Flying Tiger: Chennault of China

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Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.

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FLYING TIGER: Chennault of China

ROBERT LEE SCOTT, Jr.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

INTRODUCTION 5

1 8

2 14

3 25

4 30

5 40

6 45

7 48

8 58

9 72

10 85

11 95

12 103

13 114

14 118

15 124

16 140

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 150

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to those Americans who recognized the cancer of Communism long, long ago—men such as General Claire Chennault and Merian C. Cooper, his chief of staff.

INTRODUCTION

BY General George C. Kenney, U.S.A.F. (retired)

Flying Tiger, with the subtitle Chennault of China, by Robert Lee Scott, Jr., is basically the story of a rebel whose concepts as to the use of air power often clashed with the orthodox and standardized teachings of the military schools of his time.

Since the days of Alexander the Great military leaders using surprise tactics that were not in the books have won battles and wars. Opposing generals complained that Napoleon was a bandit who knew nothing about the accepted rules of warfare. MacArthur’s spectacular landing at Inchon, Korea, and the seizure of Seoul, the capital, were made against the advice and pleadings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States.

In time of war the rebel against accepted doctrine who wins is decorated, promoted, and hailed as a great military captain, but in time of peace the nonconformist is looked upon as a troublemaker. He is seldom marked for promotion to higher rank and is generally retired or induced to resign.

The advent of aviation in the military picture introduced a series of bitter controversies. To army commanders, the air-plane was just something to help the foot soldier win the war. To the admirals, it was an adjunct of the fleet to aid in winning a naval engagement. Any possibility of air power playing a decisive part in war was ridiculed, and the proponents of air power were forced to conform or were eliminated. The Italian Douhet, the apostle of all-out air warfare, did a tour in prison for his heretical ideas. Billy Mitchell was tried, found guilty, and resigned. He was condemned on the charge of making statements to the prejudice of good discipline, but to the aviators the real reason for his trial and conviction was that his ideas differed from those accepted as doctrine by the War Department.

After Mitchell’s departure the aviators themselves tended to standardize their ideas. Speeds and rates of climb doubled, bomber firepower was greatly increased, ranges and bomb loads quadrupled, but tactics remained static. The only lesson from World War I that should have influenced their thinking was unaccountably discarded. The fighter airplane in that conflict had played havoc with the unescorted bomber, but by 1930 the accepted doctrine was that the bomber could function in spite of enemy fighters and that it no longer needed escort. The fighter plane seemed to be on the way out. Owing to the lack of interest in the development of this type, it was not long before we saw the ludicrous situation in which our standard bombers were actually faster and carried more firepower than the fighters.

There were rebels who cried out against this trend. One of the most vociferous was a young lieutenant named Claire Lee Chennault. He almost had to be a rebel. His heritage practically decided his destiny. The family was Huguenot, driven from France to America back in 1778. On his mother’s side was Sam Houston of Texas and San Jacinto. His father’s family tree included another outstanding rebel by the name of Robert E. Lee.

Chennault began preaching his doctrine of the employment of fighters which, later on in World War II, proved that the air victory depended upon the proper employment of this type. Reduced to simple terms it was: first, detection; second, interception; and third, destruction. To accomplish detection an information service had to be set up. The fighters had to be directed to the point of interception from a ground control. Neither of these two services existed, and only the rebels in the fighter ranks led by Chennault seemed to be interested in developing them. The dogfighting tactics of individual fighter pilots armed with a pair of machine guns synchronized to fire between the blades of the propeller were still being taught. Chennault wanted more firepower, and he wanted to have team play with his fighters instead of individual action.

Although he worked out and proved his theories, first mathematically by himself and finally with fellow pilots as volunteers demonstrating the efficacy of well-directed team play, his arguments fell on deaf ears. A tour at the Air Force Tactical School was supposed to get the rebel properly indoctrinated, but the idea backfired. He was even made an instructor at the school, possibly in the hope that he would maintain the dignity of the teaching profession and tend toward at least a degree of conformity. The end could have been predicted. In 1937, Captain Claire L. Chennault was retired as physically disqualified for flying duty. He was partially deaf at forty-seven.

That year, Madame Chiang Kai-shek persuaded him to take on the job of training and organizing the Chinese Air Force. At last he had a chance to put his ideas into effect in a real shooting war. Chennault consistently refused to publicize his own score, but there is plenty of evidence that he personally accounted for around thirty enemy pilots who lost out trying to dispute the air with the rebel from the bayous of Louisiana.

