Li Guangxi's dictation:
In the spring of 1941, I was assigned to the 3rd Flight Group of the Chinese Air Force as an instrument officer. Soon after, we received an order from the then Aviation Committee to send people to Burma and Yangon to receive the planes.
Our group of more than 20 ground crews, led by Chief Engineer Liang Zengguang and Chief Ordnance Wu Jungan, set off by truck from Chengdu Shuangliu Airport in mid-June (or late June) and arrived in Kunming via Yibin, Bijie and other places.
After a short break in Kunming, after completing the formalities of leaving the country (i.e., each person is issued with a military ID card), he transferred to another truck, along the Yunnan-Burma Highway, through Wan Town on the border between China and Myanmar, to Lashio, an important town in northern Myanmar, and then changed to a train to arrive in Yangon, the capital of Myanmar, in early July.
The journey lasted more than 3,000 kilometers and lasted about a month, and the pilots, headed by group leader Luo Yingde, including squadron leaders, detachment leaders, and pilots with better skills, totaled about 20 people, flew directly from Chengdu to Yangon via Kunming.
At the same time we arrived in Yangon, the P-40B/C fighters of the Curtis Wright Aircraft Company of the United States were successively transported to Yangon, and the total number of 100 planes was originally 100, but one fell into the sea, but it was actually 99 planes.
The assembly of these aircraft was carried out by technicians and workers from the former Sino-US Central Hangzhou Aircraft Factory (Zhonghang Plant or Leiyun Factory), which was originally located in Hangzhou and later moved to the Sino-Burmese border.
According to Dai Changhui, who was an inspector at the time and is now a professor at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, this group of personnel went first and later, and at most no more than 40 people.
The actual person in charge of the assembly personnel was an American man named Sargent, who was the foreman of the assembly workshop of the Leiyun factory at that time; the Chinese team leader was Xia Xunji, in addition to his younger brother Xiao Xia, and among the other staff members were overseas Chinese surnamed Ma and Cai, and technicians from workers' backgrounds (unfortunately the names were forgotten). The inspectors include Wu Tierong, Zhang Chong, Dai Changhui, etc., because Wu is older, he is the head of the inspectors.
In addition, there are acceptance representatives appointed by the government to the factory. Among the test pilots were the American Green and the Air Force Zhou Tingfang, who was a major in the Fourth Brigade where Gao Zhihang was formerly located. The assembly of this batch of aircraft began roughly in July and ended before the end of the year, and another two or three aircraft did not have complete parts, and more than 95 aircraft were actually delivered.
Soon after our team arrived in Yangon, two international students who had just returned from the United States came to teach us.
One surnamed Xiong, I heard that he was Xiong Shihui's son, and we ground crew mainly talked about the construction and maintenance of aircraft, and the other was Gu Dechang, who heard that he was Gu Weijun's son, who mainly talked about the construction and maintenance of engines.
The course was roughly over two months, and then I was assigned to the assembly site to observe and practice according to their respective division of labor, and although I was an instrument officer at the time, I also learned about the assembly and maintenance of the aircraft comprehensively.
Around September and October, the planes were decided to be handed over to the American volunteers organized by Chennault, most of whom were retired officers of the American army, who had to be paid by the mainland to fight in China.
In order to minimize their ground crew, it was decided that all the flight personnel of our brigade would return to China, and all the ground crew, except for the captain, would stay in Yangon to help them with ground work.
Due to the tight domestic gasoline supply at the time and the presence of oil fields and refineries near Yangon, the volunteers had planned to train in Yangon for a week before flying back to Kunming.
However, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 and the outbreak of the Pacific War, we were ordered to stay in Rangoon with the volunteers and fight against the Japanese together with the British and Burmese forces.
At that time, I was the only one on the ground staff who could speak some English, so I worked as a translator and got busy.
Soon after, the Japanese army attacked Burma and often sent planes to bomb Rangoon, at that time, the British Royal Air Force left only "Wellington" bombers in Rangoon, and some of them were still lying in the nest and could not fly, and the strength of the ground air defense forces was not strong, so the air defense in the Yangon area and the ground support of the front-line army almost all relied on the P-40C planes equipped by the volunteers.
The picture comes from the Internet
The performance of the P-40C aircraft was still better than that of the Type 99 aircraft that were more common in Japan at that time (note: this should be the Nakajima Type 97 fighter or the Nakajima Ichi "Hayabusa" fighter).
