Communist China's POW for 20 Years

In February 1963, Major Changti “Robin” Yeh of the Republic of China (Taiwan) Air Force arrived at Laughlin AFB to learn how to fly the U-2. It was the start of a 20-year journey that would take him from the top of the military aviation in Taiwan to captivity in Mainland China to being refused by his own countrymen in Taiwan upon his release from captivity.

“I probably had over 100 missions over Mainland China,” Yeh says. He was a fighter pilot, the best of the best. He started his career in the T-33 for training, flew the F-86 “Sabre”, RF-84F, and then was selected to fly dangerous low level photo reconnaissance missions over the Mainland Chinese coastal airfields in the RF-101. This was a supersonic, single-seat fighter designed to penetrate enemy territory alone, unarmed, and unafraid and shoot them with nothing but a camera mounted in the nose.

“When you takeoff, you had to stay low, about 80 feet over the water” Yeh says. That was to avoid detection of the Communist Chinese (ChiCom) enemy radar. “You can see the sailboats. The men stand up [on the sailboat], and then when you pass by, they all lay down!” he says with a laugh.

Yeh’s missions monitored the order of battle at six or seven ChiCom airfields situated within striking distance of his country, the small island of Taiwan just across the Taiwan Strait from the enemy mainland. “So when you reached the soil, then you pull up, all the way, you know, put your afterburner on all the way up, to go over the hill. You go over the hill and then you push down again to go to low, low level. Because you can get your good pictures at about 1000 feet, not over 1000 feet. And you keep the airspeed at about 550 knots,” Yeh says.

By the late 1950s, Taiwan and its ally, the U.S., had more to worry about than just the number of aircraft parked at seven coastal air bases in Communist China. The ChiComs had embarked upon a program to develop their own nuclear weapons, and the political and military repercussions of a nuclear Communist China sent shock waves throughout the Pacific and the World. The U.S. wanted to know more about their abilities to wage nuclear war. Our allies, The Republic of China did too.

Out of that need, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the ROC Air Force forged a partnership to operate the RB-57 and later the U-2 from Taiwan using ROC pilots. They would penetrate the Bamboo Curtain at extremely high altitudes and photograph the ChiCom’s weapons programs.

Starting in 1959, the ROC Air Force recruited its top pilots to travel to the U.S. to learn to fly the U-2. “Actually at that time, the U-2 was very attractive for the pilots. I guess at that time everyone wanted to lay their hands on those new airplanes. They asked my intentions and I said of course I would like to join the program,” Yeh says.

The training he received at Laughlin AFB’s 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing was unusual because of its “top secret” nature. “What they do is just give you ground school. And at that time it was top secret to fly the U-2. So they led you in the ground school in an office like a classroom. Everything was laid [out] on the table. But you don’t take notes. You make notes in your mind. And so after the school [was over each day] you left everything where they were [on the table] and try to keep everything in your mind [remember]. You are not allowed to take notes,” Yeh recalls.

After a short ground school, the ROC pilots were placed in real U-2 cockpits to familiarize themselves with the controls, buttons, and switches. “They ‘ground flew’ you and saw how much you can remember. Then we taxied around the airfield getting used to the controls. The next day they told us to takeoff!” Yeh says.

Yeh’s first two training flights in the U-2 were solo. “The first flight was not over 20,000 feet so you don’t have to put on the pressure suit. The first two flights, we just flew around on an orientation,” Yeh recalls. He graduated fully qualified in the U-2 in July 1963 from Laughlin AFB, and returned to the Republic of China to commence operational missions with the ROC Air Force U-2 Black Cat Squadron.

Because of the danger of the missions, ROC U-2 pilots were only expected to fly 10 missions. After that, they could decide to continue or move on to something else. Yeh fondly recalls his first mission.

“My first time. I flew around the south side of China to that big island on the south side, Hainan. Then I go to Hunnan and come back across the center of China. So it took about nine or nine-and-a-half hours,” Yeh says.

