On September 9, 1943, the commander of the Japanese Army's Chinese Aviation Corps, Nakagō Mori takashi, was shot down and killed in the skies over Huangpu, Guangdong Province, when inspecting the defense of the Japanese Army in South China, due to the deciphering of the code and his whereabouts were exposed, becoming the supreme general of the Japanese Army Air Force killed in World War II. Who killed Lieutenant General Nakaen?
On April 18, 1943, after deciphering the code to learn its flight schedule, the U.S. Army Air Force successfully intercepted the Japanese Combined Fleet Commander Isoroku Yamamoto and his party, who had visited the front line, over Bougainville Island. After a brief fierce battle, The landline of General Isoroku Yamamoto was shot down, and the general, who was regarded as the soul of the Japanese Navy, was killed on the spot. Accurate intelligence and swift action, this battle is a well-deserved classic example in the history of aviation warfare.
Coincidentally, half a year later, there was also a case of a clone of the war in the Chinese battlefield.
On September 9, 1943, the commander of the Chinese aviation of the Japanese Army and the commander of the Japanese Third Air Division, Lieutenant General Nakamoto Morihito, who was also exposed due to the deciphering of the code during the inspection of the defense of the Japanese Army in South China, was intercepted and killed over Huangpu, Guangdong Province, and was shot down and killed, becoming the highest general of the Japanese Army Air Force killed in World War II.
Nakaen Mori takashi, born in the 34th class of the Japanese Army University (graduated in 1922), was originally an excellent artillery officer. In 1937, he was transferred to the Japanese Army Aviation Corps, and in 1937, as the commander of the 60th Combat Team, he led his troops to participate in the war of aggression against China.
He was promoted to lieutenant general in 1941 for his "outstanding military achievements". He commanded or participated in all the large-scale operations of the Japanese Army Air Force in China, including attacks on Nanjing, Wuhan, Xi'an, Guilin, Quzhou and other places, and was regarded as one of the best generals of the Japanese Army Aviation Corps.
His death was a heavy blow to the Japanese army's operations in China, and the Japanese generals who succeeded him thereafter lacked their prestige and strategic vision. By 1944, the Japanese had largely lost their air superiority on the Chinese front.
It is worth noting that the killers in both attacks were P-38 Lightning fighters. The use of such a fighter for interception missions is determined by its unique performance. Or rather, doing this kind of decapitation is exactly the P-38's unique skill.
The P-38 Lightning is a Lockheed single-seat propeller fighter with a distinctive appearance. The heavy fighter had two engines, mounted in a pair of separate fuselages on either side of the cockpit, and the two engines extended backwards, each with a vertical tail, connected at the rear with a tail brace.
The front of the aircraft looks as if it has three heads – which may be related to the aesthetic preference of its designer, Kelly Johnson, who designed the most proud work of the SR-71 Blackbird stealth reconnaissance aircraft, which also looks like three heads on the front, which is quite similar to the P-38.
Despite its bizarre shape, the P-38 does have unusual performance. Relying on two V-1710-111/173 liquid-cooled engines with turbochargers, the P-38 had nearly three thousand horsepower almost unmatched in a fighter at the time, which gave it a speed of 667 kilometers per hour and an ultra-long range of three thousand six hundred kilometers.
The abundant power allowed it to have more than enough armor in addition to its high speed, so that in the battle, the P-38 was hit by more than a hundred guns and shells and still escaped safely. Japanese ace pilot Saburo Sakai said the P-38 was the opponent who "should least waste ammunition" because it was so hard to beat.
At the same time, the P-38 was armed with a 20 mm cannon and four large-caliber machine guns, all placed in front of the cockpit. Because the engines are split on both sides, the P-38 does not have to need a propeller coordinator like a normal single-engine fighter to ensure that the bullets will not hit its propeller, so its machine gun has a much higher rate of fire than its peers, with exceptionally strong firepower.
The P-38 entered service in 1942. Initially, however, the use of such fighters was unsuccessful. In addition to the problem of engine failure in early models, in Europe, especially in the German battlefield, the P-38 caused a great shock and a high loss rate.
