The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan

By Sam Kleiner

Members of the Tigers would soon become familiar figures: their leader, Colonel Claire L. Chennault, and pilots like David “Tex” Hill and “Scarsdale Jack” Newkirk. Years before American soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy or raised the flag on Iwo Jima, it was Chennault’s Flying Tigers who rallied the country with victories when the Axis forces appeared unstoppable.

“A hundred American volunteers had taken the measure of the enemy,” Clare Boothe wrote in Life. “Who, in the face of that measure, dared doubt that America could-if it would-defeat Japan?”

The Flying Tigers’ shark-nosed P-40s-also known as Tomahawks would go down in history as one of the iconic images from World War II. Hollywood executives knew a heroic story when they saw one, and in 1942 Republic Pictures rushed out Flying Tigers, starring John Wayne as the swashbuckling commander of the unit. Hollywood produced its own version of their adventures, but the truth was that the pilots were “doing deeds that a movie director would reject, in a script, as too fantastic,” as Time described them in April 1942.

Despite the hyperbole, the Flying Tigers were indeed undertaking an important mission: they helped to keep China in the war. If China fell, Japan would be able to focus its forces against an unprepared and under-armed United States.

It would take five decades for the Pentagon to acknowledge the truth about the Flying Tigers: namely, that the mission was a covert operation authorized at the highest levels of the Roosevelt White House-in violation of America’s neutrality, and out of view of an isolationist Congress-months before Pearl Harbor. Its pilots and ground crew resigned from the U. S. military, bade their loved ones farewell, and crossed the Pacific on ocean liners, carrying passports listing false professions to disguise the truth about their mission. Over one hundred pilots arrived at a makeshift camp in the jungles of Burma to discover planes many didn’t know how to fly. Determined and desperate, they drilled in new techniques to fight the Japanese air force’s more agile planes, and were just about to enter into battle when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. When President Roosevelt declared war, they were practically behind enemy lines, outnumbered and with no reinforcements coming. Yet between December 20, 1941, and July 4, 1942, they shot down scores of Japanese planes in Burma and southern China.

For over seventy-five years, the most detailed accounts of the Flying Tigers lay buried in pilots’ diaries and letters that were hidden away in closets and at the backs of drawers after the war and in combat reports that lay moldering in the basement of an unremarkable brick building in Georgetown. Their achievements are even more remarkable and stirring than the myth created by Hollywood.

(Kleiner 2018, 2-4)

Chennault might have followed that path for1917, a German U-boat sank the Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians, including 128 Americans. America entered the Great War. Even though it would mean leaving his family, Chennault felt that he had to prove to himself that he could make it as a soldier. The army had sent out a request for pilots, particularly men who could operate the observation balloons that Chennault was making at Goodyear. Applicants had to be between nineteen and twenty-five years old, and the twenty-three-year-old Chennault was confident that he’d finally get his chance to fly.

But the army was looking for a certain type of man to become a pilot, one who was “energetic and forceful and of good moral character and clean habits,” as a newspaper described the ideal candidate; it said, too, that he must “have a good education.” Hiram Bingham, a Yale professor and an explorer who had rediscovered Machu Picchu, was in charge of recruitment. In his view a pilot should be “an officer and a gentleman.’ He must be the kind of man whose honor is never left out of consideration…. He must be resourceful, keen, quick, and determined.” Unsurprisingly, the army believed that Ivy Leaguers made the best pilots, especially polo players and quarterbacks. Few Americans in 1917 had flown in a plane, and the army concentrated on finding the best and the brightest from the flying clubs on Ivy League campuses to serve as America’s pilots in the Great War. A factory worker like Chennault didn’t stand a chance. 

He received a cruelly blunt rejection letter that he’d remember for the rest of his life: “Applicant does not possess necessary qualifications for a successful aviator.” The army believed men like Chennault, common men, were needed for the infantry, and he accepted the job he was offered. He reported for basic training at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, one of the newly established bases where the army was turning civilians into newly commissioned officers.

He spent three months there, making him one of the “90-day wonders” that filled the army’s burgeoning ranks.

Though he was an infantry officer, fate showed its hand when he was ordered to a base in Texas connected to Kelly Field, where the army was training its new pilots. Chennault spent his days drilling new infantry soldiers, but would visit the field where the planes were taking off, drawn by “the roar of their motors, the harsh thrashing of their propellers and the strange rattle they made as they flew,” as biographer Keith Ayling wrote. He desperately wanted to fly.

He eventually finagled from one of the flight officers an unauthorized lesson in the “Jenny,” a two-seater with a place in front for the instructor and one behind for the student. As the Jenny jolted into the air, shaking like a kite in the wind, Chennault could see the white tents in neat rows at Kelly Field and the open Texas landscape that spread to the horizon. Seven years from when he’d first seen that plane take off at the state fair, he was finally flying. Soon he was even trying his hand at soloing. The instructors, impressed with Chennault’s drive to learn, or maybe just worn down by his persistence, would taxi to the flight line, then climb out as Chennault “jumped in and took off.” In total, he estimated that he accrued eighty hours of “bootleg” flying time. But in the army’s books, he was still an infantryman.

(Kleiner 2018, 10-11)

When they gathered on the yacht, the leader of the group, Colonel P. T. Mow, must have impressed the Americans with his nearly perfect English. Mow had been traveling with his team to Russia, France, Germany, England, and Italy seeking to buy more planes for China and hire more pilots to train its air force. 

He believed that China, “a young country, in aviation,” had much to learn from expert pilots in the West. He already had a number of former army pilots working as instructors at one of China’s aviation academies, led by West Point graduate John Jouett, but he wanted more. When he met the Three Men on the Flying Trapeze, Mow quickly got to the point, telling Chennault and his team that they should come to China. Such an invitation wasn’t unusual at the time. Lured by adventure and money, dozens of American pilots were flying under foreign flags. Pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille had fought for France in the Great War before America’s entry. After the Armistice, the Army Air Corps had been reduced in size but many of its members were eager to take part in combat abroad. Some formed the Kościuszko Squadron to help Poland in its struggle against the Soviet Union, while others joined the Cuban Air Force and the small air forces of South American republics. In 1928 Chennault himself had received a tempting proposal to take his skills abroad, when, after viewing some drills, a visiting Soviet general had given Chennault some vodka, chocolate, and caviar as preliminary gifts to open a conversation about coming to advise the Red Army’s new air force. Chennault got them to agree to $1,000 a month, which was a steep raise over the $225 he was earning in the army, but he ultimately turned them down. However tempting Mow’s offer might have been, Chennau lt, M cDonald, and Williamson declined. Chennault had his job in the army and a large family to look after-he and Nell now had eight children. But Mow was not a man easily discouraged. The pilots remembered him saying, “You will hear from me again.”

(Kleiner 2018, 15-16)

Worse was still to come. On September 13, a group of Chinese pilots flying Russian-made I-15 and I-16 fighters took to the air to fend off a raid. The Japanese bombers completed the run and then withdrew. Once the Chinese planes were in pursuit, Japanese fighters dove from out of the sun and opened fire. The Chinese pilots scrambled to defend themselves, but the enemy planes were faster and more agile than any the Chinese had ever encountered. Within half an hour, more than twenty Chinese planes had been lost-a massive blow to the Chinese Air Force. It was an unqualified disaster. Chennault mused that the Chinese had been shot down before they even knew what hit them. What had hit them was a new Japanese plane, the Mitsubishi A6M. It would come to be known by a simpler name: the Zero, and it would be feared not just in China, but throughout the Pacific.

Victory had never felt more distant. A mere two weeks after the rout, on September 27, 1940, Germany and Italy signed a new treaty with Japan, the Tripartite Pact, which cemented their military alliance with Tokyo. The geostrategic plates were shifting. By April 1941, the Japanese and the Soviets, both now aligned with Nazi Germany, would sign a nonaggression pact-a diplomatic shift that would leave China increasingly isolated on the world stage.

(Kleiner 2018, 58-59)

Thomas Corcoran was a Washington lawyer and former adviser to the president. He was known as “Tommy the Cork” because he knew how to float through the swampy morass of the capital to get things done. “He knew when to flatter, and he knew when to cajole and when to threaten,” one profiler wrote of him. This was a task that would require both praise and oratory. As he recounted, he wrote directly to his old boss, President Roosevelt, and appealed to his sense of his place in history, and sent a copy of A. E. Housman’s famous poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.” The poem praised British soldiers in World War I, whom the Germans had tried to label mercenaries because they were paid instead of being conscripted. Corcoran would speculate that Housman’s words had been decisive in spurring Roosevelt to act. The proposal clearly violated the spirit and probably the letter of the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress between 1935 and 1939, but this wasn’t an administration that felt constrained by the letter of the law. The president “had a tendency to think in terms of right and wrong, instead of terms of legal and illegal,” as his attorney general, Robert Jackson, put it. The plan for military men to resign and join the special air unit was approved. The legend was that Roosevelt himself signed an “unpublicized executive order” on April 15, 1941, as Chennault put it, but Roosevelt would have been far too careful to put his signature on such an explosive document. Martha Byrd wrote, “No such order was signed by the President. His consent was verbal; specifics were handled” by aides. A few aides were dispatched to meet with the military brass and set up clearance for the pilots to leave for China. In a confidential March 1941 memo, Hap Arnold signed off on the proposal. The pilots would have one-year contracts with CAMCO, “an American firm,” but this would be treated as akin to military service; “the year’s absence will be considered as a year of duty as far as promotion is concerned.”

(Kleiner 2018, 69-70)

Whenever the men needed a wholesome touch of comfort in the Burmese jungle, they’d join an American missionary couple, Chester and Alice Klein, for Sunday-night dinners. They were homey affairs that would be the setting for one of the more influential developments in the identity of the American Volunteer Group. Chester had served in the U. S. Army in France during the Great War, and the Ohio native had later spent over twenty years in Burma before becoming famous among Chennault’s men for his homemade gin. 

After dinner one night in November 1941, their guests were sitting in the living room having a drink, when one of the pilots happened to pick up the Kleins copy of an English-language newspaper, the Illustrated Weekly of India, which had an Australian P-40 on the cover. The nose of that P-40 was painted to look like it had the face of a shark, giving the pilots an idea for a redecorating project.

The next morning, a few of the pilots picked up some chalk from Chennault’s classroom and headed down to the flight line on their bikes. They sketched the outline of what they’d seen across the nose of the P-40s in the photo-marking where the wide-open mouth and fearsome teeth would go-before asking Chennault what he thought. Not only did he like it, he wanted the design painted on the whole fleet as a distinct marker of the American Volunteer Group. They set about painting the side of every plane with a nose that looked like a shark’s snout and a beady shark eye above the mouth. Head on, it looked like the plane was coming to eat you alive: the intake at the front of the nose was like the gaping maw that a shark’s prey would disappear into. The pilots could never have imagined how iconic those faces would become in the months, years, and decades to come. Chennault couldn’t wait to get his shark-nosed planes into battle.

The shark faces gave no indication of the nationality of the P-40, but the twelve-pointed star underneath the wings, the distinctive “Blue Sky with a White Sun,” made clear that they belonged to Nationalist China.

(Kleiner 2018, 96-97)

Though the members of the AVG were largely unaware of it, their unit was also becoming somewhat famous back in the United States. YANKS SMASH ENEMY OVER CHINA read one headline the day after the December 20 raid. 

Some of the men’s local newspapers ran brief profiles of them based on the telegrams they sent home, their victory hailed when there was little good news elsewhere about the war. A number of different names for the group began to appear in the press as journalists young American pilots were to determine exactly who these attempted and what they were doing in China. They were sometimes identified by their semiofficial title, the American Volunteer Group, but also came to be known by a catchier name: the “Flying Tigers.” On December 29, 1941, Time ran a small piece with no byline titled BLOOD FOR THE TIGERS, which described how “the Flying Tigers swooped, let the Japanese have it” in the skies over Kunming. That laudatory article appears to be the first time that the term “Flying Tigers” was used in print as a name for the AVG. It was, on its face, somewhat incongruous, given that the P-40s were painted to look like sharks, not jungle cats. Chennault later claimed he had no knowledge of the origin of the name “Flying Tigers” and was “astonished” to see it in the press. Some would attribute the designation to the Chinese newspapermen who had watched the battle in Kunming and had used it as a term of praise. Others argued (and were likely right) that the term was a clever marketing ploy created by Thomas Corcoran and the team in Washington to gin up newspaper coverage for the group’s exploits. Whatever its source, “Flying Tigers” would be the name by which the American Volunteer Group would now be known by the general public.

At a time when the navy was still clearing up the destruction at Pearl Harbor, Americans were desperate for stories that could give them some hope for the long war ahead. The triumph of these American pilots over the Japanese bombers in the skies of China provided much-needed inspiration, and their leader, the “lean, hardbitten, taciturn Colonel Claire L. Chennault,” as Time described him, seemed just the hero they’d been looking for.

(Kleiner 2018, 120-121)

It was estimated that some ten thousand people were killed in the raid on Paoshan. Among the dead was Ben Foshee, a Flying Tigers pilot who had been driving a truck on the retreat from Loiwing. After the attack, Chinese villagers would find unexploded bombs that were filled with a “yellow waxy substance [with] many live flies struggling to fly away,” as one Chinese witness described them. These “maggot bombs” were filled with the bacteria that carried cholera, and the bombers would return again to carry out more of these attacks. Historians estimate that around two hundred thousand people would ultimately die from the disease in Yunnan Province.

(Kleiner 2018, 189)

If China fell, the consequences could be grave. American policy was to ensure that China stayed in the war because Japanese forces might otherwise be freed to fight in the Pacific. The defeat of China might also give way to a Japanese invasion of India at a moment when Nazi forces could launch a successful campaign across North Africa.

(Kleiner 2018, 190)

Chennault was now facing the end of his time with the Flying Tigers. A man of few words, he didn’t share his pride in his pilots with them, though he poured out his emotions in a letter to a friend in Louisiana: “I’ve seen my companions die suddenly and violently… all of them are boys with whom I’ve worked and whom I’d grown to love as my own blood…. I am compelled to see them go out to meet death, but powerless to aid them to avoid it.” He was indebted to these pilots, and later acknowledged that “the AVG gave me the greatest opportunity an air officer ever had-to collect and train a group like that with complete freedom of action. It afforded me enormous satisfaction.”

He did think wistfully about a simpler life back home, but not seriously: “Right now, after five years of my work, I’d cheerfully trade my gun for a plow and hoe. However, being unable to do that and not knowing much about a plow anyway, guess I’ll just go on using the gun until the affair is finished.” A return to Louisiana for a retirement of hunting, fishing, and time with family wasn’t imminent.

Still, it meant a great deal to Chennault that Louisianans were cheering him in fighting this war. A “Buy a Bomber for Chennault” campaign had been undertaken in the state. Though Chennault cabled that he “would be delighted to receive the Louisiana Bomber,” the War Department informed the committee that the bombers had already been allocated, and that even a single plane cost far more than the paltry sum they could offer. Instead, they sent the money they raised to Madame Chiang to assist Chinese orphans.

Chennault found satisfaction in his growing fame, but he knew that reputation wouldn’t help him much now that he’d given up his independence to once again be part of the army. He was already amassing a litany of grievances about how he was being treated by the army brass. His first major complaint was the Doolittle raid. On April 18, 1942, B-25s under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle bombed Tokyo and then crash-landed in China. The Japanese had captured eight of the downed airmen. Three were ultimately executed and one died in captivity. Chennault was peeved that the B-25s had been lost and that he couldn’t use them for his own missions. “If I had been notified,” he later wrote, “a single AVG command ground radio station plugged into the East China net could have talked most of the raiders into a friendly field. My bitterness over that bit of bungling has not eased with the passing years.” Apparently the Army Air Forces brass wanted to avoid notifying Chennault about the raid because of concerns that, given his close ties to the Chinese, word of the attack might be leaked.

Chennault was struggling to come to terms with the fact that he was losing his status as the foremost American military leader fighting in the China-Burma-India Theater. B-17 bombers had begun arriving for the Tenth Air Force based in India, which could carry out attacks that Chennault could only dream of with his P-40s, and which made him feel that he had been overlooked. “Apparently the only people who realized our acute need for bombers were my fellow citizens of Louisiana, ” he wrote.

(Kleiner 2018, 193-194)

The memory of World War II, and the young men who fought in it, receded as the decades wore on. New wars came to claim new warriors, and those from the Greatest Generation grew gray, paunchy, and arthritic. And like their old leader, they passed away, one by one. Their obituaries were featured in publications like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, reminders of when young Americans had dared to undertake bold deeds.

But the last of the Flying Tigers wanted one final victory-recognition that they had been on active duty and were not just mercenaries, as many had considered them. Finally, in 1991, a Pentagon special service board reviewed the old documents and concluded that the AVG members had indeed qualified as a bona fide part of the American war effort. They found a secret army report from 1942 that explained: “To avoid a breach of international law, the entire project was organized as a commercial venture.” The lawyer representing the AVG vets put it in terms that could be more easily understood: the AVG “makes the Iran-Contra affair look like a small-scale operation.”

Tex Hill was as proud as ever of what they had accomplished. “We have a record that is second to none,” he said. “Nobody will ever match that again.”

At the 1996 AVG reunion in Dallas, each pilot was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross, and all the ground crew received Bronze Stars. As the surviving Tigers slowly made their way across the stage to receive their long overdue medals, some needed canes or walkers, but the eighty-one-year-old Hill walked without assistance. Air Force Chief of Staff General Ronald Fogleman pinned a medal on each man’s lapel. One pilot who attended was Ken Jernstedt, who had been a state senator in Oregon after the war. He had lost his vision, and as he told an interviewer: “I’ve got to be the only person to get one of those [medals] late and with a seeing eye dog.”

(Kleiner 2018, 234-235)

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References

Kleiner, Samuel M. 2018. The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots who Waged a Secret War Against Japan. N.p.: Viking.

ISBN 978-0-399-56413-0