In addition to two 12.7 mm nose machine guns, four 7.62 mm wing machine guns, bulletproof glass, bulletproof steel plates, self-sealing fuel tanks and other attack and protective equipment, it has a maximum speed of 574 km/h at an altitude of 4580 meters, a climb speed of 938 m/min, a normal range of up to 1050 km, and a endurance of more than two hours.
At that time, the volunteer team adopted a nine-plane tandem formation with flexible emergency response (at that time, Japan and the mainland generally adopted a six-plane zigzag formation), and according to the relatively fast speed and climb rate of our aircraft, they adopted the tactics of hitting and running, climbing high and then attacking (that is, avoiding entanglement and dogfight with enemy planes), and won a complete victory in every air battle.
At that time, the volunteer team had a tacit understanding: whenever they came back from the battle, they would first make a dive at the airport, and then pull a fast roll to mean that they would knock out an enemy plane, and pull two fast rolls to mean that they would knock out two enemy planes.
Around New Year's Day in 1942, the Japanese invaders twice dispatched dozens of planes to attack Rangoon, and the volunteer planes took off in time to respond. After the air battle, I counted the number of our planes that were rolling fast, and there were as many as fifteen or sixteen at a time.
On one occasion, we saw a Japanese plane swaying over the airfield, and soon after circling, a vertical dive came and crashed into the ground with a bang.
Due to the slight deviation, the British plane was intact, but this shows that the Japanese pilots were still very strong in the spirit of bushido at that time.
I have the impression that during the more than two months of fighting in Rangoon, the P-40 planes were slightly better performed, and because they adopted some good tactics in a targeted manner, and because they were relatively brave, they still won a relatively large victory.
According to some sources: "During the defense of Yangon, which lasted for more than two months, the American volunteers shot down a total of 216 Japanese planes, and they lost only 14 of them, achieving a great victory. ”
Therefore, the final loss of Rangoon was entirely due to the fact that the British were too weak, and it was not until the Chinese expeditionary force sent troops to Burma that they stopped the sharp offensive of the Japanese army.
Old photos of the Japanese Zero fighter formation The picture comes from the Internet
Around the beginning of February, I heard that a Japanese Zero plane had made a forced landing in a farmland two or three days away from Yangon. The pilot escaped with the help of the Burmese traitors, and the plane was still in good condition.
In order to study the performance of the enemy plane, the volunteer team sent me and a pilot (Ah Zhong, the name is forgotten) to accompany a British officer to dismantle the aircraft.
Because the tools we carried were made in the imperial system, the metric system used in Japan, and the structure of the plane was also somewhat peculiar, we took great effort to transport the plane back to Yangon with the help of the British officers urging the local government to send people to send people back and forth.
When I went to explain this mission, the volunteers told me that the Japanese army was approaching Yangon, and that the planes (roughly a squadron) remaining in Yangon would fly to Kunming the next day, and that the ground crews would also be withdrawn to Kunming on the third day.
In the early morning of late February, we evacuated Yangon in about 10 trucks, fuel trucks, jeeps, and other vehicles under the jurisdiction of the volunteers.
A few days later, the car arrived in Lashio, and the mechanic of our brigade (everyone called him Lao Mei, I forgot his name) died unfortunately due to illness and could not be treated in time (probably heat stroke, because Myanmar belongs to the subtropical climate, and the temperature was already very high in February), and sacrificed his precious life for the war of resistance.
It happened that there was an office of the Aviation Commission there, and we handed over the body to the office for disposal and rested for two days, and then drove on.
Around mid-March, we returned safely to Kunming, where the seasons are like spring. At this time, we learned that due to the fact that China and the United States were already allied forces and news reports, the volunteer team had been renamed the "Flying Tigers".
The picture comes from the Internet
At the same time, it was also seen that the flat and elongated fairing shell formed by the V-shaped liquid-cooled engine installed in many P-40 aircraft was painted with various colors of paint, and a terrible shark with a nose, eyes, and a large mouth with a blood basin open, revealing two rows of white, smooth and terrible teeth.
We worked with the team for about two or three weeks before we received an order to go to Karachi, India (at that time, Pakistan and Bangladesh were not yet independent and belonged to India) to receive another batch of planes, so we ended our work in the "Flying Tigers" and embarked on a new journey.