Towards the end of his third sortie, Yeh was almost to the east coast of Communist China when bad luck caught up with him. It was forewarned by a relatively new addition to the U-2, the System 12 radar-warning receiver. “I was almost home. You could see the coastline. I was probably less than two hours away. I was ready to go home. And then all of a sudden the System 12 gave me a long pulse in the ears. If you got locked on by the ground missile, you got this warning in your ears. When the missile got closer, it got louder,” he says.

U-2 pilots were taught to try to turn to an abeam position of the SA-2 missile radar. Supposedly it mitigated the enemy radar’s ability to acquire a good position on the target. When Yeh’s System 12 indications occurred, they were indicating the radar was well behind him at the 5 o’clock position.

Yeh turned right to “beam” the radar. In retrospect, Yeh thinks this was a mistake. “I think losing altitude and turning toward the SA-2 was the wrong tactic. Of course if you kept your altitude and kept going, it makes it easier to get away from it,” he says.

An SA-2 missile exploded within close proximity to Yeh’s U-2. “When [the SA-2 warhead] blows up, it has hundreds of thousands of pieces, missile fragments, so that anything within the two kilometer diameter gets shot down,” Yeh says. In this case, the missile fragments tore 3/5s of Yeh’s right wing off and sent shrapnel into the cockpit, lodging 59 fragments into Yeh’s legs.

“When the cockpit decompressed, there was a big ‘boom!’ The air just came in, but you have the protection of your helmet. But you don’t know what happened. I was thrown out by the explosion. I might have hit something [that caused me to eject]. I don’t know. I was thrown out,” Yeh says. Yeh’s incident occurred before a safety modification on the U-2 was made to the canopy system. Yeh had to manually open the canopy before igniting the ejection seat. Yeh wasn’t sure if he opened the canopy or pulled the ejection seat handgrips.

“In our training they taught us that when you don’t eject, the automatic system doesn’t work. You have to do it all yourself,” Yeh says. Now in free fall from 70,000 feet, Yeh assumed he was on his own as far as deploying the parachute.

“In our training, they said you have to watch the color on the horizon. At that altitude (60,000-70,000 feet), everything is grey. So you have to make out when you see the color. When the color is clear. You know, when green is green, and red is red and blue is blue, then you pull your [D-]ring. That’s why I survived. I remembered those instructions,” Yeh says.

But he almost didn’t survive the crash. After pulling the D-ring, Yeh says he only had about a minute of time floating down in his parachute headed towards the top of a small hill deep inside ChiCom territory.

Yeh also says he considered suicide rather than risk capture. “All of these things are going through your mind. What happened? What are you going to do? At the time, I could have let it [free fall] go the way it was going. It was going through my mind just to end it [my life]. But subconsciously, the mind tells you that you want to live. That’s why I pulled my ring,” Yeh says.

Once on the ground, peasants from a local village first discovered him, but Yeh was in too much pain to move. He was losing blood from his leg wounds and drifted in and out of consciousness.

“And I laid there a long time before they came over. You know, the ones in the uniforms. The ChiComs. At first, I saw some people and they didn’t dare come near me because I had my pressure suit on, and even my helmet. I couldn’t take my helmet off. So they must have thought I was somebody who came from space. So they just kept [far away] in a circle around me,” Yeh recalls.

According to Yeh, he made his parachute landing at approximately 4 p.m. It was not until midnight that he was in a hospital emergency room getting shrapnel removed from his legs and receiving blood transfusions. “They took out 59 fragments from my two legs. Not a bone was broken,” Yeh says. To this day, Yeh still suffers from over 100 pinhead-sized fragments of that SA-2 warhead still lodged in his legs.

While in the hospital, Yeh learned of his pending captivity. “I remember when I first got caught, when I was in the hospital, one of the high level cadre, who I found out later was the [People’s Republic of China (PRC)] air force commander-in-chief came to me and asked what I wanted to do ‘Do you want to stay or go back.’ I said I wanted to go back. He said okay. Mark it down what time I said it. And he said we promise you, if you want to leave, we’ll send you back. At that time they did say something about 10 months, at the most. They would keep me for 10 months. And [during that time], he said, ‘Take a look around at what China has become. It must be better than the old China,’” Yeh recalls.

