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Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Although the article duly notes that the P-61 did not 'have any significant impact' in the CBI theatre, because the Japanese did not operate at night by that time, I believe it's a matter of record that the 426th and 427th Night Fighter Squadrons, equipped with the P-61 and assigned to US Fourteenth Air Force at Burmese and Chinese bases, shot down quite a number of friendly aircraft, including US C-47s and, most controversially, two RAF Liberators (out of eleven) operating on special-duties flights, i.e. resistance support, from Bengal to Indo-China on the night of, I think, 22-23 January 1945. It is believed that the 426th were responsible, since the Americans informed the British that a pilot of the 426th had filed claims for one destroyed and one damaged. Three Liberators failed to return that night. One possibly hit high terrain in bad weather, but the other two were probably shot down by the rogue P-61. The crews, and their resistance passengers who were due to make parachute drops, were all lost. The Japanese had no aircraft in the area, obviously, and those P-61 squadrons are only known to have shot down friendly aircraft. Although the weather was difficult in places that night, any American pilot incapable of identifying the silhouette of a Liberator, which resembled no enemy aircraft, shouldn't really have been flying. I'm not going to truffle up the sources right now, but they are there, and a couple of them, including Richard J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret Service, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, ISBN 978-0521641869, pp.210-211, are mentioned here. https://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-576312.htmlKhamba Tendal (talk) 19:48, 13 March 2024 (UTC)Reply
