Great Collection of Taiwan Photos

Tom Jones was in Taipei with the Army during 1957-58, where he worked at the transmitter site.  He also spent a few months on Matsu during that period.  He recently posted a link over at my USTDC Facebook page to his collection of 260 photographs that he took all over Taiwan.  Here's the direct link to his Picasaweb album.

Taipei Transports of the 1960s

Here's another group of photographs from Bill Amborn.  He wrote:

"Here is a small photo collection of ways in which goods and people were moved around in 1963-1965. I was intrigued by how things moved and stationed myself in a spot to photographed whatever came by. The photos were all taken in the same area, probably along Zhongshan Bei Lu. This is more part of the general history of Taiwan than anything to do with the military, a different slice than one might usually encounter.

 

I don’t know how much had changed in the ten years between my tour and yours, but now when I cruise around the roads on Google today, it is just incredible."

I believe I saw most of these methods of transport still being used during 1973-74, though probably far fewer of them than were around ten years earlier.  The exception would be the pedicabs.  I think they had been banned from the streets of Taipei by then.

 

Taipei Map ca. 1959

Stev Pitchford sent me a copy of the maps of Taipei and Taiwan that he was given upon his arrival at USTDC in 1959.  As always, you can click on either image to view it in its full size.

I've noticed on this and other maps that there were several foreign embassies shown in the area of the compounds.   I was unaware of any of them when I was there during 1973-74, not that I would have had any direct dealings with them anyway.

The Bridge

 Dennis sent me these three photos taken on or near the bridge that crossed the river just north of the HSA compound and northwest of the U.S. Taiwan Defense Command building.  I may have posted at least one of these in the past.

Taken from the south end of the bridge, facing southeast.

Taken near the south end of the bridge, facing north, toward the Grand Hotel and the Club 63/China Seas Club.

Again near the south end of the bridge facing west-northwest.  If you look closely, you can see the "exoskeleton" surrounding the construction of the Grand Hotel.

Chung Shan N. Road -- 1973

Dennis McNelis and I served in Taipei during the same period (1973-1974).   I don't think we ever met in those days, though it's likely that we saw each other from time to time.  Unlike me, Dennis took a lot of photos of the area in those days and I've posted several of them here in the past.  He is now in the process of scanning his collection of color slides from that period and I'll likely be posting some of them here also as they become available in the weeks ahead.

Today's image was taken during July, 1973.  It was taken from the south end of the old bridge on Chung Shan North Road.  You're facing southwest and the area behind the billboards is where the zoo was located.  Note that one of the signs is advertising Royal Crown Cola.

The Canal

Back in 2008, Sarj Bloom submitted several photographs that he took during Typhoon Gloria in 1963.

He just sent me some more information that he's discovered using Google Earth:

While looking for the Canal that ran north and south east of TDC I remembered that one of the photos I took of Typhoon Gloria '63 was taken looking north towards the east of TDC. See location photo from Google Earth.

 

 

A friend of mine told me that the Canal is still there it just runs under the new raised highway. Sure enough I even confirmed it with a Google Earth photo of the water under the Highway.

 

Anyway I got my photo out and then tried to match it the best I could looking North from the new Highway that goes over the Canal.

 

Both photos are looking north and you can see the mountains that run behind Club 63 and the Grand Hotel. I think I got the approximate position on Google Earth to represent my photo.

 

I was a few blocks north of Nanjing E. Rd. or what we called Nan King E. Rd. Our intention was to walk to TDC that day but had to turn around because of the canal overflowing the road, as you can see in the 1963 photo if you look up near the trucks. Also you can see the canal on the right is hardly in it's banks.

 

That had to be a lot of heavy construction to contain that canal and then build a raised highway over it. Most of all, look at all the big buildings that have been constructed since those days. 

Amazing what time can do.

Sarj

Slides of Taiwan 1968-69

Titojohn found this YouTube presentation that was put together by a former Air Force guy who was stationed in Taipei during 1968-69.

