Kweilin incident

DC-2 number 32 Kweilin was owned by the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC), one of the first commercial airlines in China. It was operated under contract by Pan American pilots and management who were mostly American in 1938. The plane was on a routine civilian passenger flight from the British colony of Hong Kong to Wuzhou, the first stop en route to Chongqing and Chengdu in Sichuan province. From Hong Kong, Chengdu was over to the northwest. The flight had fourteen passengers, plus a steward, radio operator Joe Loh, copilot Lieu Chung-chuan, and American pilot Hugh Leslie Woods. The Kweilin left Hong Kong at 8:04am. They began to strafe it with machine gun fire. Woods saw an unused boat on shore and swam to retrieve it. During the swim he was repeatedly strafed with machine gun fire but was not hit. On reaching shore, he saw the plane had drifted far down river and was so riddled with bullets it was sinking with only the tail and wing still visible. After about an hour of continuous attacks the Japanese planes left. ==Cause and effects==

), Chairman of the Bank of Communications, pictured in '''', was killed in the incident It was speculated that the reason for the attack was to assassinate Chinese President Sun Yat-sen's only son, Sun Fo, who was expected to be on the Kweilin. In fact Sun Fo had taken an earlier flight that day with a different airline, Eurasia. Sun Fo later claimed a secretary had made a mistake and had publicly announced the wrong flight. It was speculated that Sun Fo intentionally announced his departure on the wrong plane, in effect sacrificing the Kweilin so that his real flight could travel unmolested. The Japanese Foreign Office claimed not to have fired on the aircraft but to have chased it as it was behaving suspiciously. , General Manager of The National Commercial Bank, pictured in ''Who's Who in China'', was killed in the incident Three prominent Chinese bankers were among the passengers killed in the incident. They were Hu Yun (Hu Bijiang), Chairman of the Bank of Communications; Xu Xinliu, General Manager of The National Commercial Bank; and Wang Yumei, an executive of the Central Bank of the Republic of China. Their deaths were a significant loss to the Chinese banking industry. The incident was widely reported, due, in part, to its novelty as the first time a civilian airliner had ever been brought down by hostile aircraft. After the incident, CNAC and other carriers began making night flights over China, using a new technology developed in Germany, "Lorenz", that allowed pilots to follow an auditory radio homing-beacon to the destination. There was diplomatic outrage over the incident. In the United States, it helped solidify the popular view the Japan was morally wrong in the war against China, ==Kweilin restored as the Chungking==

The Kweilin was retrieved from the river bottom, re-built, and put back into service as DC-2 number 39, the Chungking. Its former name was not advertised in order to assuage superstitious passengers who might not want to fly in an unlucky plane. On 29 October 1940, American pilot Walter "Foxie" Kent landed the Chungking at the rural Changyi Airfield in Yunnan with nine Unlike the unprecedented Kweilin incident two years earlier, attacks on commercial aircraft had become more common during the course of World War II. It received some local coverage for about a week but was not an international incident. For CNAC it was their second loss to a Japanese attack. Chang-Kan Chien, an American-educated Chinese architect and bridge engineer who oversaw the construction of a strategic bridge on the Burma Road, was among the passengers killed on the Chungking. After his death, the Chinese government named the bridge Changgan Bridge in his honor. ==Notes==