Chinese replacements of Soviet equipment during Vietnam War

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Member for

10 years 11 months

Posts: 2,040

I remember on this old US documentary called Wings, they interviewed Soviet advisers to North Vietnam during the war.
The Soviets said they would send anti aircraft and aircraft equipment to Vietnam via China, and when they arrived
they were surprised to find out that the Chinese kept all the original Soviet equipment and replaced them with inferior Chinese equivalents.
Anyone know exactly what anti aircraft or aircraft parts they referred to? they did not go into detail.

Original post

Member for

16 years 7 months

Posts: 167

Doesn't surprise me. I pity the guys who had to use Chinese aircraft back then, especially high performance machines like the MiG-19/F-6. Calling Chinese military hardware back then 'inferior' is being kind. The Albanians who operated alot of chinese aircraft once lost a Chinese built MiG-19/F-6 on a live firing exercise. It turned out the shells had defective fuses which caused the shells to blow up in the barrel. I'd love to talk to one of the Pakistani air force technicians who worked on the introduction of the F-6 into PAF service and ask him to what extent they had to rebuild the F-6 to make it usable and the loss rate tolerable. I know they gutted much of the avionics out of the aircraft and replaced it with western equipment and they rewired them for Sidewinders. As for the Chinese nicking Soviet equipment I'd image they were particularly keen to remove any electronics. Especially radar, RWR devices, missile seekers and guidance systems, etc. so you would have found that portions of missile shipments went 'missing' in transit and aircraft were 'damaged during handling'. The Russians and the Chinese once fought a major border skirmish over a Soviet T-62 that got stuck somewhere in no mans land and the Chinese took significant casualties to salvage it. Much of the crop of Chinese MBT's up to the Type 99 is descended from that one machine.

Member for

17 years 8 months

Posts: 275

From what i remember that was the case with MiG-19. Partially why it was so unpopular with Vietnamese pilots. AA guns also and Ak-47's.