Larry Fields Memories

One of the purposes of this blog is to provide a platform for others to talk about their assignments in Taiwan.  I recently heard from Larry Fields, who was with US Army Stratcom Taiwan from 1977 to 1979.  Though he wasn't assigned to USTDC, many of his memories are familiar to those of us who were.

We arrived in Taiwan on 12/09/1977 and I was one of the last USAStratcom members to be assigned to the island (maybe even the last one).  We stayed in a guest house located outside the back gate of the West Compound.  It was a nice enough place but I was glad to get into a house.

We moved into our house on Super Bowl Sunday (Monday in Taiwan) when the Broncos played Dallas and lost 27-10.  I had a small radio that I unpacked first thing so I could listen to the game while we unpacked (I was a Denver fan, and I ended up living here in Denver for the last 28 years).

We lived in Tien Mou , originally in the old BOT housing that was off of the circle at the end of Chungshan Bei Lu.  I’ve seen some pictures of an older house called the “White House” in Tien Mou and that may be the house I lived in.  It was in that area across the street from an orphanage.  We lived there for about 6 months then moved to the newer BOT housing that was down by the movie theater and ball fields, where the new Taipei American School is now.

We went through one major typhoon while we were there.  I had to drive up to work, stayed for about 30 minutes, then they told us to go home.  I had to give another member a ride down to the compound, and on my way home a lot of the streets were flooded so it took me a while to wind my way around the streets.

We also had earthquakes, one that did a lot of damage.  If I remember right, it killed six or seven people.  A new building being constructed by my house caught fire and was burned pretty badly. I don’t remember if it collapsed or not. Earthquakes were a way of life there as we all know.

We had a couple of Amahs; I still have pictures of them, but over the years we lost contact with them.

Like a lot of others I stocked up on teakwood furniture (some that I still have), some

rattan furniture, lots of fishbone carvings (still have those too), some marble pieces, and some pottery from Kinmen (which I think you could only get at certain times from one place in Tien Mou).  The fishbone we got from a Chinese guy who was mute, but would deal with you by writing everything down on a tablet.  He rode around on his motorcycle and would stop by the house about once a month.

My favorite place to eat was the old Tien Mou BBQ.  We also used to eat at a BBQ place across from the China Seas club, but after one of the floods the food started tasting bad so we quit going there.

We did spend a lot of time at the China seas, where my wife dealt with a lot of the locals exchanging money and stuff for the slot room. Caught a couple of good shows there, but mostly hung out and played pool, watched TV or played the slots.

There wasn't much TV:  Donnie and Marie show, Starsky and Hutch and Baa Baa Black Sheep (played on Thursday nights and I never missed an episode).  There was a movie in English on Saturdays and I think two on Sundays, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. We also started watching a reality type show from New Zealand and a Chinese talent show (that we actually started understanding).

Chop men would stop by the house every Saturday. We had my oldest son trained to

Say “Nothing to chop.”  I sold a nice refrigerator, some stereo gear, and miscellaneous stuff to the chop men before we left.

I worked at US Army Stratcom.  I worked shifts for a while then got assigned to quality control team.  I flew to a missile site down-island where we climbed up on the MW tower and could see the mainland.   We got fogged in and had to drive back -- 45 minute flight up, 11 hour drive back. We did get to see a lot of the island.

I made a trip to CCK Air Base to do QC testing and got to spend three or four days there. Dave Wyandt and I went down.  We had a great time, since work only lasted three or four hours a day and the rest was play time.

I did a little work in downtown Taipei (where the main switch was) and at Seven Star Mountain. I was supposed to go out to one of the islands, where at one time there was a communications site.  As they were making the arrangements for me, there was a shelling of the island and everything was destroyed so I ended up not going (which was a good thing).

I also got trained as a customs agent, and when someone would leave the island I’d go out and inspect the outbound shipment.  I think I did this four or five times.

