The Second Sino-Japanese War began on 7 July 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in the Republic of China and is often regarded as the start of World War II as full-scale warfare erupted with the Battle of Shanghai, and ending when the Empire of Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945. The Chinese Air Force faced the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Air Forces and engaged them in many aerial interceptions, including the interception of massed terror-bombing strikes on civilian targets, attacking on each other's ground forces and military assets in all manners of air-interdiction and close-air support; these battles in the Chinese skies were the largest air battles fought since the Great War, and featured the first-ever extensive and prolonged deployment of aircraft carrier fleets launching preemptive strikes in support of expeditionary and occupational forces, and demonstrated the technological shift from the latest biplane fighter designs to the modern monoplane fighter designs on both sides of the conflict. Although a largely dismissed and forgotten war in the Western thinking, the significance and impact of the airwar between China and the Empire of Japan cannot be denied; it was the best opportunity for the Western powers to learn about the development and technological prowess of the enemy that would shock the West with the rude awakening by the end of 1941 when Imperial Japanese ambitions expanded into the Pacific. Overview China was not an aviation-industrial power at the time, and relied on foreign countries for its military aircraft, but did have a fledgling aircraft industry that produced a few indigenous experimental aircraft designs and foreign aircraft designs under license, including about 100 Hawk III fighter-attack planes, China's frontline fighter-attack plane of choice when war broke out in 1937, at the CAMCO plant based at the Hanzhou Jianqiao Aerodrome. 15 Chinese-American pilots along with Chinese pilots of other foreign nationalities formed the first unofficial volunteer group of pilots to join provincial/warlord air force units in the early-mid 1930s, and ultimately integrating into the front-line air units of the centralized command of the Nationalist Air Force of China by 1937, in the unified-front for imminent war against Imperial Japan. These volunteers included future ace-fighter pilots Art Chin, John "Buffalo" Huang, Wong Pan-Yang, plus Hazel Ying-Lee (who was not allowed to fly in combat as a female), Louie Yim-qun, Chan Kee-Wong et al. As the battles of Shanghai, Nanjing, Taiyuan,