Author: Lamp Duo Wei Xinpu
(The author, Wei Xinpu, was the commander of the 8th Company of the 2nd Lantern Regiment when he entered Vietnam in October 1966, and later served as an instructor of the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Lantern Regiment.) ）
1. On National Day, searchlight soldiers were ordered to go to Vietnam
After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, U.S. imperialism began to bombard Vietnam indiscriminately, trying to use military coercion to destroy the Vietnamese people's will to resist the United States, and by 1966 the scale and scope of the bombing of the U.S. military was getting bigger and bigger. In order to support the Vietnamese people in resisting the aggression of US imperialism, our anti-aircraft artillery units began to go to Vietnam one after another in the name of Chinese logistics units to assist the Vietnamese military and people in defending the national security. Around August '66, our 3rd Battalion received an order from the 2nd Lantern Regiment to prepare to go to Vietnam to cooperate with anti-aircraft artillery in night operations.
At that time, I was serving as a company commander in the 8th Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Lantern Regiment, and when I received the order to go abroad, all of our company was very excited and excited. Soon the troops came to Pingxiang City, Guangxi Province to assemble. After the troops arrived in Pingxiang, they immediately mobilized for combat and carried out a series of political education abroad. For a time, the atmosphere of all cadres and soldiers seeking war was high, and everyone made up their minds to defeat US imperialism with the fearless spirit of the revolution without fear of bloodshed and sacrifice, and with the great spirit of internationalism.
In order to enable the troops to adapt to the wartime environment in Vietnam immediately after entering Vietnam, during the pre-war mobilization of the troops in Pingxiang, Guangxi, Comrade Li Shaocheng, chief of staff of the Second Regiment of the Lamps, I formed an advance group together with Commander Zheng Zaiyi of the 7th Company and Commander Chen of the 9th Company to enter Vietnam in advance and come to an artillery company for pre-war investigation and practical experience of battlefield life. Our advance group stayed in the artillery company for a week, and the next day it was bombed by US imperialism. After only a piercing siren that day, a group of enemy aircraft flew over our position, followed by a series of deafening explosions. After the bomber group flew away, we learned that the target that day was not an anti-aircraft artillery position, but a different target near the position, so it did not cause any casualties to our position.
October 1, 1965, National Day, is a day when the people of the whole country celebrate the whole country, and that day has a special significance for us, because it is also the day when the third battalion of our second lamp regiment crossed the country. On the afternoon of the National Day, the commanders and fighters of our battalion lined up at the Friendship Pass to solemnly swear to the motherland, and then marched out of the country with great vigor to begin the one-year arduous years of our Third Battalion in Vietnam to resist US aggression and aid Vietnam.
In fact, the troops that were initially determined to go abroad were not the third battalion of our second lamp regiment, but the second battalion of our second lamp regiment. However, because an operational staff officer of the regiment headquarters accidentally lost a notebook with matters related to going abroad to participate in the war when he went out on the street, the Second Regiment temporarily changed the sequence of fighting abroad and decided that our third battalion would be the first to enter Vietnam.
After entering the territory of Vietnam, our eighth company was divided into two due to the needs of combat missions. The third platoon temporarily transferred the seventh company, and the seventh company formed a reinforced company, which was deployed in Kev. The first and second platoons of the Eighth Company were deployed together with the Ninth Company in Wenxian County, and later transferred to Songhua. It was not until about the end of 1965 that three companies of our third battalion were deployed together to Taiyuan.
Taiyuan is located about 90 kilometers north of Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, where there are power plants and steel plants built by our Taiyuan Steel Mill, which is an important industrial town in North Vietnam, and we deployed in Taiyuan to defend this important industrial base together with anti-aircraft artillery units.
During our time in Vietnam, the US imperialists bombed with great ferocity, and they often sent B-52 heavy bombers and other tactical bombers of various types to bombard Vietnam's industrial facilities and our military positions. The intensity and density of each bombing was very high, often one attack wave after another, dreaming of destroying our ground air defense forces through carpet bombing and destroying the fighting spirit of the Vietnamese military and civilians. However, the US imperialist bombing was ultimately unable to defeat the great Chinese army and the heroic Vietnamese people, and on January 27, 1973, the United States was forced to sign an agreement ending the Vietnam War, declaring their complete defeat.
