Somewhere between Bangkok and Hong Kong, at nine thousand feet off the coast of Hainan, the co-pilot of a Cathay Pacific airliner called for blankets.

Two fighters were shooting at them. Cedric Carlton had the surviving passengers hang the blankets behind their seats. It was not much of a defence against cannon fire, and it was the only one available.

Ten of the eighteen people aboard died. What happened over the following three days involved an American flying boat landing in an eight-foot swell, two Chinese fighters shot down by US Navy aircraft, and a formal apology from Beijing inside seventy-two hours.

“Japanese Type Zeros”

The British diplomatic note of 25 July describes the attackers as two single-engine, radial-engined, low-wing fighters, cream or light grey, with a red circle on the fuselage, red spinners and a white stripe across the wings near the tips. The co-pilot said they looked like Japanese Zeros.

That is the only contemporaneous description, and it does not settle the type. It is usually reported as the Lavochkin La-11 of the PLAAF’s 85th Fighter Regiment, but that attribution is unsourced even on Wikipedia. The most detailed published account says La-7 throughout, and so does the US Navy’s own official history of the engagement three days later. All three types share the same ASh-82 radial and much the same planform, which is precisely why the eyewitness description cannot decide between them.

Incendiary fire set the two outboard engines alight and ignited the number four tanks. The rudder controls were shot away at five thousand feet, the right aileron came off at two thousand, and the aircraft went into an uncontrolled right turn. Blown countered it by shutting down engines one and two and going to full power on three.

The radio operator, Stephen Wong, got at least one Mayday out before the antenna was shot away: number one engine on fire, losing altitude, requesting all possible assistance.

They hit the water at about 160 miles an hour. The starboard wing struck first and tore off. The tail broke away. Wong was killed when his head was driven onto the drift meter; the engineer went through a bulkhead.

The Albatross

Captain Jack Woodyard of the 31st Air Rescue Squadron was airborne from Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines twenty minutes after the SOS came in. He was thirty-four, had seven thousand hours and had made two thousand three hundred water landings.

He put his SA-16 Albatross down on the leeward side of Dazhou Island in a two-hundred-foot ground swell crossed by a fifty-foot system, with open-sea swells of eight to ten feet, then taxied two and a half miles to the raft.

Blown’s first words on being hauled aboard were not about himself.

That sentence is how the non-communist world learned this had been an attack rather than an engine failure.

The Albatross spent about an hour on the water and used JATO bottles to get off again, more than a thousand pounds over maximum weight. It landed at Kai Tak at 16:15. Nine people were pulled from the raft; one of them, a woman, died aboard the aircraft. Woodyard got the Distinguished Flying Cross.

British Movietone’s silent newsreel of the aftermath in Hong Kong.

Three Days Later

On 26 July, AD-4 Skyraiders and an F4U Corsair of Fighter Squadron 54 were flying a search for further survivors and debris when two Chinese fighters attacked them. The Americans shot down both, thirteen miles south-east of Hainan. Admiral Felix Stump had ordered his pilots to be quick on the trigger.

Woodyard, who had been spooked on the water three days earlier by unidentified fighters, later realised what they had been.

China’s reply, delivered the day before that engagement, was remarkable for its speed and its candour.

Beijing expressed regret, sympathy and condolences and said it was willing to consider paying relief and compensation. Anthony Eden told the Commons the same day that the government welcomed the offer.

Britain submitted a claim for £367,000 on 15 September. China accepted it in full as covering all losses. It was announced in a written parliamentary answer on 3 November 1954.

The People

The passenger list is where this stops being a diplomatic incident.

Leonard Parish died, and so did his sons Larry, aged four, and Phillip, aged two. His wife Frances survived, and so did their six-year-old daughter Valerie. Also killed: Paul Yong Nam-ying, an eighteen-year-old student at the University of Hong Kong; a woman in her late twenties whose name appears in different sources as Rita Cheung and Rita Ong, who survived the ditching and the raft and died aboard the rescue aircraft; a Cathay Pacific engineer travelling as a passenger; and three of the crew — Wong, and the stewardesses Rose Chen and Iris Stobart.

Woodyard’s co-pilot said afterwards that it was worth his whole career to pull the little girl out of the raft. There is a photograph of Woodyard carrying her off the Albatross at Kai Tak.

Blown flew for Cathay Pacific for several more years. He died in a New South Wales nursing home in September 2009, aged 96. His view of why the fighters had kept firing after any mistake must have become obvious was given to reporters in Singapore a month after the attack.

Aftermath footage and stills from the incident.

Sources: Hansard, House of Commons, 26 July and 3 November 1954; Jack T. Woodyard, “We Rescued the Victims of Red China’s Murder Planes”, The Saturday Evening Post, 23 October 1954; Dictionary of American Naval Aviation Squadrons; Thomas Van Hare, HistoricWings; South China Morning Post contemporaneous reporting.