The main reason for this is the improper use of tactics. When the Allies used the P-38 on european battlefields, they mainly used its ultra-long range to escort long-range bombers bombing Germany. But the P-38 was a heavy fighter in its own right, far less agile than the German BF-109, though fierce in firepower.
Of course, this is not the fatal weakness, if the one-hit guerrilla tactics are adopted, the P-38 can compete with the BF-109, but the task of escorting the bomber forces it to stay in a fixed position in the formation, and can only fight hard with the Germans. Coupled with the fact that most of the German pilots were tried and tested veterans on the Eastern Front, it was reasonable that the P-38 did not play well.
The P-38's most dazzling glory was in the Asia-Pacific theater, where it had the most Japanese aircraft shot down among U.S. Land Aviation fighters.
The long distance between islands and reefs in the Pacific Theater became a fatal factor limiting the use of air forces on both sides, and the Japanese had to gain greater range by reducing the weight of the fighters and abandoning protection altogether. These light, fragile targets were often targeted by the P-38, and their powerful firepower was able to break the Japanese fighters.
Even if this sneak attack from a high altitude did not work, the "lucky" Japanese fighter jet could neither catch up nor defeat the fast and sturdy P-38. As a result, this fighter, which was called "double-body devil" by the Japanese army, became a feared "lightning split" above the Japanese army's head.
Against this backdrop, it's no surprise that the P-38 performed the "Assassin" mission against Isoroku Yamamoto and Morihiko Nakaen, both of which were long ranges. The flight route to assassinate Yamamoto was 700 kilometers long, and the attack on Zhongyuan would take off from the Nanxiong advance airfield in northern Guangdong and span the entire Guangdong, which was a great test for the fighters at that time. The decapitation mission featured a powerful firepower that required a single blow, and in the Asian battlefield at that time, only the P-38 was suitable for such a mission.
After Yamamoto Fifty-Six was shot down, the entanglement of American pilots such as Raffle and Barber has not yet reached a clear result. So, who killed Lieutenant General Nakato?
In the Chinese material related to the assassination of Zhongyuan, the death of Lieutenant General Zhongyuan is often generally recorded as the record of the "Sino-US Air Force".
The P-38 Lightning fighter entered the Chinese theater in July 1943. At the request of Chennault, commander of the 14th Air Force, the U.S. military directly transferred a group of pilots and P-38 fighters from the North African battlefield to the Sino-Indian-Burmese battlefield to defend the hump route, the only international passage in southern China, and to undertake the task of providing air cover for the Chinese army and attacking Japanese rear targets.
The aircraft were divided into two squadrons, the 449 Squadron, which belonged to the 14th Air Force of the Chinese Theater, stationed at Guilin and Hengyang Airports (later transferred to Lingling Airport), and the 459 Squadron, which belonged to the 10th Air Force of the Indo-Burma Battlefield. In the later period of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, there were three main aviation units fighting on the battlefield in China, namely, the Chinese Air Force, the Sino-US Joint Air Force, and the US Fourteenth Air Force.
Among them, the Sino-US Joint Air Force, the Sino-US Mixed Regiment, was established in October 1943, that is, a month after the shooting down of Zhongyuan, so it was impossible to participate in this battle. According to Bao Bingguang, a veteran pilot of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Chinese Air Force has about thirty P-38 fighter pilots.
But including himself, most of them were trained in the United States in 1943 and had not yet developed combat effectiveness. In September 1943, the only Chinese battlefield was equipped with P-38 Lightning fighters, and the only one with real combat capability was the 449 Squadron, which should have carried out a raid to intercept and kill Zhongyuan.
China's real merits in this war should be in intelligence cooperation, and the intelligence support of the 14th Air Force is mainly provided by the Sino-US cooperation agencies in Chongqing. At that time, the Japanese codebreaking work carried out by the Chinese side was very effective. Zhang Chaoxi, who participated in this work, once told Luo Yingde, a famous air force general: "Any new code of the Japanese army can be translated within three days of changing." ”
Xia Cangyi, chief of the communications section of the Aviation Commission, said in 1942: "Today's Japanese passwords do not pose any difficulties for us. The Japanese war history records that there were six accompanying senior officers on the plane in Zhongyuan, as well as the flight captain Cao, the service squad leader and others, who took off from Nanjing Airport to Guangzhou on a single plane, with the purpose of "guiding the operations of the Southern Branch Aviation."