(Map around Thai Nguyen City, Socialist Republic of Vietnam)
2. Actual combat training before the bombing of enemy aircraft
After the 8th Company of our 2nd Lantern Regiment entered Vietnam, it began to deploy in the area of Songhua in Vietnam, which is a hilly terrain and is surrounded by mountains around our radar searchlight position.
We searchlight soldiers fight, mainly relying on searchlight radar to find the target and guide the searchlight to the target for irradiation, so we are not afraid of wind or rain, but we are afraid of entering the mountains. Because our searchlight radar is an ultra-short-wave radar, the echo of the ground object reflected back from the mountain can easily mask the echo of the aircraft target, causing serious interference to our radar operator to find the target in time.
In order to solve the problem of timely detection of aircraft targets in the echo interference of features in mountainous areas, I decided to take advantage of the daytime bombing by enemy aircraft to conduct a real combat training in order to explore and summarize the method of finding targets in the echoes of features and make full preparations for the night combat that was about to begin.
Our searchlight unit has no combat mission during the day, and our main duty is to illuminate enemy aircraft at night to illuminate anti-aircraft artillery, so when enemy aircraft come to bomb during the day, we do not need to enter a state of combat readiness, we only need to hide in bomb shelters to avoid non-combat casualties. However, in order to better discover the target at night, all the soldiers of the company actively responded to my call and were determined to train the troops through actual combat.
At that time, our Eighth Company and Ninth Company were deployed together, and I and Company Commander Chen of the Ninth Company took turns to take the task of commanding the air. In order to carry out actual combat training, I discussed with the commander of the ninth company, I went to our 821 station on the radar cockpit to operate, and he replaced me in the air command.
When I arrived at station 821, sure enough, enemy planes came to bomb. When the first attack wave came, I spotted enemy targets on the distance display of our searchlight radar, and the enemy aircraft displayed on the radar fluorescent screen were not one, but several. Because there were many enemy planes coming, when I discovered the target, Company Commander Chen, who was in charge of the air command, immediately told us to immediately withdraw from the position and hide, and since we had achieved the purpose of training, we quickly hid in the bomb shelter according to the order.
Less than a minute after we entered the bomb shelter, the submunitions dropped by the US aircraft exploded. When the bombing was over, we walked out of the bomb shelter and saw that the radar searchlight protective glass of Station 821 had been shattered, the diesel generator had been blown up, and even the big rooster of the Vietnamese hometown had been blown up. When I returned to the company headquarters, I learned that the bombing area was very large, that our car at Station 811 had many holes in the bombs, that our company's tent had also been shattered, and that documents had been blown up in a mess. Fortunately, the commander gave a decisive order, and there were no casualties in the troops.
Although this actual combat training took a lot of risks, everyone felt that it was of great significance:
First, through this training, it has been proved that our searchlight radar can still detect targets in the mountainous areas of Vietnam, which has played a great role in boosting the morale of the troops.
Second, through this training, we have withstood the test of bombing by enemy planes, and the revolutionary heroism of the officers and men of the whole company that is not afraid of hardship and death has been highly enhanced.
3. 2,000-pound bombs flew over our heads
At that time, the US government used extremely cruel bombing methods during the bombing of North Vietnam, and they invented a variety of bombs for mass destruction of ground personnel, including 500-pound bombs, 2,000-pound bombs, sub-bombs, time-delay bombs, and so on.
Of these bombs, submunitions are the most lethal. So it is called a submunition because this bomb is loaded with several to hundreds of submunitions in a bomb of the same size as a normal bomb, each of which is about the size of a tennis ball, and there are hundreds of small steel balls inside. When the aircraft drops bombs in the air, the mother bomb disintegrates in the air, causing large area damage by exploding submunitions that spread to the ground. When dozens of sub-munitions are still falling together, they often present a scattered area on the ground that is three kilometers wide and tens of kilometers long, and no one on the ground within this range can escape. However, the submunition is not very powerful, and can only blast a 70-80 cm large and 50-60 cm deep pit. So as long as you hide in a bomb shelter, you can avoid its killing.
