In the early years of the Republic of China, the Guangdong Air Force, composed of the Guangdong Air Force composed of the sons of overseas Chinese in the United States who were mainly from Fouri, Guangdong, composed a song of anti-Japanese heroes who could sing and cry, Chen Ruidian, Huang Panyang, Huang Xinrui, Su Yingxiang, Lin Juetian, and so on.
Chinese Air Force
Since the Japanese Kou launched the "918" invasion of China, overseas Chinese in various parts of the United States have been indignant and patriotic enthusiasm has been unprecedentedly high, and they have raised funds to organize aviation schools, recruit overseas Chinese children, train flight personnel, and repatriate them to the motherland to serve. At times, there are the "China Aviation School in the United States" in San Francisco, the "Overseas Chinese Flight School" in Chicago, the "Overseas Chinese Salvation Congress Aviation School" in New York, and the "Bowlun American Overseas Chinese Aviation School" in Bowlen. It was set up by the "Chinese Association" and the "Chinese Chamber of Commerce" and other Chinese associations in the United States, and hired retired US Air Force personnel as instructors. In 1932, more than 5,000 people were required to join the aviation school for training, and more than 5,000 people were ready to participate in the war in China. The cadets were young, like Zhu Anqi, who was only 16 years old at the time, was in high school, and after being trained at the China Aviation School, he returned to the motherland to participate in the war. According to some scholars, during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, about 200 overseas Chinese children returned to China to participate in the war through training in the US aviation school. It is precisely because of these newborn calves, with the ideal of saving the country and saving the people, that they finally became excellent pilots of the Chinese Air Force. During the War of Resistance, some of them spilled their blood and sacrificed their lives, and some of them were injured and survived.
Overseas Chinese Aviation School
In this article, I introduce an overseas Chinese pilot born in 1923 in Oakland, San Francisco, USA, in Taishan, an overseas Chinese pilot named Zhu Anqi. He was fortunate that during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, he fought in the blue sky, and although the dangers were repeated, it seemed that there was a heavenly god to protect the body, and finally he was safe and sound, returning to the United States in the old age of Anheng.
After the "China Aviation School" opened the first phase in 1932, because of the financial relationship, it did not immediately renew the enrollment of the second batch of students, until the outbreak of the "July 7" incident, after China began to fight against Japan, the overseas Chinese in San Francisco once again donated to let the school resume enrollment, at this time the "China Aviation School" began to train aircraft maintenance personnel while training flight talents. In 1938, the "China Aviation School" merged with the "Bowling American Overseas Chinese Aviation School", and the third phase of enrollment began, and Zhu Anqi, who was only sixteen years old, also joined the training ranks with the encouragement of her father Zhu Zhongcun. At the end of April 1939, Zhu Anqi and twenty-nine other students completed the subject of flight training and graduated from the "China Aviation School", and few of the students returned to China by boat from San Francisco to participate in the War of Resistance.
Overseas Chinese in the United States raised salaries for the War of Resistance
At that time, the overseas Chinese in the United States were all wholeheartedly supporting the government's long-term war of resistance under the mood of hostility and enmity, and when the overseas Chinese circles in San Francisco knew that Zhu Anqi could not return to China with his classmates because of the relationship between schoolwork, everyone pooled their money to buy a ticket for him, and he could rush to Hong Kong and meet with his classmates to report to the Air Force Academy in Kunming. The one-way ticket back to Hong Kong is more than 1,000 US dollars (equivalent to the income of a Chinese worker for 3 years).
In mid-June 1939, Zhu Anqi was a seaplane on the Pan American Terminal on Treasure Island in San Francisco, so she boarded the plane at the pier and said goodbye to her parents and embarked on a journey back to China alone. Because the US government prohibits citizens from serving in the military abroad, Zhu Anqi did not explain the real purpose of returning home to the passengers accompanying him on the plane, but the crew knew that he was also a pilot and chatted with him very speculatively, reducing a lot of loneliness during the journey.
After Zhu Anqi and her classmates met in Hong Kong, they immediately began their journey to Kunming. At that time, because Guangzhou had been occupied by the Japanese army, it was impossible to go directly by land, so it had to go to Haiphong, Vietnam by sea, and then take the train through Hanoi to Kunming.
