China's Wrong Turn

As one of the only two Northrop Black Widows still in existence, a P-61B is the centerpiece aircraft of the Beijing Air and Space Museum.  1944, it had been transfer from 10^th Air Force, India, to China under the Chinese American Composite Wing for B-29 escort.  Facing the advancing Communists, 1949, all the P-61 starboard wings were made non-flyable by chopping out the outer panels, and these advanced night fighters became inactivated crap when they fell in the wrong hands.  Some Chinese Air Force personnel in urgent retreat to Taiwan still remembered that chaos.   Right after touch down, secret police singled out Commie suspects, and shot them on the spot.

CAF was enjoying a equipment windfall around 1946.  Though a mammoth army backed up by a mighty air force equipped with hundreds of U.S. planes, its slow-burn strike and drip-feed supply was not causing havoc for People’s War by air campaigns.  The difficult was the complexity of the situation on the ground, the battlefield features a shifting array of friends and foes.  Using aerial surveillance to assess targets had proven notoriously inadequate; without trustful air-ground coordination, once a whole infantry battalion was wiped out under B-24 air raid.  In 1946-49, 43 aircraft defected to the Reds, including L-5, AT-6, PT-17, P-51, C-46, C-47, and B-24.  In late 1948, the U.S. 7^th Fleet moved its homeport from Qingdao to the Philippines, and the Reds were using the truce to push their own agenda.

The reality by 1948 was about 30% of People’s Liberation Army was ex-centre influx, and this ratio approached 80% in 1949.  In addition to the various units defected to the PLA, some 400 million centre POWs became its cannon fodder.  PLA depended on fat trophies from the Nationalists to keep their arsenal a sudden spike in the US weaponry.  When the unwinding of its servicemen occurred, it sent shock waves throughout China.  Outraged by the Red’s insurgency, more and more of centre sovereignty was slipping into the Red’s hands.  A less-motivated army not backed up by leadership and aerial support, an unstoppable spiral into collapse.  China was proclaimed a communist state on Oct 1, 1949, 17 ex-CAF aircraft formation overflew Tiananmen Square to salute Mao and his ilk.