The 2,000-pound bomb is characterized by great explosive power. After a bomb comes down, it can blast a large pit ten meters deep and ten meters wide in the ground, and the high temperature of the bomb can also burn the soil like bricks. It is conceivable that if such a blow-up reaches the position, all weapons, equipment and personnel will have to be blown up.
During our time in Vietnam, the bombing of American aircraft was very large-scale, and each bombing was composed of many sorties and batches, often after a wave of bombing attacks, a wave of bombing attacks followed, and this indiscriminate bombing posed a great threat to our ground forces.
I remember once, I went to Station 811 with the chief of the company to check combat readiness, and that day I happened to encounter a wave of bombing attacks by American aircraft, and our soldiers at Station 811 were all hidden air defense, only the two of us had just reached Station 811 before we had time to enter the bomb shelter. At this moment, the Yankee bomber formation flew to the headspace of Station 811, and we saw three 2,000-pound bombs still coming down from the plane, and when the secretary general saw this situation, he held his head and shouted: "It's over!" Finished! "I thought the bomb was going to fall on my head, but I didn't expect that after three loud bangs, we were all safe. It turned out that the target of the bombing was not our searchlights, but the artillery positions next to it.
The power of the 2,000-pound bomb was amazing, and it exploded at an anti-aircraft gun position hundreds of meters away from us, blowing up dirt and branches on the ground into the sky, and then flying down to the command post of our lamp station, and the branches and dirt that fell on top were three feet thick.
As soon as I saw that the artillery positions had suffered serious losses, and despite the fact that the bombing was not over, I quickly ordered the soldiers in the station to go to the artillery positions together to rescue the wounded. When we got closer, we saw that the artillery on some anti-aircraft artillery positions was gone, leaving only a large pit in the ground, and the bodies of artillery soldiers were blown up and scattered around the position. Because the battle was not over at that time, and the artillerymen who were not injured in the position were still fighting persistently, we were moved by their revolutionary and fearless spirit, and everyone shouted the slogan "Make up your mind, not be afraid of sacrifice, overcome all difficulties, and strive for victory", encouraging the artillery soldiers to persist in fighting. With tears in our eyes, we retrieved the bodies of the fallen soldiers. After the battle, the artillery unit barely brought the bodies together and buried them. According to later statistics, about 20 soldiers died that day.
After returning from Vietnam, whenever I saw some war scenes in the movie, I always felt that even if the scenes in the movie were realistic, they could not be compared with the bloody and cruel battlefield after all; Similarly, the scenes in the film that show the fearlessness of the revolution are difficult to compare with the heroic spirit of our soldiers on the battlefield who persist in fighting in the face of death threats.
(Picture of the sub-mother)
Fourth, the new fighters cut off the lights, and the anti-aircraft artillery instantly fired a volley and the enemy aircraft fell
Our searchlight unit is a unit with a glorious history, and as early as during the period of resisting US aggression and aiding Korea, our predecessors created brilliant achievements in lighting down US aircraft. Similarly, during the period of resisting US aggression and aiding Vietnam, we also created a classic combat example of using the naked eye to detect the target and disconnecting the light to illuminate the enemy aircraft, thereby guiding anti-aircraft artillery to shoot down the enemy aircraft in one fell swoop.
What makes me proud is that it was an ordinary soldier of our Eighth Company, Wang Zhaoming, a soldier from Shandong, who created this battle example.
Wang Zhaoming joined the army in early 1966, and when we entered Vietnam, he was a recruit who had been in the army for less than six months, but his station chief was a veteran. His station commander was Liang Huamin, a native of Shanxi who joined the army in early 1961. Even before entering Echi, he was already an excellent small station manager of our company.
Speaking of "small stations", it is necessary to make a brief introduction to our searchlight troops: our searchlight troops are equipped with two kinds of searchlights, one is a searchlight station with radar, which we call "big station"; The other is a searchlight station without radar, which we call "small stations". The small station is organized into a class consisting of a total of 5 people: the squad leader, the number one, the second player, the third and the fourth leader. The squad leader is responsible for directing the whole station operation, the number one player is responsible for manipulating the searchlight to aim at the target, the number two is responsible for controlling the light handle and replacing the carbon rod, the third hand is responsible for driving the vehicle and generating electricity, and the fourth hand assists the third hand to start the car. Wang Zhaoming is the number two player of Liang Huamin's small station.
