Lin Hu

Lin Hu (; 26 December 1927 – 3 March 2018) was a Chinese fighter pilot and lieutenant general of the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). Born to a Russian mother and a Chinese father, he was orphaned at a young age. Lin joined the Eighth Route Army to fight in the Second Sino-Japanese War before he turned 11. After the Second World War, he was trained as a fighter pilot and fought in the Korean War and the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. He served as deputy commander of the PLA Air Force from 1985 to 1994 and attained the rank of lieutenant general in 1988.

Early life Lin Hu was born on 26 December 1927 in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. His father, originally from Zhaoyuan, Shandong province, moved to Harbin. There he met Lin's mother, a Russian woman, who gave birth to three children.

Wartime career

After the Japanese invasion of China, Lin joined the Eighth Route Army in October 1938 and fought in the Communist guerrilla base in the Yimeng Mountains of Shandong province, before he turned 11; he was renamed as Lin Hu ("forest tiger") by his superiors.

In 1945, Lin became a member of the Chinese Communist Party. After the surrender of Japan at the end of the Second World War, the Communist Northeast Army took over a number of Japanese warplanes, pilots, and mechanics in the former Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, and established its first aviation school, the Northeast China Democratic United Army Aviation School (a predecessor of the PLA Air Force Aviation University). Lin was selected to receive pilot training at the school, from which he graduated in 1949.

During the Korean War, Lin was a deputy regiment commander of the People's Volunteer Army Air Force. He was credited with shooting down one and damaging another F-86 Sabre, the best jet fighter of the United States Air Force. After the end of the war, Lin was promoted to deputy commander of the 18th Division of the PLA Air Force based at the Shadi Air Base in Foshan, Guangdong. During the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958, he shot down two Taiwanese warplanes and damaged a third. He was awarded the rank of lieutenant general in 1988.

In January 2002, Lin published the book Fight to Protect the Motherland's Airspace—A Retrospective of the Air Battles in the First Twenty Years of New China ,

Death Lin died in the evening of 3 March 2018, at the age of 90 (91 by East Asian age reckoning).

Personal life Lin Hu had a daughter named Lin Li .