His organization of the American Volunteer Group—known better as the Flying Tigers—and their accomplishments under his leadership, followed by his series of victories as a major general commanding the 14th Air Force in China have become a part of air history. His fighter tactics are accepted even today as models. With a handful of aircraft, constantly starved for fuel, bombs, spare parts, and replacements and opposed and hampered by the antiquated thinking of his army superiors, Chennault’s achievements are without parallel in the story of air power in World War II. In no other theater was so much destruction caused to the enemy by so small a force.

In 1945, just before the Japanese surrender, the opposition finally prevailed against him. The Japanese feared him, the Chinese adored him, but his own country deprived him of his command and ordered him home. He was not even allowed to stand on the deck of the battleship Missouri with all the other senior army, navy, and air commanders in the war against Japan, that day on September 2, 1945, when the Mikado’s representatives signed on the dotted line and brought hostilities to a close.

Among other things, Chennault’s insistence that the Chinese Communists were a threat, as well as the Japanese, had brought him into conflict with his army superiors in the theater and in Washington. Chennault had lived with the Chinese, he had fought side by side with them, he had enjoyed their confidence; and, shrewd analyst that he was, it is reason able to suppose that he knew the situation in China, but his advice was ignored. To him, Mao Tse-tung and his gang were Reds, closely allied with Moscow, not the harmless agrarians that some of our starry-eyed experts called them. To him, they were no more to be trusted than events have since proved them to be. If we had gone along with his recommendations it is quite conceivable that China today would be the traditional friend of the United States that she used to be, rather than a tool of the Kremlin, dedicated to the conquest of the world and the enforcement of the dictates of communism by the slave-labor camp and the firing squad.

Chennault retired soon after the war, went back to China, and continued to serve the Nationalist Government in the struggle against the Reds. In 1957 he returned to the United States to undertake a fight against his last enemy—cancer.

In July 1958 the Flying Tiger made his last flight. It was from his home in Louisiana to Arlington National Cemetery. Just before his death he was promoted to lieutenant general. He was buried with full military honors. Ambassadors, generals, and former officers and enlisted men who had served under him were there to pay their respects. An air force base at Lake Charles, Louisiana, now bears his name.

This story of Chennault of China is well worth reading. It is written by one of his devoted followers who was there and who knows what he is writing about.

FLYING TIGER

1

They were tall men mostly, or at least tall men predominated. And slow-drawling Southerners predominated too, until you got the strange feeling that all the American Volunteer Group were tall, lean, lazy-acting Texans. But in reality they came from forty-one states; from Maine to California, and from Washington to Florida. They were fairly young men, and all were at least moderately touched by the spirit of adventure, the imagined spell of far-off places, and the mystic sound of ancient names recalled from grammar school’s Tarr & McMurry’s Geography.

There was dough in the proposition, too—good green American dollars deposited to their credit in a New York bank, and that was why some of them were there. But not all of them. For the best of them, and even some of the mediocre ones, would have done the same even if there had been no money. All they wanted was the adventure, and to have a fighter plane to fly, and a man like Chennault to work for and to be their friend as well as their boss. And there was plenty of work to do. For they had come to China at the very darkest hour of that nation.

I suppose what brought them there all began on a summer night in the year 1937, the seventh of July to be exact. The village of Lukouchiao in far North China was peaceful. A group of Chinese men and women and a few children were standing on the Marco Polo Bridge. Some of them were singing, and some were talking, and the children were playing about the marble dragons that were supposed to protect the bridge. Not far away some two hundred Japanese soldiers were engaged in their customary illegal maneuvers. Suddenly they simply maneuvered across the little bridge past the peaceful people and stopped at the gates of the town.

We demand to search the place, the lieutenant commanding the soldiers of the Japanese Emperor said. One of our men is missing.

You have no right, the Chinese captain of the garrison replied, just as you have no right to carry out your maneuvers here. I refuse.

Those were the only words exchanged, for then bullets took the place of words. A shot came from the Japanese soldiers, followed by shots from the Chinese garrison. In another moment the dead were falling—the first dead of World War II.

While the rest of the world stood by—calmly disinterested—the Japanese Army overran Lukouchiao and pushed on boldly to Tientsin and Peiping, then farther south and west along the only rail line of North China all the way to the Yellow River. By early August, Shanghai was invaded, and before our world realized it almost half of China was dominated by the Japanese. On September 13 China complained to the Assembly of the League of Nations that the Japanese had committed aggression, But the League didn’t bother about it very much, nor did America. War was remote from our world.