After a journey of thousands of miles, Zhu Anqi and thirty other prospective pilots who returned from the United States to join the army finally arrived at the cradle of China's air force at the end of July 1938, and the air officer academy attached great importance to this group of overseas Chinese who returned to the army, and specially handed them over to the foreign advisers headed by Chennault at the official school at that time for qualification evaluation. Sixteen others, including Zhu Anqi, were assigned to the eleventh phase of the officer to start advanced flight training, and four others were assigned to the twelfth period to continue their primary training because their skills had not yet reached the standard.
Taught by American instructors
Before starting the flight training, the official school found a problem that had not been thought of before, although this group of overseas Chinese students had begun to receive Chinese education since they were young, but what they said was cantonese, and Chinese they could not understand a word. Therefore, when organizing the group, it took a little effort to let at least one of the overseas Chinese students in each group speak fluent Chinese, Cantonese or English, so as to help them understand the instructor's explanation.
When they were training at the official school, Japanese planes still came to bomb from time to time, so the instructors of the official school at that time had to take off to fight with the Japanese planes in addition to training flights. The instructor of Zhu Anqi's group, Tan Hannan (a high-ranking person in Guangdong), was forced to land and injured by a Japanese plane during an air battle, and witnessing the tragic scene of the instructor being chased by three Zero planes made Zhu Anqi have a deeper hatred for the Japanese warlords, and he swore that these blood debts must be repaid with Japanese blood.
After more than a year of training, Zhu Finally graduated from the Air Force Academy on February 10, 1941, and officially became an air force officer of the Republic of China. Zhu Anqi, who originally thought that he might participate in the war against Japan immediately after becoming an official, but because the aircraft in the early days of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression were depleted too quickly, there were no aircraft in the army to let this group of new pilots show their skills, so the graduates of the eleventh class were sent to the Yining Teaching Team in Xinjiang to receive the Soviet E-16 fighters after being apprenticed in Chengdu for half a year.
In the autumn of 1942, Zhu Anqi completed the training of the Yining Teaching Team and was sent to the Twenty-ninth Squadron of the Fifth Brigade in Lanzhou to start a formal battle against Japan. When he flew a Russian-made E-16 fighter jet for the first time and strafed the Japanese ground troops, he almost burst into tears, because he seemed to see the group of overseas Chinese who had worked in the kitchen for many years in the restaurants of San Francisco's Chinatown, and donated their hard-earned wages to buy expensive tickets to return to the army, they did not need any return, they only hoped that China would stand up and stop being bullied. Now that he was flying a fighter plane to shoot the invading Japanese Kou on the battlefield, although the results of the battle were not enough to affect the entire war situation, he felt that he had taken the first breath for those overseas Chinese who were thousands of miles away.
Foundation of Kunming Air Force
At that time, because the Pacific War had already broken out, most of the Japanese air forces were gathered in the Pacific Islands to fight with the US army, so there were many fewer Japanese aircraft on the Chinese battlefield than in previous years, so Zhu Anqi mostly carried out the task of attacking the Japanese army on the ground or covering our army during that period. It was at that time that U.S. military aid to the Chinese Air Force began to grow exponentially, and new aircraft flew from India to Kunming via Hump. With the arrival of the new aircraft, the Air Force also selected a group of outstanding flight personnel from various units and incorporated them into the four major groups in Baishiyi, Chongqing, and let them receive these new P-40 aircraft.
Although Japanese aircraft are no longer wreaking havoc in Chinese airspace as before, there has been a slight relaxation of the war on the ground. After only three hours of flying the P-40, Zhu Began to fly the aircraft to support the Battle of the Central Plains. He remembered that at that time, he took off from Xi'an at dawn with the leader Gao Youxin, flew to Luoyang to support our ground troops, in order to bring more ammunition, they all only added enough fuel to take off, returned to Xi'an after the attack, hung up the bomb and refueled, immediately embarked on the journey again, many times his plane was hit by enemy ground artillery fire when attacking Japanese tanks at ultra-low altitude, but he was able to fly the plane back to the base very carefully.
