The Earliest Sidewinder User - Sabre of Taiwan

In July 1958, the Red China declared the "Bloodletting of Taiwan". Ominous drones of over 100 MiGs overflew Quemoy, an outpost islet off coast of mainland, to spread terror. Meanwhile troops concentrated opposite Taiwan. The Outbreak of a full-scale conflict was unavoidable. On Aug 14, a group of CAF Sabres shot down three MiGs over Matsu without a single loss. This was an overture of the overall victory for the upcoming battle. The maneuverability of F-86 was slightly inferior to that of the Communist Mig-15 and MiG-17. But the training of pilots, quality of maintenance, and survivability of the Sabre far exceed their Communist counterparts. The result was an impressive kill-loss ratio of 31:1 in Aug 14 and 23 air combats. 18 of the 31 kills were claimed by the 5th FG. This group and the 6th Recon Group were attached to the 5th Composite Wing based at Taoyuan.

What’s more, the CAF i.e., RoCAF (中華民國空軍) had undergone a quiet revolution in its air-to-air firepower. Code named "Bright Star", in the midnight of Sept 18, the first batch of GAR-8 air-to-air missiles, later known as AIM-9B Sidewinder, along with the auxiliary training equipments were ferried to Taoyuan by a gigantic USAF C-124 Globemaster. This early version of Sidewinder had some operational limitation: pilot's estimation of the minimum attack range, the position of the sun, search angle of the missile's infrared sensor, etc. had to be taken into account.

In the air battle on 9/24/1958 during the Taiwan Strait Crises, the missile-equipped 11th FG's F-86Fs achieved a kill-loss ratio of 8:0. None of the Sabres inflicted a single bullet hole.

The remarks in my following North American F-86 Sabre and F-100 SuperSabre provide the significant dates and events in the operatioanl live of each CAF variant: