Torn by many years of civil war and battles between warlords, the Chinese found it beyond their power to halt the Japanese aggression, which escalated in the following years. The carnage continued as the Japanese swept nearly unopposed across the fertile agricultural plains of eastern China. Peking and Shanghai quickly succumbed during ruthless attacks on strategic military targets and civilian population centers.
Claire Chennault and Sgt. Chennault, who was born in and grew up in Louisiana, had tried unsuccessfully to become a pilot during World War I. The war ended before he had his wings, but he spent the postwar years honing his skills as an aerobatic flier and working on aerial maneuvers, especially the use of three-plane teams.
Williams, flew Boeing P biplanes The peppy little aircraft were equipped with hp engines and could achieve a top speed of mph. At each performance site, the three-man team would zoom in, land and taxi to a stop, then line up wingtip to wingtip before the waiting crowd. The two outside pilots, McDonald and Williams, would clamber out of their aircraft, each carrying a foot length of rope.
Then they hopped back into their cockpits, waved to the crowd and took off once more. The team members, literally linked together by the two thick ropes, performed a number of slow, lazy loops above the fascinated crowds. Their most spectacular stunt, however, was a complete degree roll maneuver. It was an absolutely breathtaking display. By , Chennault had served 20 years in the U. Army Air Corps. Partially deaf from many years of open-cockpit flying, he retired and the aerobatics team was disbanded.
But in the audience at their last. Chennault accepted the challenge and the rank of colonel in the Chinese Nationalist air force.
In the following months, he worked hard to organize and educate the eager young Chinese pilots who wanted to join in the defense of their country. But due to political pressure and a lack of planes, he was forced to send many of the flight cadets back to the United States to complete their training.
Between and the Chinese military establishment was made up of many regional military elements, considered the personal armies of powerful and wealthy land barons. This situation led to bickering over leadership, disorganization in planning and ineffective distribution of scarce resources.
Roosevelt to support a clandestine foreign aid program to China. As it happened, Roosevelt was already looking for a way to aid China in her struggle against the Japanese. One of the one hunderd, an AVG Hawk A-2s having it's guns bore-sighted The aircraft, numbe 68 was 'assigned' to Charlie Older but was also flown by Robert Hedman during his "ace in a day" mission of December 25, National Archives.
A band of recruiters, including some retired U. Navy commanders, combed Army, Navy and Marine bases looking for volunteers with a sense of adventure and some aviation experience. In exchange for signing a one-year contract, they were told that when their time was up they could go back to their old ranks.
But according to some AVG pilots, Generalissimo Chiang was a bit slow in signing those bonus checks for the confirmed kills. Most of the American volunteers who sailed for the Far East in the summer and fall of were young and relatively inexperienced. Altogether, 87 pilots and some ground support personnel joined Chennault at a training base in Burma, where they familiarized themselves with the PB and began exhaustive tactical instruction. When Chennault had accepted the Ps from the Curtiss Wright factory, the only place to load them on board a ship was at a New York City pier.
As the first crated fuselage was being hoisted aboard the ship, the cable snapped and the fuselage complete with engine, radios and all cockpit gauges-fell into the Hudson River.
The crate was recovered, but the engine and gauges were waterlogged and determined a loss. It helped to foster a profound friendship between the two peoples and left us with an important legacy of China-US cooperation and friendship that we need to carry forward in our present-day relationship," Zhang said. The Flying Tigers stories are well cherished and remembered in China, where monuments, heritage parks and museums have been erected to commemorate the fighter squadrons.
However, their tales are less known in the US, where people are more familiar with Normandy landings and other operations on the Western front. In his book, which draws on interviews from veterans and survivors of the war in the US and China, Jackson recounts the Sino-American cooperation during World War II and how some of the downed American airmen were able to get back to Allied lines with the help of the Chinese. According to Jackson, American airmen had a roughly 20 percent chance of being taken back to friendly territory with the help of underground forces after they crashed or bailed out in Europe, but in China, the possibility of making it back to friendly territory was 90 percent, thanks to Chinese civilians and soldiers who risked their lives to return them to safety.
It didn't matter. Those people will work to pick you up from behind enemy lines," he said. He recalled the story of Doolittle's Raiders, who crash-landed in China after running out of fuel following air raids on Japan. The Japanese slaughtered an estimated , Chinese in retaliation for aiding the American flyers. The Chinese knew the cost, but they did it anyway," Jackson said. His research found American airplanes and more than 1, American airmen were reported missing in combat missions in China at some point.
Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff. Stilwell was an infantry officer with a strong prejudice against airpower in a theater that was largely about airpower. Diplomacy was not among his skills. He spoke Chinese but did little to hide his condescending attitude toward the Chinese people.
When Allied forces were in retreat from Burma, Stilwell refused to board an airplane sent to fly him out. Instead, he chose to walk out to India and led a ground party of through the jungles to India. The ranking American officer in Asia was out of touch with the rest of his command for two weeks. Clayton L. Bissell had been junior to Chennault when both of them were in the Air Corps, and Chennault had a low opinion of Bissell.
Chennault was called to active duty, promoted to colonel, and then to brigadier general. Their intent was to ensure that Chennault would be subordinate to Bissell at all times. Their antipathy deepened later when Roosevelt met Chennault, liked him, listened to his advice, and invited direct correspondence from him. Stilwell persisted in his disdain for airpower.
