Harbours in flames (Taiwan, April 1 1923)
The Californian sailors were caught utterly by surprise by the attack of the Chinese torpedo-bombers. It shouldn’t have been so; many war games had suggested that as long as an aircraft could carry and launch one of the torpedoes lesser cruisers and small ships used to attack in squadrons, they represented a clear danger to any battle-fleet.
But no one had ever trained for this situation. From the Rear-Admirals commanding the two flotillas to the ordinary sailors, everyone had thought that if the Chinese fleet came, they would have a couple of hours of advance warning, and the threat would come from the Battleships waiting at Guangzhou, Shanghai, or wherever the warships were built those days.
They were wrong.
Keelung was the first to be targeted, though it was only by ten minutes. Forty Xia torpedo-bombers fell upon the Californian warships, while the twenty Tang bombers released their lethal cargo upon the imposing defences of the harbour, which were in their great majority unable to retaliate. At the same time, ten Sui strike fighters found and decimated the aviation of the Californian Air Force, which had not managed to put a single aircraft in the sky before the assault was confirmed in the most terrible manner possible.
The Cruiser Lion de Oro was struck by five torpedoes, and it was five too much. The ship rapidly sunk, and with it went down dozens of officers and hundreds more Californian sailors. Three other Light Cruisers and one Submarine were also targeted, with all but one Light Cruiser soon burning or suffering massive damage.
When the Chinese aerial assault wave ended, they left behind them a spectacle of utter devastation, to which a Destroyer’s destruction provided a bloody finale: the captain of the ship had decided to leave the harbour as fast as possible, recognising it as a truly inhospitable location, only to be ambushed by a Chinese Submarine mere minutes after sailing away.
The Chinese pilots had lost three of their own. The number of dead for the Californians, be they sailors or civilians, was certainly above one thousand, and climbing up hellishly fast.
But if Keelung was a Chinese triumph, things didn’t go as spectacularly well at Kaohsiung.
The General in charge there had a far more respectful view of the Chinese threat, and had maintained a rotation of air patrols which began at dawn. Ironically, the cost in terms of fuels and spare parts had not made him popular at all in the couple of months this doctrine was employed, and if the Chinese hadn’t attacked, it was likely the man would have been sent to a far less prestigious command for ignoring the wishes of his mercantile ‘masters’.
There were not enough P-02 strike fighters to do stop their Sui counterparts, never mind the Xia torpedo bombers or the bigger Tang aircraft. But they were able to give time to the rest of their fellow pilots on the ground. Time the men of the Californian Air Force didn’t waste.
By the time the first wave of Chinese aircraft left Kaohsiung, twelve aircraft in total had been lost, and four more would fall before they could return to their carriers. The losses of the Californian pilots were twice that in men, and many more strike fighters and bombers were burned hulks, but the aviation fields were intact, and most of the harbour defences were still more or less functioning. The flotilla of the Californian Navy, on the other hand, had received too many torpedoes to not be considered crippled. The sailors of the Isabella were desperately trying to keep it afloat, and six other ships were sunk or so damaged they would need an intact shipyard to be repaired.
But Air General Mayo had accomplished the most important thing he had to: Kaohsiung was still a functional harbour-fortress, and the Chinese Air Force didn’t return that day.
Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said about Keelung.
The Chinese Admirals knew that they had won a great victory there, and didn’t hesitate in launching the second wave so they could transform it into a one-sided massacre.
The very numerous fires weren’t extinguished when the Sui strike fighters led the hundreds of Chinese planes back to the harbour of Taiwan, and their reappearance provoked a monumental panic on the battlefield.
Suddenly, a lot of sailors, remembering how lucky they had been to survive the first wave, fled as fast as their current location allowed.
Some brave sailors resisted, manning the last turrets which hadn’t been pulverised by the aerial bombardment, loading the guns of the ships not sunk, and the last planes which had avoided destruction soared to deny air supremacy to their foe.
The latter took less than twenty minutes to be swept from the sky. For the rest, it was like the end of times was coming, as the Chinese pilots tried to methodically ruin anything that could be a threat for the amphibious invasion coming behind them.
Indeed, knowing how difficult an assault coming across the Straits was, and how dangerous the mined and trapped beaches could be, the Chinese High Command had decided it would be far simpler to take the harbour of Keelung for their own use.
And on the first bloody day of the Second Great War in Asia, this phase of the operation went perfectly according to the plan, with only sixteen aircraft of all types destroyed or too damaged to fly again.
But as the transports approached Keelung, the failure at Kaohsiung meant there were many more fighters and bombers of the Californian Air Force left to defend the island.
The Californian Navy had perished and inflicted no damage whatsoever, but the Army and the Air Force were still potent forces.
And they were going to have the occasion to prove it within twenty-four hours...