Before the departure of the Zhongyuan plane, it was notified in advance that the plane would land at Guangdong Baiyun Airport and requested that several fighter jets be sent from the airport to escort it on the way. However, it is unpredictable that the enemy has deciphered the code in advance, so it has made a (interception) operation. By the time the friendly planes took off from Baiyun Airport, (Nakaen's landline) was already surrounded by six enemy planes, under concentrated artillery fire, and crashed into an orchard near Dashi in the Zhunan garrison area with white smoke, (Nakaen Shengxiao) was killed. ”
The location where the Zhongyuan landline was shot down was near the former site of the Whampoa Military Academy in present-day Huangpu District, Guangdong Province, where lieutenant Lieutenant Gosuke Murayama, of the 4th Squadron of the Independent 66th Brigade of the Japanese Army's Independent Mixed 22nd Brigade, was stationed. Perhaps in order to provide air defense support for the mid-park aircraft when it landed, the unit received a request in advance to prepare for air defense. As it turned out, this was purely a chaotic order that helped more and more.
In the Japanese army's "History of the Independent Sixty-sixth Brigade", the personal account written by Shini Kanichi, a veteran of the command class of the Fourth Squadron, vividly describes the detailed process of the downing of the Zhongyuan landline, and unexpectedly, he also provides a strange speculation about who shot down the lieutenant general.
Arai's article reads as follows:
"'Air Raid!' With the sound of a heart-rending siren, I rushed up to the roof with a rolling belt. It was past nine o'clock in the morning, and I had just finished changing guards with the sentry below the steps.
When I got to the roof, I saw that several members of the machine gun squad were ready to shoot around the gun. To this day, I don't quite understand how I could have aggressively rushed to the roof.
Probably because I had been attacked by air raids before, but every time I hid in an air raid shelter, although I knew that there was an air battle, I only heard the roar of machine guns and never really saw the battle in the air - maybe this is the reason why I rushed up at that time.
The sirens sounded from far and near, but there was no sound of explosions or the shadow of an airplane. Looking back, several of the soldiers who had subsequently rushed up looked around as dazed as I did. Suddenly, however, things changed suddenly.
Almost the same height as the five-storey barracks, a formation of aircraft from the direction of Whampoa in the East flew with a mournful whistle. It was right in front of us in an instant. It looked as if several two-fuselage P-38s were escorting a large plane. Suddenly, a flash of light emanated from the wings of the P-38, and machine gun bullets flew overhead. The heavy machine gun on the roof opened fire, and the shooter was Captain Aono, and the tracer shell split directly into the middle of the air formation.
Seeing an enemy plane at such a close distance, this was the first time that my whole body was filled with the tension of imminent incontinence as if I had been shocked by an electric shock. As if to avoid hitting the barracks, the formation suddenly made a left turn. They have a total of one large aircraft and six P-38 fighter jets. Our heavy machine guns were firing in pursuit from the rear. The mainframe emitted white smoke, stalled, and fell head-on. It looked as if a green fruit tree garden had sucked it down.
In an instant, black smoke rose into the sky. Shouts immediately erupted from the rooftops, and someone shouted long live, apparently cheering for shooting down an enemy plane. Captain Aono's face was also twisted with excitement. The crowd quickly reported to Captain Murayama. The captain was also full of joy and immediately informed the headquarters of the troops by telephone.
In the face of the emergency, the squadron leader immediately summoned all the mobile personnel, personally led, and took a motorboat to the direction of the fruit tree orchard on the opposite bank full of bananas. By the moment the steamboat entered the shallow water, the soldiers who suspected that the boat was too slow had jumped into the water and rushed toward the embankment on the opposite bank. Because of poor vision, [we] can only identify the direction based on the shadow of the banana tree.
