When the three Americans were finally released, they had suffered physically from a skimpy diet of practically inedible food. Captain Krasner’s fiancée, and one of the crewmen, a British subject living in Hong Kong, were subsequently allowed to leave China, but the other Chinese crewman remained a prisoner.
The international repercussions of the Dixon-Applegate affair were intensified by a fresh provocation which called ships and planes of the United States, Britain and France into emergency action. This was the callous and apparently senseless shooting down of a British-owned Cathay Pacific Airways C-54 Skymaster on July 23, 1954, with the loss of ten lives, by three Red Chinese LA-9 Lavochkin piston-engined fighter planes.
The Skymaster, carrying twelve passengers and a crew of six, took off from the Bangkok airport at 8:28 P.M., heading northeast in bright moonlight over Thailand and Indochina for the 1,071-mile flight to Hong Kong. The passenger load was light, so most people occupied window seats. The sun rose soon after the plane flew out over the South China Sea. Cape Bastion, the southeastern tip of Hainan Island, a Communist possession about the size of Denmark, became visible 50 miles away. Below, a brisk southwest wind whipped the sea into whitecaps.
Co-Pilot Cedric Carlton suggested a time-saving route nearer to Hainan, but Captain Phillip Blown decided to hold his present course, keeping far away from Hainan to avoid another of the Red charges that their twelve-mile limit was being violated by non-Communist flyers. At 8:45 A.M., Carlton looked out a starboard window and shouted to Captain Blown that two cream-colored fighter planes with Red Chinese markings were coming up fast from the rear on his side. Captain Blown put the plane on automatic pilot, took a quick look back through the port window and saw a third fighter zeroing in on his side of the tail.
“Without any warning, they opened up with machine-gun and cannon fire,” Captain Blown later wrote in his report. “The noise and the shambles from their guns was terrific. It was obviously a premeditated attack.”
The hail of bullets from short range immediately set fire to the Skymaster’s left outboard engine, and the No. 4 engine on the far right. Flames burst from the auxiliary and main fuel tanks beside the No. 4 engine at almost the same moment.