Episode 88 First encounter in the air

Shenyang's army aviation unit is extremely efficient, from officers to soldiers, from pilots to ground technicians, pilots gathered in the hangar with lunch boxes, and listened to the commander's briefing while eating breakfast. The ground crews are like a swarm of busy ants, running around the airfield with carts pushing ammunition, inspecting, loading, and refueling the fighters. Battery cars drove on the runway, dragging bombs, driving to the dive bombers, loading them with all their hands. Commands were transmitted from the airport's loudspeakers, and from time to time a few fighter jets roared up to the runway and into the skies to take part in a battle in the distance.

And the squadron of transport planes that airdropped supplies to Anton's army was also making intense preparations. Ground crews were shirtless, loading one large cylinder after another onto the DC-3 transport plane. The cylinder carries an umbrella bag, which contains various supplies.

At seven o'clock in the morning on July 8, the second round of airdrops was prepared. A signal flare flew into the sky from the conning tower, and fifteen transport planes roared one after another to climb onto the runway and taxi into the air.

Transport planes circled in the air, formed formations, and then the fighters on the airfield - the "Kingfishers" of the two squadrons also climbed one after the other. After a squadron of transport planes and two squadrons of fighters, they converged and flew southeast.

At the same time, a squadron of "Goshawk" fighters at the airfield on the Changshan Islands in southern Liaoning had also taken off and flew in a northeasterly direction. The two groups will rendezvous at sea west of Andong and fly together to Andong to carry out the airdrop.

……

Both groups of the Ming army encountered an air battle on the road. The Kingfisher group, which was protecting the transport planes, encountered a Japanese bomber group over the mountains between Benxi and Fengcheng. The Japanese fighters also happened to be two squadrons. The large planes protected by both sides immediately scattered and dodged, and the escort fighters of both sides immediately became entangled.

The fighter pilots of the Ming army did not dare to slack off in the slightest. Because before, they were repeatedly warned that although the Japanese pilots had no actual combat experience, they trained very hard in peacetime, and the flight time was relatively long. Sure enough, as soon as the battle was now, the Ming fighter pilots immediately felt the strength of their opponents.

The fighter pilots of the Ming Army adopted a system of combining old and new, and the squadron leaders who led the team were all experienced ace pilots. Then, although the leaders of the four aircraft detachments below are not called "trump cards", they are also veterans of air combat. Each four-plane formation is made up of two twin-plane formations, each with a pair of long wingmen. One of the long-plane pilots was both the captain of the four-plane formation and the captain of this two-plane formation.

And the captain of the other two-plane formation does not need to be an ace or a veteran, but at least they are pilots with actual combat experience. The two wingmen are generally novices with no actual combat experience, "interns" who have just come out of aviation school. Their mission is to keep up with the long planes and cover them when they attack enemy planes. In general, the collocation of Ming army pilots is "aces with veterans, veterans with novices, and novices with rookies".

In the air battle, pilots at different levels of the Ming army immediately had different feelings. The ace and the veteran felt that the Japanese pilots were more dishful and easier to fight than they imagined. Although it is not a "duck fight", it is at least much easier to deal with than the Soviet pilots. However, the novices and rookies of the Ming army felt tremendous pressure, feeling that the Japanese pilots were simply masters, and they were in danger of being beaten down every minute.

In the midst of radio orders, call signs, and shouting and scolding, the Ming pilots gradually understood that the level of the Japanese pilots was relatively average, and there were few who were too top-notch, and few who were too vegetable. Anyway, there is no obvious horizontal ladder like the Ming army. This is also in line with the actual situation of the Japanese army. None of the Japanese pilots had participated in the war before and none had actual combat experience. All the experience comes from training and exercises. Although the training of Japanese pilots was very intense and hard, the training was not comparable to actual combat after all, and the level of each person was the same as that of coming down the assembly line, and there was not much difference.

And the pilots of the Ming army experienced the baptism of war. A group of rookies fought several battles, some were killed, and some survived. The first few battles that didn't work were eliminated, and after a few air battles, Xing also completed the transformation from rookie to novice and veteran. And the best of them has become a trump card. The layers are very open.

And this air battle was also, the veterans of the Ming army pilots showed their skills and constantly shot down Japanese planes, while novices and rookies were constantly shot down by Japanese planes.

After a short air battle, the fighter groups of both sides distanced themselves and stopped entangled with each other, and each of them joined their escort groups and went to the opposite goal. 12 of the 36 Japanese fighters were shot down, and 32 of the Ming 10 fighters were shot down.

The Goshawk fighter squadron that flew from southern Liaoning achieved remarkable results. The new fighters of this squadron were also piloted by veteran pilots of the Ming army, and they existed as elite troops. At sea, they met a swarm of Japanese aircraft flying from Korea. The Japanese group had a squadron of horizontal bombers and a squadron of fighters, and the target was Lushun, the Ming Army's Dongjiang Fleet. The purpose of the Japanese army was not a sneak attack, but a kind of cooperation with the main battlefield, an attack on the base on the south side of the Ming army. Their purpose was to constantly bomb the ports and ships of the Ming Army's Dongjiang Fleet, so that the Ming Army Fleet could not stay in the harbor.

But apparently, the Japanese army underestimated the air power of the Ming army. In particular, little is known about the new fighters newly installed in the Ming army. In an air battle on the Yellow Sea, 16 Ming Goshawk fighters shot down 13 Japanese bombers and 10 fighters, and only 3 fighters were lost.

The remnants of the Japanese army's 5 bombers and 3 fighters still stubbornly flew to the Ming army's Dongjiang Fleet base. And the Ming army's goshawk squadron did not pursue, but put the task of rendezvous and escort in the first place and continued to advance to the northeast. They just radioed the base and told the base to take air defense measures in advance.

The two groups met 30 kilometers west of Anton. Then together to the east.

They first flew to the port area of Dadonggou and dropped a batch of ammunition and supplies in the explosion of anti-aircraft guns. Then it continued to fly northeast, and soon flew over Andong City.

This time it was broad daylight, and the Ming army below had already marked the airdrop range with colored smoke bombs. And there are no Japanese fighters around to intercept them. The total number of aircraft of the Japanese army was far inferior to that of the Ming army, and all kinds of coordination, early warning, deployment, etc., were not as experienced as the Ming army. Now the combat planes of the Japanese front line have penetrated deep into the north and west, and the rest are resting at the airfields in North Korea. The area around the Yalu River happens to be a vacuum area at the moment.

Some of the Ming fighters were on alert at high altitudes, and some were diving downward, strafing and suppressing anti-aircraft guns. The transport plane, on the other hand, flew over the Ming army-controlled area with ease, throwing cylinders down as fast as they could. The sky was immediately filled with one parachute after another.

After all 15 transport planes were airdropped, the entire fleet began to climb and turned around and headed southwest. The Japanese anti-aircraft guns on the ground were still firing desperately. The dense black clouds behind the buttocks of the Ming army still exploded unabated, and it was not until they flew several kilometers that the Japanese army was unwilling to cease fire.

On the Ming army's position in Andong City, there was a sea of cheers. Hundreds of large cylinders fell one after another with parachutes, and basically all of them fell in the area controlled by the Ming army. The soldiers of the Ming army happily surrounded it, opened the cylinder, and took out shells, bullet boxes, bullet chains, bullet clips, grenades, compressed biscuits, canned food, chocolate, various medicines, bandages, surgical instruments...... Every time I took it out, there was a cheer all around.

In less than ten minutes, on the Ming position, the machine guns began to fire intensively again.