I attended the University of Maryland Taipei campus.  I became friends with some local Chinese
students who attended classes, one of whom eventually married Chiang Hsiao-wu, Chaing Kai-sheks grandson.  I still have some of the grade slips and some of the Instructors' names. One of the instructors was Ellen Klossen whose husband at the time worked at the American Consulate.   In the last few years I’ve been able to get in touch with a couple of them, thanks to the internet.

I played softball  on the Grass Mountain team for one of the seasons then got to play on the TDC team.  I didn’t play much; mostly coached first base.  After the Carter announcement, we regularly had softball games against the Chinese unit stationed at the compound. We shared gloves and bats and had a very good time with all of them. They were very professional in every way.

I golfed at Peitou.  The course was across from a military base and once in awhile they would

fire off  a cannon. There was also one hole that you hit across a wide ravine.  The first time I played it I thought I hit a good shot but it went about halfway over then straight down.  I didn’t try to find my ball.  You couldn’t go out of bounds either because of snakes etc.   The last hole had a big rock in the middle so you had to go to one side or the other.  I think I bounced a few shots off of that rock.

I drove a 1978 Ford LTD, which I bought for $8,000 and sold for $11,500.   I never did any maintenance on the vehicle and wore the tires down to nothing before I sold it.  Driving was quite an experience but once you got used to it, it was easy.   I remember the lights turning from green to amber to red and if you were going the other direction, it was all about who could beat whom through the intersection.

I had one accident while I was there.  Coming home from the China Seas, I rear-ended a guy -- $2500 damage to my car but not much to his.  I didn’t get into too much trouble.  By the time the FAP’s got there (it was a cool night) I was sober ( I think).   Dealing with the insurance company was an experience.  I remember having to take my car to a repair shop on a little back street that was barely wide enough for the car. They did a good job on it though.  What was the insurance guy's name?  Jimmie something, I think.   Oh yeah, still have my Chinese drivers license.

One of my sons was born at the Chinese Naval Hospital in Tien Mou (Sept 1978).  It was a real experience since none of the doctors or nurses spoke English.  On the night he was born, I was waiting in the hospital and saw a young nurse come to the door and look at me three or four times but she never came out.  After about 5 hours, the Chinese interpreter assigned to US personnel came out and congratulated me on my new son.  My response was, “Huh?”  The young nurse was supposed to have come out to inform me but her English was poor and she didn’t want to embarrass herself.   When I went to see my son for the first time, I had to walk outside of the room that was round, with all of the newborns inside.  Since I didn’t speak Chinese I had no  clue what to do, so I just started walking.   All of a sudden one of the nurses came running up to the window and instructed me to go back.  My son was the only non-Chinese baby and she recognized that. My wife didn’t like staying in the hospital because she didn’t understand the language and all they served was Chinese food.

I had to get my son's birth recorded so I got all of the paperwork from the hospital, got it translated, and took it to the consulate.  I don’t remember how long it took, but I had to go back down to the consulate after the Carter announcement, and there were long, long lines of Chinese.  I managed to work my way to the front where one of the Marines saw me and let me move to the head of the line.

After Jimmy Carter's announcement, we stopped driving our cars and took a van to work every day to be safe, but still had rocks and other things thrown at the van.  I heard a noise one night at my house and thought someone was breaking in.  I got up to check it out and there were six or seven police officers sitting on the bumper of my car in my carport.  Eventually the Chinese army moved a company of soldiers into the area and we had no problems from then on. There were a couple of stabbings and one or two servicemen were assaulted during this time frame but for the most part the Chinese were pretty decent to us.

Near the end, the post office stopped processing any shipments being made by personnel that weren’t stationed in Taiwan (Lots of folks would come from the Philippines and  elsewhere to buy stuff to ship back).  My wife became friends with a couple of them, so I would stand in line and ship their stuff for them (and sometimes it was a lot of stuff).  Then they would send us stuff from the Phillipines (or Okinawa or Japan).   We ended up with some nice stuff from those places.

I came back with a bunch of pirated record albums that I got from the record store across the intersection from the Roma hotel.   We would buy them cheap and record them on tape because they only lasted three or four plays on the turntable.