They preferred to fly out their contracts and go home. Even so, most of them eventually returned to US military service. Two of them went on to earn the Medal of Honor. The AAF could have recruited more of them than it did in China in , had the offer been made with greater consideration and respect. Their critics emphasized that aspect of the AVG but gave short shrift to the fighting abilities of the airmen and their contributions in plugging the gap against the Japanese in the first days of the war.
According to Chennault, more of the AVG veterans would have joined the AAF if they could have gotten a furlough before resuming combat and if the Army had been willing to offer them regular commissions. After that, only five pilots and 22 of the ground personnel chose to join the AAF. Service with the AVG did not count for promotion, retirement, or time in grade. The Flying Tigers did not share in the generous promotions awarded elsewhere for those with prewar military service.
Two of them were killed on these volunteer missions. Of these hard-used aircraft, 29 were flyable. However, the soap opera was not quite over. In , Stilwell was recalled from China at the request of Chiang Kai-shek. On his way back to the United States, Chennault made a farewell call in Chung-king. People from the countryside flocked to the city and mobbed the car in which he was riding.
The driver turned off the engine and the crowd pushed the car through streets and up hills to the open square where thousands had gathered for the leave-taking ceremony. More than 14, were produced in different models and variants. The P was flown by 28 nations, but it is forever associated in popular memory with the American Volunteer Group Flying Tigers.
The P evolved from the trusty Curtiss P Hawk, to which it bears a strong resemblance, but the P had a liquid-cooled Allison engine in place of the radial air-cooled engine of the P There is some confusion about which model the AVG initially flew.
Chennault, in his autobiography, Way of a Fighter , called them PBs, but many books and articles say they were PCs. The facts seem to be these. However, AVG pilot Erik Shilling said emphatically that the features of the aircraft received were those of the Tomahawk II, including externally sealed fuel tanks.
In other words, PBs. It appears that Curtiss had some leftover parts in stock and decided to use them on the AVG order. The airplanes were essentially PBs. Unlike the PBs, the Kittyhawks could carry bombs. As more information about World War II becomes available, parts of the Flying Tiger story have been re-examined with results that are hotly disputed. Those numbers are challenged by Daniel Ford, who did extensive research of Japanese Air Force losses, down to accounting for specific airplanes and crews, and interviewed veterans of Japanese units.
In Flying Tigers, published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in , he concluded that there had been multiple claims on many of the specific credits and that Japanese losses did not exceed aircraft. Others do not. Animosity toward the Flying Tigers is still found, notably among academicians. On the other hand, the US government in at long last recognized the achievements of the Flying Tigers with the award of a Presidential Unit Citation for operations from Dec.
Through it all, the legend of the Flying Tigers survives. In the months following Pearl Harbor, they were the only effective Allied air force operating on the Asian mainland. Flying airplanes that were regarded as obsolete and hampered by irregular supply of parts and support, they consistently outflew and outfought the Japanese air regiments, which had better airplanes and were present in far superior numbers.
The formation of the Flying Tigers. When these Americans arrived in China in , the country was very different from the China we know today. Leader Chiang Kai-shek, a revolutionary who split with the Communist Party, was able to loosely unite the country's warlords under a central government. In the late s, China had been invaded by the armies of Imperial Japan and was struggling to withstand its better equipped and unified foe.
Japan was virtually unopposed in the air, able to bomb Chinese cities at will. Faced with that dire situation, the Chiang government hired American Claire Chennault, a retired US Army captain, to form an air force. He spent his first few years in the job putting together an air raid warning network and building airbases across China, according to the Flying Tigers' official website.
Then in , he was dispatched to the United States -- still a neutral party in World War II -- to find pilots and planes that could defend China against the Japanese air force. With good contacts in the administration of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a budget that could pay Americans as much as three times what they could earn in the US military, Chennault was able to get the fliers he needed. The planes posed a bit more of a problem. The US was making them in large numbers, but they were destined for Britain to use against Germany or for US forces, amid fears that the war in Europe would soon suck in the US.
For its hardship, Britain was promised a new and better model about to go to the assembly line. In his memoirs, Chennault wrote that the Ps purchased by China were lacking some important features, including a modern gun sight. What the P lacked in ability, Chennault made up for in tactics, having the AVG pilots dive from a high position and unleash their heavy machine guns on the structurally weaker but more maneuverable Japanese planes.
In a low, twisting, turning dogfight, the P would lose. A ragtag group of fliers. The pilots Chennault had to teach were far from the cream of the crop. Ninety-nine fliers, along with support personnel, made the trip to China in the fall of , according to the US Defense Department history. Some were fresh out of flight school, others flew lumbering flying boats or were ferry pilots for large bombers. They signed up for the Far East adventure to make a lot of money, to find lost girlfriends or because they were simply bored.
With such a disparate group of fliers, Chennault had to teach them how to be fighter pilots -- and to fight as a group -- essentially from scratch. The training was rigorous and deadly. Three pilots were killed early in accidents. During a single day, eight Ps were damaged as pilots landed too hard, or the ground crew taxied too fast, causing collisions.
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