All China was in turmoil. It was on the move. Old faces and young faces too—the lined faces of the old and the smooth faces of the young, the pale faces of the scholar, the sunburned faces of the fanner, and the toil-streaked faces of the peasant—were all stumbling somewhere in a kind of daze, barely keeping ahead of the advancing Japanese. On they went across rice paddies and over the rolling plains and the jagged peaks of the mountains. They were students, businessmen, farmers, coolies, secretaries, beggars, bandits, and harlots. All with a common purpose now—to escape the barbarian. They were short and tall, fat and emaciated. There were the sick and the well, the rich and the poor. They had all heard the words, or at least about the words, of Chiang Kai-shek, that China has reached the last limit of endurance. Now we must fight the Japanese to the bitter end.

A month later at the League of Nations, Ambassador Davis said that peaceful means must be sought to end the China conflict. The British and the French seconded his motion. The Italians warned all in hearing not to interfere in the conflict. Then a few days later the Nine-Power Treaty Conference sent Japan a conciliatory message inviting her to exchange views regarding the Chinese question. It was a question not a war.

So the Japanese kept right on. Soon the Chinese abandoned Shanghai and sadly watched the Japanese move in. Chiang Kai-shek transferred his headquarters to Hankow. On December 12 Japanese shells sank the U.S. gunboat Panay and several American oil barges in the Yangtze River above Nanking. The Japanese apologized profusely for this error, and at the same time the pro-Japanese administration in Peiping announced it had restored the old name of Peking to Peiping. Now all was serene under the New Order of the Greater East Asia, and there’d be no more incidents.

Far away from all this, in the United States, Americans swallowed Japanese excuses. But occasionally Americans would sit up in horror at newsreels they felt almost abused to witness in their comfortable theaters, newsreels such as the one of a Chinese baby sitting in the middle of a bombed street with its face smudged with smoke and blood, contorted in pain. Over the strange thundering of the bursting bombs they could hear the child’s screams on the sound track. It was all so unreal and so improbable it just couldn’t be so.

By 1938 that superiorly trained and superbly equipped Japanese war machine controlled most of China that was worth controlling. A nation had fallen to an aggressor without the rest of the world raising an eyebrow, much less a hand. The League of Nations was gone with a new wind, and so were China’s main railroads. The Japanese had sealed off the Yangtze and Yellow rivers and thus tied the string on the rice bowl of China. They had confiscated 95 per cent of China’s industry; they had possession of the major seaports and held the key areas to all the worthwhile provinces.

Nineteen-forty came and the year went into 1941. During all that time China struggled on alone and almost ignored. The National Government had been pushed back to the battered city of Chungking which sat precariously atop the backbone of a mountain standing at a hairpin bend on one of the loops of the Yangtze, For all practical purposes, a nation was completely isolated.

And of course the Japanese hadn’t stopped with China. They’d pushed on to the south and were in control of most of Indochina; they had forced the British to close the Burma Road leading up as a final supply line to the Chinese from Rangoon; and war between Germany and Russia had dried up the trickle of supplies which had come across the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Last of all now, as though to sound the knell of a dying nation, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, and with the fall of Hong Kong went the only remaining air route between the China coast and the vast interior.

Inside there was internal discoid, a completely disintegrating political machinery. China had a Kuomintang government headed by Chiang Kai-shek and a Communist government with its army led by the war lord, Chu Teh. These two factions were at odds, and it would be years before the story of the discord found sympathetic Western ears, and by that time it would be too late. How could anyone have understood in 1941 that Chiang knew neither he nor anyone else could do business with Communists? Later on we were to try to advocate this very impossibility. General Marshall would go to China, and Math all his experience and all his intelligence he would simply recommend that Chiang Kai-shek and Mao sit themselves down at a conference table and patch up their differences.

But in 1941, the Nationalist or Kuomintang Army faced the Communists of Chu Teh along a two-thousand-mile front. It was a stalemate, but already ugly communism was proving to be the cancer of China, long before it was to become so for the rest of us. The best Nationalist troops couldn’t be used to face the Japanese, for they had to hold off Communist Chinese. A Nationalist Air Force existed only on paper, and the people of China were in the midst of a period of suffering we couldn’t understand.