Judging from the scene just seen, the target is near the village of Oishi. Ahead was a pond two meters wide and waist-deep, but the soldiers rushed in like a herd of pigs and flew through it. What was the condition of the pilot on a fallen enemy plane? Alive? Will you raise your hand and surrender? In a hushed (we) got on the bayonet and unconsciously rushed out a kilometer or so. At this time, there was the sound of burning objects, and a strange stench. Understanding had reached the vicinity of the scene, and everyone held the gun tighter.
The reckless banana grove suddenly flashed a gap, and the enemy... No shadow of the enemy was found nearby. Pointing his bayonet forward, someone noticed that there were some scattered little white things on the ground in front of them, and hurried to look closely—wasn't this a gifted cigarette? It was unbelievable! Looking around, there are indeed "gifted cigarettes" scattered around, and there are letterheads floating around in front of you. Ominous air began to fill the surroundings. The scattered objects around here are obviously all the items used by the Japanese army.
At this time, with a strong contrast with the surroundings, the tragic scene of the crash site appeared in front of us in an instant. A banana grove about 150 meters long has been cut to pieces, the trunk is broken, the green sap is still oozing, and the banana leaves on the ground make people feel that there is no place to get off. Everything shows the horror of the moment the plane crashed.
The body has been severely broken and scattered everywhere, making it impossible to restore its old view, only the tail of the aircraft fell across the ground, showing a bright red rising sun sign.
The reality is harsh, and up to this point, it has always been believed that it was the enemy aircraft that shot down, and now it seems that it is clearly a friendly aircraft. Facing the impact of reality makes people have mixed feelings, not sadness or anger, but an unspeakable bitterness. Who was so elated just now? Which bastard is shouting long live? Even I couldn't tell who I wanted to hate.
Let's take care of the body first. Barely calming down, he continued to move forward with the scattered banana leaves. On the right side of the middle section of the crash site, you can see that the burned engine is still emitting black smoke, and the heat is accompanied by a strange odor, and the people in the middle are vomiting. Underneath the flaming engine, a human leg in half-length leather boots was found, indicating that containing the remains would not be an easy task.
Twenty meters ahead, a body dressed in an officer's uniform lay down. As we approached, the tragic situation was momentarily dizzying—the man's head was only half left, and his brain plasma burst into a rotten pumpkin. When I turned it over and examined it, I found something even more alarming - there were two Gold Stars, it was a lieutenant general! It's unbelievable, but... This is a fact!
Hurry to report to Captain Murayama, and I still remember that moment the captain seemed to be full of bile. Later, it was determined that this commander was originally His Excellency Lieutenant General Zhongyuan, commander of the Aviation Corps of the Chinese Dispatch Army. The remains of the following nine people of His Excellency Naka circle were not contained until that night. The hastily arrived aviation officer announced that the crew of the round-seat plane (referring to the lieutenant general) had been killed by an enemy machine gun shot in the air... The lieutenant general's side collar badge, saber, pistol, etc. were not found, and it is estimated that they were picked up by local villagers who rushed to the scene during the fall. The remains were cremated on the north side of the barracks.
During the long process of containing the remains, I was hungry and thirsty, during which time I plucked the star fruit with my hand full of stains and ate it without hesitation. That sweet taste will never be forgotten. Tired and sleepy, the officers and men below the squadron commander took heavy steps and returned to the camp with a depressed will.
What a nightmare day. ”
The history of the Japanese army has left a strange memorial for this thrilling and fierce battle, but it has to make people think about it - will the commander of the Japanese lieutenant general, a generation of famous generals Nakatsuno Mori takashi, actually die at the hands of the Japanese anti-aircraft machine gunner Aono Mushi?
Although it is not explicitly stated, the hint of Arai is very obvious. According to the records of the Japanese aviation, Nakagami Mori takashi flew this flight, and the number of Production Ofi KI-57 transport aircraft on board was very small, and the general Japanese army was not familiar with it, so it was not surprising that it was mistakenly regarded as an American aircraft.
Although the P-38 chasing after it is still likely to be the killer who shot down the circle, the Japanese standard Type 92 heavy machine gun used steel core bullets in air defense, and also had the ability to kill an unarmored transport aircraft.
A single bullet kills a lieutenant general... If this were true, there must have been green smoke on the ancestral grave of the Aono Wu Commander.