Word: ilyushin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...game hunt of sorts. The weapon they chose is an odd one: a Swedish single-engine aircraft known as the MFI-9B trainer, equipped to hold twelve rockets in pods under its wing. The bag claimed so far has been equally unusual: it includes four MIGs, one Ilyushin 28, two Canberras, a Heron and a control tower, all belonging to the federal government of Nigeria...
...must be crushed now, before China becomes a nuclear superpower. Fast-moving, heavily equipped Russian armored columns stab across the Amur and Ussuri rivers into Manchuria, brushing aside China's infantry. A Soviet armored division knifes into Manchuria from the west, across the Mongolian border. Fleets of Ilyushin bombers pound Chinese airfields, troop concentrations and industrial centers across the entire northeast. China's outnumbered jets are swept from the skies, and within a week the major Manchurian cities of Shenyang and Harbin have fallen to the Soviet pincers. Linking up, the Russian columns race south toward Peking, then...
...well. A visitor has to be nerveless to endure the trip. Approaching the coast at dusk, the planes are occasionally shot at by Nigerian antiaircraft batteries. When they reach Uli, homing in on the airfield's radio beacon, they face worse harassment from a twin-engine Nigerian Ilyushin the pilots call "the Intruder." The Ilyushin hovers over blacked-out Uli every night for four hours, drops 500-lb. bombs from time to time, and forces the food planes to pull up and scatter. Its pilot breaks into their radio frequency in mocking, accented English. "This is genocide, baby...
...Nigerian MIGs. But three flights are almost impossible. Diversions because of the Intruder eat up time; so does the fact that Uli can accommodate only eight planes easily and gives priority to the gunrunners. Weakened by hunger, Biafran ground crews sag noticeably unloading second or third flights. When the Ilyushin drops one of its bombs, the Biafrans vanish, leaving the plane crews and church officials to offload the cargo themselves. Twenty-four missions in one night is the squadron record. The average is closer to half that many...
...seeing a chance to gain a new foothold in Africa by backing the likely winner) were soon providing Nigerian military commanders with every kind of weapon they wanted. Automatic rifles and endless rounds of ammunition, heavy artillery, mortars, rockets, grenade launchers, antiaircraft guns, Czechoslovak Delfin jets, Russian MIGs and Ilyushin 11-28 bombers?Nigeria ordered and got them all. The result was an unhappy precedent for Africa: the Nigerian conflict became the first African bush war fought with modern weapons...