We departed 3/21/1979 and were on the next-to-last plane to leave. Our Amahs rode out to the airport with us.  There were lots of tears, knowing that we probably wouldn’t ever see them again.  It was pretty rough leaving, more so for my oldest son, who was four years old when we left.

The Situation in 1976

I've written several pieces about the withdrawal of US Forces from Taiwan that ended with the final flag retreat ceremony at the US Taiwan Defense Command on April 26, 1979.  But a gradual downsizing had been underway well before the President James Earl Carter's speech on December 15, 1978, announcing the complete withdrawal from Taiwan of all US forces.

I found a very interesting UPI article in the Pittsburgh (PA) Press of July 18, 1976, titled "Fading US Presence leaves Taiwan at Sea."  Here's most of the text from that article, which paints a very interesting picture of the situation in Taiwan, especially Taipei, at that time:

By Charles R. Smith

Taipei, Taiwan (UPI) -- At a corner table of the American Officers' Club lounge two American military officers in civvies sipped Saturday afternoon beers.

Across the otherwise empty room sat four civilians, complaining about the slow service.

Empty seats lined the black, L-shaped bar.  In the middle of the bar a large white sign gave mute testimony to the dwindling military presence in Taiwan: "Waitress Service Only."

Only one waitress at that.  And at prime drinking time and at what was once one of the busiest American military clubs in Asia.

"The number of military personnel on Taiwan is way down," a Navy officer said.  "It's down to 2,100 now, down from a peak of 9,000 in 1972.  And it's still going down."

Only about 50 people are left in a Military Assistance Advisory Group that once numbered more than 2,000.

The Taiwan Defense Command staff has been cut from more than 200 three years ago to about 80.  More cuts are ahead.

About half of the U.S. military personnel remaining on the Nationalist Chinese Island are Air Force.  But there are no more combat planes around.

The largest single American military unit on the island is a 400-member army communications command.

Along Chung Shan Road, which runs from the magnificent Chinese-style Grand Hotel and through a burgeoning business district of new high-rise office buildings and hotels, there are many faded signs of a fading era.

The San Francisco Tailor shop ("We make regulation uniforms") is closed.

The pitch to GIs painted on the front of an antiques and art shop is painted over.  The come-on message is now in Japanese.

The girls at the Butterfly Bar still speak GI slang, but now they cater to tourists.

Government officials and businessmen are not so concerned about the dwindling number of American military personnel as they are about the continued presence of at least a token force and the continuation of the U.S.-Republic of China Mutual Defense Treaty.

"Of course we are very much concerned about what might happen," a government official said.  Our biggest worry is that the United States will break relations with us, abrogate our defense treaty and establish full relations with the Communist regime on the mainland."

If young people are as worried about the future of Sino-American relations as their elders, it doesn't readily show.  Their concern is with more mundane matters.

At a new YMCA building, just behind the Taipei Hilton Hotel, a bright young American, Greg Zurowski, sits in the coffee shop with a group of Chinese teen-agers for an informal evening English class.

What are Taiwan's young people thinking about?  What are their problems, their concerns, their complaints, their desires?

"School" is the reply, almost in unison.

"The competition is so keen and the opportunities so few," one student explains.

"Western culture is overwhelming us," one student says.  "We need a return to more traditional culture."

That's just what the government has been saying in one of its campaigns.

But he and the others admit they prefer many aspects of Western culture, expecially movies, music and lifestyle.

"Industrialization is the problem," one young man says.  It is forcing Western culture on us.

He and his friends beside him are studying chemical engineering, a profession not only involved in the industrialization process he complains about but also the highest paid profession in Taiwan.

Concerned about the vast amount of money spent on religious festivals and temples -- there are more than 7,000 temples in Taiwan and more than 300 gods who rate important festivals -- authorities instructed teachers to ask students to try to dissuade their parents from participating.

This did not seem to be working very well.

There was a bit more to the article, but part of the text was illegible in the on-line copy.

