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    AVG Confidential: A Flying Tiger Reports to the U.S. Navy, April 1942
    AVG Confidential: A Flying Tiger Reports to the U.S. Navy, April 1942
    AVG Confidential: A Flying Tiger Reports to the U.S. Navy, April 1942
    Ebook57 pages48 minutes

    AVG Confidential: A Flying Tiger Reports to the U.S. Navy, April 1942

    By Noel Bacon

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    In the spring of 1942, Noel Bacon returned from China, one of Claire Chennault's "Flying Tigers" who had won fame as the defenders of Burma. He had been credited with three air-to-air victories over Rangoon, and shared the credit for another Japanese fighter destroyed on the ground during a raid into Thailand. Recruited from "Fighting Four" on USS Ranger, Bacon had been an outstanding U.S. Navy aviator before he signed up for the American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force. The Navy and the Marine Corps were desperate to hear firsthand what Japanese pilots and planes were like, and on April 22, 1942, they sat down with Noel Bacon at the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington. Here is that interview, with an introduction, notes, photographs, and a postscript by Daniel Ford, who wrote the definitive history of the Flying Tigers. (About 13,000 words; with photographs. Revised and updated March 2022.)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWarbird Books
    Release dateMar 18, 2022
    ISBN9781502260130
    AVG Confidential: A Flying Tiger Reports to the U.S. Navy, April 1942

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      Book preview

      AVG Confidential - Noel Bacon

      AVG CONFIDENTIAL

      A Flying Tiger Reports to the U.S. Navy, April 1942

      (Book 5 of ‘Tales of the Flying Tigers’)

      Daniel Ford and Noel Bacon

      Chinese ideogram

      Warbird Books

      Revised and updated 2022

      Contents

      Noel Bacon and his P-40

      1 - On Becoming a Flying Tiger

      Bombers over Rangoon

      2 - The ‘Confidential’ Interview

      Inspecting a Ki-27 rudder

      3 - The Tigers Come Home

      Sources

      Copyright - Editor - Books

      Noel Bacon at Toungoo, September 1941

      1 - On Becoming a Flying Tiger

      LIKE MANY OF THE Flying Tigers of the Second World War, Noel Bacon was an engaging young man from the heartland of America. Born in June 1917, he grew up in Randalia (population 125 at the time, but only half as many today) in the flatlands of northeastern Iowa. Corn and soybeans were the crops that kept Randalia in business. Officially, it was a city, and his mother was the mayor. There were two boys in the family; their father died when they were small, and Mrs. Bacon later married a pharmacist from a neighboring town.

      Noel joined the Boy Scouts, played the clarinet, and joined the Randalia High School basketball team, such as it was. Less predictably, he had his first taste of flight. In 1930, when he was thirteen, he met Slim Freitag, who played the trombone for a mid-western dance band, and who also piloted a small plane owned by Charles Correll, then famous for playing Andy Brown in the nationally syndicated Amos ’n’ Andy sitcom. One of the first radio comedy series, the show was hugely popular in the 1930s and 1940s, but would be condemned as racist today, with white actors portraying sterotypical black residents of Harlem.

      Slim [Freitag] and I struck up a friendship, Noel recalled years later, and I would hitchhike into Chicago and spend a weekend with him. We would fly around Chicago in Charles Correll’s airplane, and I got enthused about flying. That’s how it all got started.

      Noel went off to Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls, now the University of Northern Iowa. Here he seems to have joined every organization in sight, including the marching band and the mostly male Pep squad. He also worked on the College Eye student newspaper, which a few years later would remember him this way:

      The young man is none other than smiling, taciturn Noel Bacon, the boy who in 1938, as head cheerleader for Teachers College, broke the ladies’ hearts, and set the stands yelling themselves hoarse for their alma mater.

      After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in commercial studies in June 1938, Noel taught high-school business classes for a year in Soldier, Iowa. This was a somewhat more substantial city than his hometown, north of Omaha, Nebraska.

      With Fighting Four

      In 1939, with war clouds over Europe and Asia, Noel followed the example of thousands of young Americans, leaving home to become a military pilot – in his case, a naval aviator. (The U.S. Navy reserved the title of pilot for the specialist who guides ships into harbor.) His brother Royden also went into Navy officer training about this time.

      Noel learned to fly at Pensacola, Florida, winning his wings of gold and an ensign’s commission in April 1940. His assignment was a good one, to America’s first purpose-built aircraft carrier, USS Ranger, which was then assigned to what was euphemistically called neutrality patrol, combing the Atlantic Ocean from Bermuda to Newfoundland.

      In the summer of 1940, the view from the White House was a bleak one. In Asia, Japan had set up a puppet government in Manchuria, fought a bloody border war with the Soviet Union, seized much of seacoast China and its fertile Yangtze River valley, and invaded what we now know as Vietnam, then the French colony of Indochina. In Europe, Germany had conquered most of the continent, leaving a few scraps to be taken by Italy and a larger portion by the Soviet Union. The only significant capitals still standing were

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