Xueyong Liu: CCP Representative to Praca, being executed for "Escaping the Prison" with Zhou together.

All the above charges are the death penalty in the court-martial during the Martial Law period then.

"On 21 June 1954, the civilian tanker Tuapse with 49 crew members, which sailed from Odessa and was loaded with over ten thousand tons of kerosene from Constanța in the Black Sea with the scheduled delivery to Shanghai and Vladivostok, arrived in Victoria Harbour in British Hong Kong to resupply." - So I understand that the ship left from Odessa, and was sailing with kerosene that it was going to offload at Shanghai and Vladivostok. Where does Constanta come into this? Is the kerosene form Constanta? Did the ship make a stop in Constanta?

Yes, Tuapse was originally a scientific research ship to the Antarctica, and was refitted as an empty tanker at the home port Odessa, therefore needed to sail to the Constanța port first to load the Romanian oil (ranked 6th in the world then) first, before her first delivery trip started, because neither Odessa, Shanghai nor Vladivostok has any local oil supply.

"Tanker Tuapse was renamed ROCS Kuaiji (AOG-306, 會稽), commissioned in the ROC Navy with 22 commissioned officers and 88 enlisted rank seamen on 20 October 1955, to deliver aviation fuel for ROCAF monthly alongshore before the transit pipeline across the island was constructed." - If I understand this correctly, the Tuapse delivered aviation fuel once a month to ROCAF bases located along the shore before an oil pipeline was built to supply them instead, at which point the Tuapse was no longer used to deliver fuel?

Being not a specialist on the 3rd Category of the G4 Logistic Supply, I did not know much about the pipeline history, except that it had been completed during the Vietnam war but with some efficiency issue, therefore the maritime and other transportation methods were still active as auxiliary means until slowly faded away after US helped ungrading the system, please see the ref: http://blog.udn.com/dff1baf6/104725698 which does not indicate the specific date either. The major issue to cease Kuaiji from running operation is the high personnel cost in short trips after the confiscation. I will update this paragraph with the above note for clarification - thank you for the reminder.

"The communication barriers with the Tuapse crew exposed the issue of lacking interpreters and translators in need, so Major-general Pu Dao-ming (卜道明少將), who was processing the case, gave the detainees a radio to listen to the news, and received special permission to found the first Russian language course in Taiwanese history at the Foreign Language School of MND in 1957. The exceptional permission was extended later to the public institutes with scholarships offered for specified services, till the taboo finally disappeared with decades of accumulated outstanding practice merits, and the East European cultural and linguistic education are open to the civilian society and academies such as the academies of NCCU, CCU, TKU and FHK today." - What are "outstanding practice merits"?

Please see the following Note 33: "後來政府在政治大學東語系設置俄語組，並提供獎學金。緊接著文化大學、國防部政戰學校相繼開辦俄語班，如今則有淡大俄文系。所以可以說，陶普斯號油輪事件是台灣俄語教育的催生者..." Many professors, scholars and senior officers came from these institutes and performed extraordinary services in their fields which eventually contributed to end the taboos of discrimination and hatred after the Martial Law lifted 33 years ago, such as the example of 反共抗俄 title has been removed from the regulations and organizations including NWL, CUC... long time ago. You surely know better than I do. Please don't ignore the progress of democratic reform these years, and return to the ideology of Chiang Kai-shek era.

This article still needs more inputs since missing data from the East European part. Please feel free to add more information to flourish its content. I will also attach more historical data to fill in the missing links in history soon. Thank you and hope you have a great day. Mickie-Mickie (talk) 06:02, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

Possible errors in the text

Hi there. I can't read Chinese so can't check the reference but it looks like there's at least one error in this section:

the Czechoslovak civilian cargo ship Julius Fueik, but failed to catch her in the Yaeyama sea area of the Pacific Ocean.[12] At 14:20, 12 May, another Polish civilian cargo ship Prezydent Gottwald

The name of the cargo ship would almost certainly have been the Julius Fučík. Is the second ship Czechoslovak or Polish? Gottwald was President of Czechoslovakia. Daveosaurus (talk) 10:04, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the correction on the typo from the source P.18, Ch. 4 of the NCU by Professor Lin, the most prestige Taiwanese historianr on the Guanbi policy research during the White Terror era, which is verified indeed as JULIUS FUCIK (IMO 5177054) as per the vessel tracker, and updated in the article accordingly. The special characters or accents are dropped on the titles of international liners customarily in history to avoid confusion with foreign ships overseas, and to facilitate the maritime communication where the Telegraph keys with Morse codes and early Radiotelephony with static noise were common practices at the time.

The Prezydent Gottwald was launched in Lübeck as the Norwegian Brattland in August 1939, requisitioned as German Warthe in April 1940, and sunk in the Port Gdynia by RAF in November 1944, until being taken-over by Polish Armed Forces in March 1945, and raised to rebuild as the first Polish post-war cargo vessel Warta in May 1949, and later renamed Prezydent Gottwald indeed to honour the late Czech president on 19 March 1953, but still belonging to the Polish Ocean Lines Company as shown on her dossier

Two other evidences are her bearing the Polish Flag with the Polish captain and crew onboard while being bombarded twice in the Pacific Ocean with the generic cargo being confiscated by the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) military in May 1954, is that the Representative of Poland to UN, instead of the Czechoslovakian representative, denounced the piracy acts on high seas in the General Assembly and the International Law Commission afterwards. Thank you and have a great day. Mickie-Mickie (talk) 03:42, 16 March 2022 (UTC)