Re: General Gabriel

[<jackchwang@comcast.net>]

Joe:

The only "published" sources were from China.  It all started around 1985
when PLAAF and USAF began to have friendly contacts after more than 30
years of hostility.

According to various articles on Chinese publications, General Wang Hai,
a fighter group leader in Korean War, shot down Charles A. Gabriel.
There was no details about when or how he was shot down, but full of the
praises for the heroic conducts of Wang Hai and his fighter group during
the Korean War.  All these articles seemed to base on some stories (
probably written by Chinese reporters) circulated in China after Gen.
Wang Hai visited the U. S. with a military delegation in mid 80s.

Wang Hai's own accounts was quite modest.  In an interview given in
2000, he said --

  It was July, 1984.  I visited the U. S. with General Zhang Ai-Ping,
  then the Minister of Defense Department.  Before the meeting, General
  Zhang made the introduction of the members of our delegation.  When
  it was my turn, General Gabriel, then Chief of Staff, USAF, approached
  me to shake my hand and said, "Are you that Wang Hai in Korea?  I was
  shot down by you then."

  I laughed and said, "If you guys come to attack us again, we will shoot
  you guys down again."

  There were lots of laughters and applause in the meeting room....

  However, I have to state that the interpreter presented then might
  have made a mistake.  He translated Gabriel's "shot down by you (guys)"
  directly into "shot down by you (Wang)".  Actually, the air combats
  in Korean War were always in groups.  Gabriel couldn't possibly know
  that I shot him down.  Neither did I know.  But, later he told me that
  he was with the 51st Wing.  At that time, the Wing's F-86s had two
  yellow stripes.  We met lots of this Wing's planes in the air.  I
  think, no matter what, one thing is certain: he was shot down by our
  air force.

This is probably the only accountable source for the incident.  Curiously,
Chinese military did not follow up with this piece of information and find
out exactly who had shot down Gabriel.  That would have lots of propaganda
value if they could arrange the meeting between the alleged Chinese pilot
and General Gabriel when he visited Beijing in 1985.

Also, how could General Wang assert that a PLAAF pilot shot down Gabriel
without the details from Gabriel?  It certainly was not mentioned during
the meeting, nor during the later visits.

Furthermore, since these high ranked generals did not speak each other's
languages, those conversations had to be done through interpreters.  It
was not totally unlikely that the interpreters might have made some
mistakes and exaggerated General Gabriel's words.

Since there is no details from Chinese records, we can only turn
to the U. S. records.  And it is, alas, the same blank.  So it is
still an unconfirmed story.

Last, a little off the topic but somewhat curious: General Wang
mentioned "two yellow stripes" on 51st Wing's F-86s.  In the other
publications, he maintained that his group met lots of 51st Wing's
F-86s with "one yellow stripe on the fuselage" and had several kills.
Considering that almost all F-86s had the same yellow stripes on the
fuselage and wings since the spring of 1952, and Wang's 3rd Division
had been rotated to the front several times till March 1953, I
cannot help but speculating that several of his "51st Wing's F-86s"
were actually 4th Wing's.

Jack