Out of all this there came one tremendous achievement that the entire world should remember forever. This was the migration inland of some fifty million Chinese. It was a mass exodus, perhaps the largest in history. In this modern hegira every man, woman, and child followed the only road open to them, the treacherous and forbidding route of the tortuous Yangtze. They transported on their very backs—for their own legs were all the transportation they had—six hundred factories from one city alone. This human chain dragged boilers fifteen feet in diameter along that terrible two-thousand-mile obstacle course and up the steepest hill of all, up the mountaintop that was Chungking. They so stripped the metal from the city of Hankow that not even the manholes, of the sewers were left in the streets for the pillaging Japanese invaders.

But courage alone was not enough. Mere heart and hands and blood and tears are not enough to stop a modern military horde. All it did was to prove the glaring lack of material out there, and that the world of ours, as well as that of the remote Chinese, was to change.

Public opinion at home was the first thing to change. In the spring of 1941 America suddenly reversed her hands-off policy advocated by pacifist demands and committed herself to lend-lease for China. In the autumn the United States forced Britain to open the Burma Road. The first lend-lease items began to move into Southwest China. A few tons a day were a mere pittance of what was needed, and much of that never actually arrived, but it was something anyway—winding up from the port of Rangoon across the mountains by way of the twisting track to Kunming in the exile province of Yunnan. It was a long and costly line of communications, but nevertheless it was the only contact China had with the outside world, and so was worth any sacrifice.

Just as the lend-lease go-ahead was given and the Burma Road was reopened, there came upon the scene a remarkable group of tall, drawling men. They called themselves the First American Volunteer Group. There were two hundred of them, and they looked like a bunch of pirates, or western badmen, and they were just about as hard to handle. They rode antiquated old P-40 fighter planes instead of horses, and when anyone wondered at them, the man who had organized them and caused them to be there created more wonder. His name was Chennault.

This strange group of wild men sailed into Rangoon Harbor on a neutral ship. They were new to the East, but Chennault had been out there since 1937. Ever since then he’d been building airdromes and arguing with the people back in the U.S.A. that what he was doing was not just for China but was for America as well. He’d literally fought for these men, and he’d literally moved mountains and overcome prejudices and broken the strongest of diplomatic red tape to get them out there. Now he had his American Flying Foreign Legion, and he had the tacit approval wrung from the U.S. State Department, with assists from President Roosevelt, to use them. They came from the U.S. Army Air Forces, the Marine Corps, and the Navy. They were pilots, communications specialists, and mechanics, and they came to fly for China and defend the Burma Road and fight the Japanese if necessary-mercenary air soldiers, a Foreign Legion of the Sky.

For years the Imperial Japanese Air Force with thousands of planes had been using China as a kind of human target to test its bombing and strafing. They had flown in lower and lower over the years, actually doing acrobatics and flaunting a show of force to a people who had no guns, much less airplanes, and who were powerless to defend themselves against modern weapons. So they flew where they wanted to fly and bombed what they wished to bomb. They came in the moonlight so often that a full moon in China was called a bombers’ moon. They shattered the cities and they strafed the schools and what hospitals there were, and they took special delight in working on simple coolies in the rice paddies and then laughing arrogantly at the dead. No planes ever rose to combat them for the simple reason there were none. And there were, of course, no anti-aircraft guns and thus no flak to dodge or endure. They flew without escort of fighter planes because the bombers needed none, and the gunners sat up there, flying along for the ride.

But that was before these wild Americans came to China as the fulfillment of the dream of their leader. Chennote Chiang Chun, as the Chinese called Chennault, had visualized this First American Volunteer Group for years. He must have thought it was never going to materialize, so great had been his frustrations. Now his men had arrived, and with a burst of imaginative genius they tagged themselves the Flying Tigers. Rather, they heard the Chinese call them Tigers, and a couple of their pilots had seen an RAF squadron of Tomahawks decorated with sharks’ teeth along the nose of the plane under the prop spinner and covering the gap of the prestone radiator. Soon they had taken brushes and converted their drab P-40s into grinning mouths of tiger sharks. A leering bloody tongue was added, and a single baleful eye of red and white just aft of the propeller and forward of the exhaust stacks. As time went by they learned, too, that the Japanese inherently feared the shark as symbolic of evil; while the Chinese had looked upon the saber-toothed tiger of Fukien as their national symbol from time immemorial. So it was that the American Volunteer Group, as they blazed a trail of glory across the China sky, combined all this and came to be known as the Flying Tigers.

Their organizer was a retired U.S. Army Air Corps captain. He was considered partially deaf since his eardrums had thickened, a common occurrence in the early days of flying with the noise