More Tien Mou Housing Photos

Les sent me another batch of photographs of his quarters and neighborhood in Tien Mou.  Here's what he had to say about them:

After looking through my photos, here are the ones that I think give some idea of what the New BOT housing compound in Tien Mu looked like.  As I said, we lived in BOT 106A which was the first unit in from the main street and was separated from the street by a concrete wall.  The photos were taken in 1976 and 1977, though we lived there until our departure in June 1978.

BOT 109

Barbara sent me another shot of their quarters in Tien Mou (BOT 109), around 1978:

The Bridge -- The Final Chapter

These will be the last shots of the bridge across the Keelung River that I'll be posting here...unless, of course, somebody sends me some more.

Les sent me a batch of photos a few days ago of both the old and new bridges.  The first shots were taken sometime between 1962 and 1966 while the second group shows the construction of the new bridge when the north-south super highway was being built during 1978.

First the batch from the 1962-1966 time period:

And these photos were taken during 1978 as the new bridge was being constructed:

And Even More Tien Mou

Barbara Auch sent me a great photo of the BOT quarters where she and her husband lived during the late 1970s.  Here's what she had to say about it:

The last photo under Tien Mou in 1984, Part 1, was very interesting to me.   Things changed so much just from 1979 to 1984!

You said that photos three through six are of the west side of the street where the Japanese school now stands.  I believe that the apartment buildings behind the school (photo 6) are the same apartment buildings that were being built behind my house (BOT #109 in the west compound)!  If you blow up the picture, you can see the bamboo scaffolding.  There was a big earthquake when we were there and I was amazed that the scaffolding didn't come down.

Burning Bridges Behind Me

Just kidding.  I'm not really burning anything but whenever I think of bridges my mind always seems to wander back to when that song was popular.  It's too late to turn back now.

I've written several times about the bridge that has been called the Hirohito Bridge, the Keelung River Bridge, and probably various other names that I've never heard.  I'm not obsessed with the structure or anything, but I crossed it so many times on my way to the Club 63 and elsewhere that it is very much a part of my Taipei memories.

The bridge that existed when I was there was built in 1923 for Japanese Emperor Hirohito's visit to the Taiwan Grand Shrine.  The shrine was located on the spot today occupied by the Grand Hotel.  You can see the bridge toward the bottom of this painting.

 

 The photo below is how it looked when I was at USTDC in the 1970s.

 

 I recently received a couple of images from a friend that show the previous bridge that spanned the river at that point.  I don't know if this was the original bridge or if there was another one there prior to this one.

Just Down The Road

I don't usually post things from down-island, but I came across an on-line copy of the 1973 edition of the Ching Chuan Kang (CCK) Republic of China Air Force Base orientation booklet.  It has a section about the US Taiwan Defense Command and Taipei, which I thought some of you might find it interesting.


There's a section about housing and the cost of staying in the hostel at CCK.  I don't recall what I paid at my hostel next to the East Compound in Taipei but the CCK hostel rates seem very reasonable, even for those days.   All I remember is that my room was less expensive overall than renting an apartment elsewhere in the city, especially since I had no utilities to pay or transportation costs to get back and forth to work.

You can find the complete CCK brochure HERE.

More on MIG 1765

I've commented a couple of times previously about the MIG pilot who defected from the Peoples' Republic of China on March 3, 1962.  Those articles were on May 11, 2008 and June 11, 2008.

Today, old friend Sarj Bloom pointed me to a YouTube video that appears to be a newsreel about that period.  I don't speak the language, of course, but there appear to be stories about Chiang Kai-Shek, new farming technology and the building of a dam.  About three minutes into the five minute video, there is a story about the MIG aircraft, tail number 1765, and the pilot who flew it to Taiwan.  Here's that video:

Taipei Area Videos From The 1950s

John Quinn recently sent me links to these three great YouTube videos:

Tien Mou in 1984 - Part 4

Les sent three more photos of Tien Mou that were taken during his 1984 trip, including the Tien Mou tree, which he said anyone who lived there would remember.

Though I didn't live there during my stay at USTDC, I hope these images bring back some happy memories for those who did.