The attack began with a heavy missile bombardment with conventionally armed Dong Feng-9 and -11 missiles from the mainland. Their accuracy was not great, but it didn’t need to be — because more than three hundred missiles launched from sixteen different locations, with warheads ranging from 500 pounds to more than 1,700 pounds of high explosive, peppered the area around Kai-Shan for over an hour. Every square inch of a twenty-five-square-mile area around Kai-Shan was blasted away. Along with the effect of the nearby nuclear explosions at Hualien, the area resembled the surface of the moon in very short order.
The second phase of the attack was by a completely new weapon system: China’s Type-031 attack submarine. In the day preceding the attack, the Type-031 sub, named the Yudao, had left its port at Shanghai and had cruised without incident right up to the mouth of the Mei River, less than five miles from the cave entrance to the Kai-Shan airfield complex, and waited. At the preplanned time, the Yudao surfaced, took a final targeting fix using its Golf-band targeting radar — aiming at a tiny radar reflector placed near the cave entrance by the Chinese commandos — and began firing Yinji-6 “Hawk Attack” guided missiles at the cave. The first four Yinji-6 missiles blasted open the movable armored doors to the cave entrance, finally exposing the interior of the complex to attack. Two of the remaining four Yinji-6 missiles flew inside the cave itself, creating spectacular gushes of fire and exploding rock from within.
The third phase of the attack was the most impressive, and was certainly the largest Asian aerial attack force since Japan’s naval air forces in World War II. Led by thirty H-6 bombers, watched by an Ilyushin-76 radar plane, and guarded by ten Sukhoi-27 and thirty Xian J-8 air- superiority interceptors, an attack force of two hundred Nanchang Q-5 fighter-bombers, each carrying two 1,000-pound bombs plus a long- range fuel tank, swept over the island of Formosa to begin the attack on Kai-Shan.
The H-6 bombers went first. From ten miles out, they launched huge Hai-Ying-4 missiles at the complex. These missiles merely flew straight to a set of coordinates, and were meant to knock down or destroy any rock outcroppings that might still be obstructing the cave entrance. Although the HY-4 missiles were not designed for land attack and some did not perform well in this hastily planned role, the destruction they caused left the attack path wide open for the waves of Q-5 bombers to follow.
As if they were doing a standard traffic pattern entry to land on Kai- Shan’s underground runway, the Q-5 fighter-bombers flew eastbound over the Chung Yang Mountains at 1,000 feet above ground until they were about ten miles offshore, then turned southbound for three miles, then north westbound, descending to 500 feet and lining up on the cave entrance. The planned procedure was a “toss” delivery, where the pilots would pull up sharply about two miles in front of the cave, then pickle off the bombs, which would fly on a ballistic path right into the cave. There could be no delay on the pull-up — the Chung Yang Mountains rose from 500 feet to nearly 10,000 feet within five miles, so there was only a six-second margin of error. The best bombardiers from all over China were picked for this important mission.
The first flight of ten Q-5 bombers started their runs, and the plan was working better than anticipated. The lead bombers announced that pilots could fly a hundred feet higher to get a flatter toss into the cave, because parts of the ceiling of the cave had collapsed and they couldn’t arc the bombs in quite as high anymore. As the first flight of Q-5 bombers cleared the target area, the second flight started their turn inbound on the attack course…
… just in time to hear the warning screams over the command frequency: “Warning, warning, all aircraft…” and then the loud, incessant hiss of static. Pilots all over the sky over Taiwan were switching to alternate frequencies, but all they found there, after a few seconds of trying to speak, was more static. The 11–76 Candid radar plane orbiting over Formosa might as well have been back on the ground, because no one could hear or talk with its all-important radar controllers.
It was up to the Sukhoi-27s and radar-equipped Shenyang J-8 fighters now — but it was soon apparent that they were mostly out of the fight as well — the jamming was intruding on their attack radars. The J-8 s older radars were easily jammed; the Su-27’s modern pulse-Doppler radars and advanced counter jamming functions worked better. “Enemy planes, heading westbound! ” the Su-27 pilots shouted on the attack frequency — but that did no good, because all of the VHF and UHF frequencies were jammed. No warnings and no formation orders could be sent or received. Two electronic-warfare EA-6B Prowlers from the USS George Washington, and two more EA-6Bs from the USS Carl Vinson had set up an effective electromagnetic net around the island of Formosa, denying the Chinese air force the use of any radio or radar frequencies except those in use by the U.S. Navy attack planes bearing down on the Chinese air armada.
The first target was the Ilyushin-76 radar plane — and that task was left to the nine surviving fly able Taiwanese F-16s, which had launched out of Kai-Shan just after sunset, along with Jon Masters’s DC-10 tanker- transport. Four Su-27s guarded the 11–76, but in the confusion caused by the EA-6B Prowlers jamming their radios and disrupting their radars, they were no match for the wave of F-16s. All four Su-27s were shot down by the F-16s, against the loss of one F-16—and then each F-16 took a shot at the 11–76 radar plane. At least a dozen AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles plowed into the Chinese radar plane, sending huge burning pieces spinning into the Formosa Strait. The eight Taiwanese F-16s then withdrew from the area and linked up with Jon Masters’s DC-10 tanker-transport orbiting over the Pacific, where they all refueled and headed to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.
The confusion between the Chinese planes allowed the Navy fighters to get into missile range. A total of twenty-four F-14 Tomcats and twenty F/A-18 Hornets from the two carriers in the Philippine Sea began launching missiles. The Tomcats could open fire from over seventy miles away with their huge AIM-54C Phoenix long-range antiair missiles, while the Hornets attacked from as far as twenty miles away with medium-range AIM-7 Sparrow and AIM-120 radar-guided missiles. Nearly half of the Su-27s and J-8 fighters covering the attack force were destroyed before the Navy fighters closed in within range of their short-range AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking antiair missiles, and another eight Su-27s and J-8s fell to AIM-9 missile attacks. The surviving Chinese fighters fled before the American fighters got a chance to close within cannon range. The Chinese fighter-bombers that had not dropped their weapons simply punched off the bombs and fuel tanks wherever they were and turned westward to get away from the unseen predators closing in on them.
But the Chinese bombers retreating from the area were just being herded into another trap — ten four-ship formations of U.S. Air Force F- 15 C Eagle fighters from the Eighteenth Wing at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa and the Third Wing from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, all loaded with six AIM-120 AMRAAMs and two AIM-9 Sidewinders apiece. The F-15s spread out over the Formosa Strait and simply waited for the Chinese aircraft to fly right into their laps before opening fire. Twenty-three F-15 pilots claimed kills that night, and three more claimed multiple kills. Any Chinese HQ-2 surface-to-air missile sites that tried to lock onto the F-15s over the Strait were destroyed by U.S. Navy A-6E Intruders launching AGM-88 High speed Anti-Radiation Missiles.