Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942

421 Pages·2007·3.03 MB·English

by  Daniel Ford

Flying Tigers
Claire Chennault and
His American Volunteers,
1941-1942
UPDATED AND REVISED EDITION
Daniel Ford
For
KATHARINE FORD LAIRD AND HER DAUGHTERS,
three bright lights of my life
Contents
Map: Burma Road, 1941–1942
Map: Free China, 1937–1942
Preface to the New Edition
Chapter 1 Presenting Colonel Chennault
Chapter 2 The Special Air Unit
Chapter 3 Too Good to Be True
Chapter 4 Looks Mean as Hell
Chapter 5 Flaming Till Hell Won’t Have It
Chapter 6 Such a Bright Red!
Chapter 7 He Just Went Spinning Away
Chapter 8 Leaning Forward
Chapter 9 They Fell in a Straight Line
Chapter 10 Hoffman Down and Dead
Chapter 11 Get the Heck Out of Here
Chapter 12 Did You Have Any Warning?
Chapter 13 Like a Movie, Only Better
Chapter 14 The Pilots’ Revolt
Chapter 15 Auction Sale at Loiwing
Chapter 16 Piss on Bissell
Chapter 17 Worse Than You Know
Chapter 18 Passing into History
Appendix 1: Identifying Japanese Aircraft
Appendix 2: Warplanes Used in Burma and China
Appendix 3: Victories Credited to AVG pilots
Sources
Index
BOOKS BY DANIEL FORD
Copyright
About the Publisher
Notes

Preface to the New Edition
or a scholarly look at events that happened a long time ago, Flying
F
Tigers: Claire Chennault and the American Volunteer Group was met
by an astonishing amount of flak when the Smithsonian Institution
Press published it in 1991. Author, publisher, and even the grave old
Institution—we all found ourselves accused of having sold out to the
Japanese.
Our sin, of course, was to bring the news that there’s a discrepancy
between Flying Tiger combat claims and the losses actually suffered by
Japanese air units in Southeast Asia and southwestern China. In its
simplest and most defensible version, the Flying Tiger legend holds that
sixty-seven volunteers, flying obsolete planes with Chinese markings,
destroyed almost three hundred Japanese aircraft in the air and on the
ground, while losing only four men in air-to-air combat.
But wait! As it’s most often published, the legend goes on to say that
the official tally includes only wrecks located on the ground or otherwise
proven, and that the number must be doubled to account for planes that
fell behind enemy lines or that lie forever uncounted in the rain forest or
beneath the waters of Martaban Bay. And if you were lucky enough to
get the Flying Tigers in an expansive mood, as I did for their 1989
reunion at Ojai, California, you’d be assured that Claire Chennault went
to Tokyo at the end of the war and learned in Japanese records that
they’d lost one thousand planes to the men he commanded in Burma and
China from December 1941 to July 1942. Indeed, the reunion program
that year contained an even more cheerful version of the AVG legend,
claiming 299 planes shot down “by official count,” plus “another known
240 Japanese aircraft,” plus “upwards of a thousand aircraft which could
not be confirmed officially.” More than 1,500 aircraft!
There are three things wrong with these reckonings. First, Chennault
didn’t visit Japan after the war. Second, he couldn’t have studied
Japanese records, because they were in poor shape and he didn’t know
the language. And third, the Japanese Army Air Force went to war in
Southeast Asia with fewer than 750 planes—with which it had to defeat
the Flying Tigers and the Royal Air Force in Burma and China while also
fighting (in concert with naval air forces) British Commonwealth
squadrons in Malaya, Dutch squadrons on Java and Borneo, and U.S. and
Filipino squadrons on Luzon. The JAAF couldn’t have lost 1,000 or 1,500
aircraft to the AVG, because it didn’t have that many to lose.
In fact, Japanese losses to the Flying Tigers amounted to 115, give or
take a handful—a finding that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Every World
War II air force, in every theater of war, came home believing it had
inflicted far more damage on the enemy than it had actually
accomplished. As a matter of fact, Japanese airmen in Southeast Asia put
in claims far more spectacular than those of the Flying Tigers—typically
five to one. At the other extreme, Royal Air Force pilots in the Battle of
Britain, equipped with gun cameras and fighting over open fields and
pastures, inflated their kills by a mere 56 percent.
How could it have been otherwise? Aerial combat in World War II was
a struggle in three dimensions, with the hard-pressed pilot doing his best
to dive away or lose himself in a cloud, and often with two or three
attackers firing at him. Opponents closed on one another at speeds of up
to 700 mph. Win or lose, if he had any sense at all, the pilot was
frightened half out of his skin. The wonder isn’t that he saw things
wrongly, even to the point of attacking friendly forces—the wonder is
that it didn’t happen more often. In the case of Allied squadrons in
Burma and China, their difficulties were compounded by the fact that
they often fought over enemy territory, or above the rain forest or open
water, making wrecks impossible to find.
As for using Japanese sources, after more than half a century a writer
shouldn’t have to apologize for that. No such skepticism is shown toward
German reports of their losses in the Battle of Britain, for example. And
though I was the first to compare Flying Tiger combat reports to those of
their opponents, I certainly wasn’t the first to work with Japanese
records. American researcher John Lundstrom made just such an
analysis for U.S. Navy pilots in the opening months of the Pacific War.
And the eminent British aviation writer Christopher Shores and his
colleagues did it repeatedly for RAF pilots and their adversaries in
Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. (As a result of his findings, Shores
was moved to write “A Radical Reassessment” for Air Classics magazine,
urging his fellow aviation writers to stop using such formulations as “X
Squadron sent fifteen of the Zeros crashing to the ground,” when all we
really know is that X Squadron claimed that many planes. Ironically, the
same magazine led the charge in attacking Flying Tigers as Japanese-
sponsored revisionism.) But those books were met with less fury,
probably because they involved a larger canvas, with many squadrons
and hundreds of pilots. With the Flying Tigers, each Japanese plane that
I traced back to its base in Thailand or Vietnam was a victory that might
be subtracted from somebody’s bonus account.
Then too, the U.S. military refused to recognize those combat victories
when the Tigers rejoined the armed forces in the summer of 1942. Nor
did it count their months with the Chinese Air Force as qualifying time
for promotion, retirement, or veterans’ benefits. That snub remained a
hot-button issue for Flying Tiger veterans for half a century, until it was
partly remedied in the 1990s.
In any event, with a few good-hearted exceptions, the surviving Tigers
—then numbering twenty pilots, plus eighty of the men and women
who’d supported them on the ground—roundly condemned the book, as
a defamation of Claire Chennault and the fighter group he readied for
combat in the fall of 1941.