Although the war is very busy, young pilots always find opportunities to relax themselves. On a chance to return to Chongqing on vacation, Zhu Anqi met Miss Jiang Youxian, who worked at the China Farmers Bank, and he was immediately overwhelmed by her beautiful appearance and empathetic personality, and with the encouragement of her teammates, Zhu Anqi launched a fierce pursuit of her, during which time, the troops also gave him the greatest support with the team spirit of fu tong of the Air Force, and without affecting the mission, they tried to give him convenience and let him run to Chongqing as soon as he had time.
At the beginning of the thirty-fourth year of the Republic of China (1945), the four brigades followed the P-40 and then replaced them with the most advanced P-51 Mustang fighters at that time, and not long after the change, Zhu Anqi was sent to the mission as far as Nanjing, which was the first mission of the four brigades to return to the capital after the fall of Nanjing at the end of the 26th year of the Republic of China, so everyone who was sent to participate in the mission was very excited to go all out. On that seven-hour-plus-plus mission, the Mustang plane went straight from Enshi, Hubei Province, to Nanjing at an altitude of 25,000 feet, and the Japanese troops along the way could not fly to that altitude even if they had the heart to intercept it. After arriving at the target area, the more than thirty Mustangs swooped down from a high altitude with a thunderous momentum and swept away the Japanese planes parked at the two airports of the Ming Forbidden City and the Great Teaching Ground.
Zhu Anqi and Jiang Youxian wedding photos
In that year, Zhu Anqi not only won successive victories on the battlefield, but also made great gains in the love field. After more than a year of exchanges, he finally won the hearts of Jiang Youxian, and the two of them married in Chongqing on April 24, 2004. Less than a few months after the marriage, Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies under the pressure of two atomic bombs, and at that time, Zhu Anqi was really full of Britain and China, and the original intention of returning to China had been completed, and the lifelong thing had been completed, and the next thing that came down would be to work hard for the reconstruction of the motherland.
After Japan's surrender, Zhu Stayed in Sichuan with the 23rd Squadron for several months, and did not receive orders to transfer to Beijing until mid-November. The flight from Chongqing to Beijing via Xi'an should have been very easy, but I didn't expect it to be the beginning of a series of bad luck. Because of the sudden change in weather, not long after the departure from Xi'an, the entire formation entered the clouds, and everyone hoped to keep the clouds on the clouds as long as the long plane began to climb high, but the clouds on the day were as high as twenty thousand feet or more, flying out of this cloud and into another higher cloud, flying for a long time The formation could not be maintained, Zhu Anqi's long plane rushed down after finding a cloud hole, and Zhu Anqi, who flew behind, rushed into a thick cloud before he had time to follow, and when he flew, he became a person flying blindly in a single machine cloud. But he quickly calmed down, he first changed the plane to a flat flight, and then began to use all the instruments he had learned before, and the plane was able to escape the dangerous situation and arrive in Beijing under his careful control. Half of the planes departing from Xi'an that day had accidents due to trek, and even long planes parachuted due to the exhaustion of trek, and that mission was the most seriously damaged mission in zhu anqi's several years of air force operations.
Angela Zhu
Not long after staying in Beijing, the Twenty-third Squadron began the task of "suppressing the Communists." In the early summer of 1946, the twenty-third lieutenant pilot Chen Shenling was hit by PLA ground fire during the ground attack near Baoding, and was forced to land in the Nationalist position, when the army was also surrounded by the PLA, in order to rescue his comrades in danger, Zhu Anqi volunteered to fly an L-5 light aircraft to the army defense, risked landing the plane in a place smaller than the football field, and rescued Lieutenant Chen Shenling (Chen Shenling later served as the chief of staff in Taiwan).
Not long after the rescue of Lieutenant Chen Shenling, in a single-aircraft mission to support the Shijiazhuang garrison, Zhu Anqi himself was also hit by the ground artillery fire of the People's Liberation Army, at that time, his altitude did not allow him to parachute, he could only aim the plane at the only flat farmland nearby, although the forced landing was very successful, he did not suffer any damage, but because the local area was under the control of the People's Liberation Army, Zhu Anqi was captured by the People's Liberation Army not long after the forced landing.
