Naval History, 1945–1960

In 1945 and 1946, the focus of most of the developing civil war was in the Northeast. In the maritime sphere, the Communists shuttled supplies and men back and forth between the Liaodong peninsula of Manchuria and their enclave on the Shandong peninsula, hemmed in by Nationalist ground forces. The Soviet naval presence in the Lushun area of Liaodong Province in Manchuria from the end of World War II on was an important factor in Chinese maritime affairs in the immediate postwar period. The Chinese Communist People&s;s Liberation Army (PLA) was most certainly a land-oriented armed force. The policy of the United States at this time was one of "noninterference." The Truman Administration realized, with regret certainly, that the Nationalists had lost the civil war and that it would be pointless to intervene to protect the remnants of the old regime against a PLA mop-up operation.