Yeh’s captivity was not harsh and brutal like what the American POWs experienced in North Vietnam. Instead, he was taken to what Yeh calls a “military hostel.” “It was like an apartment. And I lived in the corner room, and the comrades lived in the adjoining room,” he says.

“The [Communist] Chinese treated us pretty well. They tried to wash your brain—you know, brainwash you,” he says. In Yeh’s confinement he was expected to study Chairman Mao Zedong’s little red book and digest daily doses of propaganda from the People’s Republic of China newspaper. His release would not occur until Yeh had convinced his mentors he completely agreed with the entire ideology of the Communist Party of China. Ten months became seven years.

While Yeh lay in confinement, China’s Cultural Revolution, which started in May 1966, transpired. The initial cadre that captured him were soon banished from their high level positions, including the air force general who promised his release within 10 months.

Yeh never considered escape. “The whole of China was in chaos,” he says. He recalls ominous warnings from his immediate guards. “They said ‘You cannot escape our system,’” he recalls. The reasons not to escape were equally enforced by the revolution going on outside the walls of the compound as well as the close supervision by his captors. Even if he left the compound, where could he go?

“At that time, they were telling us, ‘we are not putting you in confinement. Actually, you can go out. But we are trying to protect you, because of your status. If you went out into society, you’d probably get killed,’” Yeh recalls.

After seven years of confinement in various military hostels, Yeh was sent to a town in the rural countryside to continue his reeducation. Now in his early 40s, he had to perform manual labor in the rice paddies. Because the Cultural Revolution had eliminated most of the educated people in the rural areas, Yeh rose to the prominent position of warehouse manager where he used mathematics to compute each person’s contribution and his or her subsequent pay. The position earned him respect of his fellow townspeople.

While working in rural China, Yeh learned that his wife of one year he left back in Taiwan before his fateful mission, of whom his thoughts kept him motivated to endure his present struggle, had remarried. Devastated, Yeh attempted to take his own life with an overdose of sleeping pills.

The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, and the Communist Party frowned upon it. The suicide attempt proved that Yeh’s reeducation was so far unsuccessful; he will have to stay several more years.

Yeh was reassigned to a factory and, after helping a high-ranking official in the Communist Party translate an American magazine article about the F-16, earned the position of Professor of English at a local University. While there, he ran into one of his initial captors that promised him his captivity would only last 10 months. “After the Cultural Revolution, when I saw the old cadre, I asked them ‘What happened to your promises?’ They said, ‘Promises are promises, but [back then] nobody dared say something about us [the captured U-2 pilots],’” Yeh recalls.

It was not until reformer Deng Xiaoping rose to lead the Communist Party of China that Yeh’s hopes of returning to his country would come true. In 1982, the ChiComs released Yeh and fellow Black Cat Squadron mate Johnny Chang, who was downed two years after Yeh and held captive as well.

But because of politics, the U-2 pilots’ own country, The Republic of China on Taiwan, didn’t want to even admit their existence, much less accept him back into their society.

“We wanted to go home to Taiwan, but they sent us to Hong Kong. We tried to contact the ROC government but they refused to take us back. But the ChiComs said you are not a POW; you are wanted here [back in Communist China],” Yeh says.

But Yeh already had his fill of the depravity of Communist China. Once in Hong Kong, he vowed to never return to his former captors. That entire country was a prison, Yeh says. The question was, if his own country didn’t allow him to return, where could he go?

“That is the saddest thing. Your own people don’t want you to come back. So how would you feel about that?” he says.

Both Yeh and Chang were members of a very loyal fraternity—U-2 Dragon Lady pilots. Many times, the fraternity of pilots transcends political and cultural boundaries. While in Hong Kong, Yeh and Chang met a former ROC U-2 pilot they knew. He was then working as a 747 captain for China Airlines and named Shihchu “Gimo” Yang. His friends, both American and Chinese called him simply, “Gimo” (Jee-moe). Gimo was one of the few squadron commanders of Yeh’s and Chang’s Black Cat Squadron. He fulfilled his promise to help.