When the People's Liberation Army learned that Zhu Anqi was an American overseas Chinese who returned to China to resist Japan, it immediately looked at him differently, and arranged several cadres to talk to him every day, hoping that he could join the People's Liberation Army and work for the aviation circles of new China, but Zhu Anqi only asked to go home as soon as possible and reunite with his newly married wife.
After Zhu Anqi's family in the United States learned that he had been shot down by the enemy and captured, they were very anxious, and they used all the upper-level connections available to them to find the US ambassador to China, Stuart Layden, hoping to use the strength of the US government to promote his release.
The US Government first refused to intervene in this matter on the grounds that Zhu Anqi had lost her US nationality, but after Zhu Anqi's father, Mr. Zhu Zhongcun, communicated with the members of Congress one by one, the US Government finally looked at the matter in the way of handling cases, first of all, they approved the application for restoration of nationality on the grounds that Zhu Anqi returned to China to fight the war, and then ordered the ambassador to China to comprehensively rescue Zhu Anqi, an American citizen captured by the People's Liberation Army. In the end, the US ambassador to China, Stu Lei, personally negotiated, and Zhu Anqi was sent to Tianjin for release after being captured for two and a half months.
It was at this time that Zhu Anqi received a letter from his father in the United States, telling him that the mission of returning to China to join the army to resist foreign insults had been completed, that as a descendant of Yan Huang, he had fulfilled his responsibilities, and that it was time to think about his future, mostly hoping that he could return to the United States with his wife.
So Zhu Anqi submitted an application for retirement to the Air Force General Capital, because the Air Force had only been in the army for more than ten years, many of the regulations were not perfect, and the pilots had not yet reached the retirement age, so for a while the Air Force Headquarters did not know how to deal with this matter. The commander-in-chief at the time, General Zhou Zhirou, was well aware of Zhu Anqi's situation, but in the absence of a "law" to follow, he could only instruct the matter to be handled temporarily with the force of "suspension of pay and retention of office". Since it is "suspended from work", there is no problem of pension, so Zhu Anqi did not get a single dollar when she left the Air Force, and even the air ticket money back to the United States was still remitted by the American family. After returning to the United States, Zhu Anqi did not serve in the U.S. army, so he could not enjoy the treatment of any veteran, so even when he returned to school and went to college, he still had to earn tuition with half work and half study, but he did not have any complaints, in the autumn of the motherland's critical survival, he returned to the army to fulfill a Chinese obligation, although legally speaking he was an American, but he knew that the blood that flowed in his veins was Chinese, and for the survival of China, he lost some benefits in the United States. He thinks it's definitely worth it.
Although he only served in the Chinese Air Force for seven years, he never forgot his time in the Air Force. Since 1949, on August 14 every year, he always invited some of his friends who had returned to China to join the Air Force to celebrate the anniversary of the victory of the Air Force, and later because of the increasing number of participants, this original informal organization evolved into the "Overseas Chinese Air Force Alumni Association" with more than 300 members, and soon after the merger of this organization and the "Republic of China Air Force Dapeng Friendship Association", he was elected as the president of these two joint organizations. And he has been volunteering for every Air Force veteran in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than forty years.
Conclusion: We often refer to the overseas Chinese pilots and air force ground crew members who returned to China to fight the war as members of the "Flying Tigers.", which is confusing. Overseas Chinese disciples who returned to their homeland from the United States before 1940 to resist the War of Resistance were subordinate to the Chinese Air Force. After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, some of them died on the battlefield of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, some of them went to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek's army, some of them changed their professions to civil aviation, and some of them stayed in China after the uprising of the two airlines, some of them stayed in Hong Kong, and some of them returned to the United States. Overseas Chinese retired aviation and Chinese American retired aviation, they were also fighting against the Japanese on the battlefield of China's anti-Japanese war. However, the former is not recognized by the U.S. government as a U.S. military and cannot afford the retirement benefits, while the latter is a U.S. military, and they can enjoy the benefits of veterans after returning home. Such as Huang Guangrui, Chen Wenkuan, Chen Ruidian, Zhu Anqi, etc., after returning to the United States, there will be no welfare. But as the same descendants of Yan Huang, can future generations forget them?