After entering Vietnam, the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of Deng, we attached great importance to organizing troops to learn war in war, and we made full use of various opportunities to organize troops to conduct wartime training. Since we are on night combat missions, we pay special attention to night training. At that time, each lamp station explored and summarized many methods for discovering enemy aircraft, among which Station Chief Liang Huamin summarized how to use the moon and stars to find enemy aircraft. Because he found that on a clear night, the plane would cover the stars and the moon when flying, causing the moon to be dark and the stars to twinkle. Sure enough, his summary played an important role in future battles. At the same time, our troops also encouraged all cadres and soldiers to fight bravely and dare to fight, and the troops fighting in Vietnam at that time had a very loud slogan: "Dare to fight a victory without orders!" "This slogan inspired the anti-aircraft artillery units and also aroused the strong desire of our searchlight units to fight.
The fighter finally came: At midnight on April 24, 1967, a US A-6A carrier-based plane flew to the Kefu area of Vietnam by night, in a vain attempt to conduct night reconnaissance and bombing of us. Our troops quickly entered the position based on the intelligence of the nearby radar and prepared to meet the enemy. At first, our proximity radar could also pick up the target signal of this A-6A carrier-based aircraft, but as soon as it entered the firing range of our anti-aircraft guns, this A-6A flew closely to the mountain with its advanced autopilot system, and the radar lost its target at once.
The radar lost its target, and both the anti-aircraft artillery and our searchlight men were anxious. At this time, our station chief Liang Huamin was not in a hurry, and still calmly directed their lamp station to use the method of expanding the search to search for the target with the naked eye. His efforts soon paid off, and Wang Zhaoming, the number two player on their station, used his usual training experience to finally see the plane in the twinkling starlight. When Wang Zhaoming concluded that he had found the target, he became highly excited, and while loudly directing the No. 1 player to adjust the height and azimuth angle of the searchlight to align with the target, he made an action that he usually did not have: his right hand tightly held the switch handle of the searchlight, and his left hand forcefully supported the lamp drum to turn the position of the searchlight (later, according to Wang Zhaoming's manipulation gesture, our second lamp group installed a handle on the lamp drum of all small light stations to facilitate the second hand to adjust the position of the searchlight).
Just when the A-6A carrier-based aircraft crossed the No. 2 hill to prepare for a dive attack, Wang Zhaoming saw it in the scope, and before waiting for the order to turn on the light to the station chief Liang Huamin, he decisively pressed the light knob. Suddenly, a dazzling pillar of light hit the A-6A carrier-based aircraft, after Wang Zhaoming turned on the light, other lamp stations also turned on the lights, focusing the enemy aircraft in the intersection of the searchlight column, anti-aircraft artillery saw the A-6A carrier-based aircraft tightly locked by the searchlight, 85 anti-aircraft artillery, 57 anti-aircraft artillery, 37 anti-aircraft gun, anti-aircraft machine guns and other large and small guns covered together, A-6A was hit in an instant and exploded, plunged into the rice field next to the high-altitude position, the pilot did not have time to parachute, and was blown to pieces together with the plane.
After this battle, Wang Zhaoming was awarded a second-class meritorious service, and after returning to China, he attended the 1968 National Day dinner with our regiment commander. In 1973, Comrade Wang Zhaoming was honorably discharged from the army. Unfortunately, due to the limited conditions at the time, I have not been able to find his contact information so far.
Wang Zhaoming discovered the enemy plane with the naked eye and decisively disconnected the lights to illuminate the enemy plane, which is the most brilliant battle example of our searchlight soldiers since the predecessors of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea used the lamp to shine down the US plane, this clean and beautiful battle won glory for the great party, the great army, the great motherland, the great people, and the great leader, and added color to the searchlight troops! We are proud to have such a hero, and we applaud the strict training and organizational skills of Station Manager Liang Huamin! I am even more proud of the spirit of "daring to fight a victory without orders"!
(Wang Zhaoming's track map of the enemy aircraft)
(This near-range plot board track map is provided by Comrade Zhang Chuanjun, an anti-aircraft artillery comrade-in-arms, and I would like to express my gratitude!) ）