After subsequent denials from the Taiwanese government to issue Yeh and Chang a passport or allow them back into their country, Gimo enlisted the help of old contacts he retained from the CIA and from American U-2 pilots.

“I flew back to San Francisco and I called Jim Cunningham, and old acquaintance from my days in the U-2,” Gimo says. Cunningham worked in Taiwan for one year during Gimo’s Black Cat Squadron days. He was actually the program director. “I said hey Jim, what are you going to do for my two little brothers?,” Gimo says. Cunningham told Gimo he was already expecting his call. “He told me he would call me in two weeks,” Gimo says. And sure enough in two weeks, Cunningham called. “He gave me a Hong Kong number and told me to have my two little brothers call that number and they would take care of them,” Gimo recalls.

After the CIA was satisfied that Yeh and Chang were not brainwashed agents of the ChiComs, they provided financial and diplomatic support to transport the two former POWs to the United States. They flew on a commercial flight from Hong Kong via Tokyo to Los Angeles. “We were so afraid that someone would hijack the plane in Japan and take us back to Mainland China!” Yeh says.

But they arrived in Los Angeles and another American and former advisor to the Black Cat Squadron met them and ushered them through a special “protocol” door to streamline their arrival through U.S. Customs. They were free at last.

In 1989, British author Chris Pocock wrote his first of three books on the history of the U-2 program, “Dragon Lady.” He devoted a chapter to the Black Cat Squadron and detailed the accounts of Yeh and Chang. “Maybe the political situation changed. Some of the [ROC] legislature read the book Chris Pocock wrote about our situation. And they started asking why they didn’t allow us to come back?” Yeh recalls. Pocock says a Taiwan newspaper, United Daily News, translated and serialized his chapters on the Black Cats. That produced political pressure in Taiwan to welcome their heroes back.

In 1990, the ROC finally allowed Yeh and Chang to return to Taiwan and they were given full military honors. It was quite a welcome, according to Yeh.

But the return was bittersweet. Yeh and Chang toured the island and even visited their tombs, where monuments to both pilot’s memorial were built. The plaques listing their names were unceremoniously removed several years prior after the ROC government learned that Yeh and Chang were alive and were soon to be released.

At Yeh’s retirement ceremony, he was was a major, the same rank he had when the incident occurred. It was as if those 20 years spent in confinement in Communist China were never recognized. “It’s one thing I don’t know about. They said our 20 years is missing! I don’t know where they put our 20 years. They said no one is going to recognize those 20 years. That was the saddest thing,” Yeh says.

Today, Robin Yeh is a retired businessman living in Alief, a suburb of Houston. After release, he gained U.S. citizenship and embarked upon a series of business adventures. First, he owned a fast food franchise. But he found that the restaurant business was hard work and didn’t pay much. Next he worked in an auto parts business. Finally he found his calling in the jewelry business. He operated Park Avenue Jewelry in Houston until his retirement in 1998.

When Yeh was released, he learned more about his wife Betty who had remarried, causing him his biggest heartbreak. She didn’t know he was still alive during all those years. Yeh was able to find happiness again, though. He met his second wife, Keiko in 1989 on a blind date. They were married the next year and have been together ever since.

Because he chose to serve his country, Yeh’s life as he knew it was taken from him. Any fighter pilot will tell you that the worst thing that can ever happen to them is to not be able to fly again. Yeh was not only denied being able to fly again, but he lost his family, his wife, and his country disowned him.

Thankfully, Yeh built a new and fulfilling life after his release. Since his retirement, he is busy reuniting with old friends and making new ones. He’s even traveled back to Communist China. “They welcome me back! They said after we were released that we were free to go. Today, I feel more welcome in Mainland China than in the ROC,” Yeh says.

But he is more proud to be an American and to enjoy the freedoms this country offers. As for his homeland, The Republic of China? Yeh feels his rejection had more to do with politics than anything personal.

“I don’t know what I think about it. Why are politics dirty like that?” Yeh ponders.

Here's an interesting article about the ChiCom's SAM battery that shot down U-2s like Yeh's in the 1960s.