How captured Japanese prisoners trained Chinese pilots in 1945
Japanese prisoners who surrendered in 1945 trained Chinese pilots
Despite deep-seated historical grievances and tense relations between Beijing and Tokyo, Japan's air force has long been the role model for the PLA Air Force.
Beijing says November 11, 1949 is the founding date for the air force but its first aeronautical institute was set up in Shenyang, Liaoning, on March 1, 1945.
Most of the drillmasters and technicians were Japanese prisoners in the second world war, according to reports from the .
Yaichiro Hayashi, a former pilot in Japan's then Second Aviation Corps, promised the Communist Party he would help build its first aviation unit in exchange for the lives of more than 300 of his air force comrades and more than 60,000 Japanese prisoners of war.
The men had initially surrendered to the Soviet forces in Siberia but were then handed over to the Communist Party, according to Zhongshan University military expert David Tsui.
Hayashi and 15 other Japanese instructors spent three years turning more than 100 poorly educated Chinese men from peasant backgrounds into pilots who could fly MiG-15 fighters. Some of those trainees would later be hailed as heroes in the Korean war after bringing down advanced US fighters, according to the .
The air force officially recognised Hayashi and other Japanese instructors for their contributions to its modernisation and development, the newspaper said.
China's air force pilots were still playing catch-up with their Japanese counterparts, military experts said.
"Japan's Air Self-Defence Force has been able to do all kinds of joint operations with the navy and other troops since the 1980s because they have got used to doing regular joint drills with the US Army, while today's PLA Air Force is just beginning to be able to do that," Macau-based military observer Antony Wong Dong said.
Rick Fisher, from the International Assessment and Strategy Centre, said the air force could probably win small aerial conflicts "with guile and surprise".
"But unless China's leadership is ready to seek the all-out destruction of Japan's air force, any strategy that seeks to accumulate small victories in the hope of scaring Japan's leadership into a fateful decision, like abandoning its US alliance, is doomed to fail," Fisher said.
Arthur Ding Shu-fan, from the Taipei-based Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, said that if the air force wanted to fight a so-called fourth-generation level of aerial warfare, it should adopt characteristics traditionally regarded as Japanese such as diligence and reliability.
