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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
These American mercenaries are revered in China. Their relatives are
among the few US invitees to Xi’s WWII military parade
By Brad Lendon, CNN
Updated:
1:28 AM EDT, Mon September 1, 2025
Source: CNN
Consider this job offer:
A one-year contract to live and work in China, flying, repairing and
making airplanes. Pay is as much as $16,725 a month with 30 days off a
year. Housing is included, and you’ll get an extra $700 a month for
food. And there’s an extra $11,000 for every Japanese airplane you
destroy – no limit.
That’s the deal – in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars – that a few
hundred Americans took in 1941 to become the heroes, and some would
even say the saviors, of China.
Those American pilots, mechanics and support personnel became members
of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), later known as the Flying
Tigers.
The group’s warplanes featured the gaping, tooth-filled mouth of a
shark on their nose, a fearsome symbol still used by some US military
aircraft to this day.
The symbolic fierceness was backed up by AVG pilots in combat. The
Flying Tigers are credited with destroying as many as 497 Japanese
planes while losing only 73.
Today, despite US-China tensions, those American mercenaries are still
revered in China.
“China always remembers the contribution and sacrifice made to it by
the United States and the American people during the World War II,”
says an entry on of China’s state-run newspaper People’s Daily
Online.
The bond is such that the daughter and granddaughter of the Flying
Tigers’ founder are among the few Americans invited to Wednesday’s
military parade in Beijing commemorating the end of World War II.
The formation of the Flying Tigers
In the late 1930s, 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.
Leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had been able to loosely unite China’s
warlords under a central government, later hired American Claire
Chennault, a retired US Army captain, to form an air force.
Chennault first spent a few years putting together an air raid warning
network and building airbases across China, . In 1940, he was
dispatched to the United States – still a neutral party – to find
pilots and planes that could defend China against Japan.
With good contacts in the administration of US President Franklin
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.
A deal was secured to get 100 Curtiss P-40B fighters built for Britain
sent to China instead.
In his memoirs, Chennault wrote that the P-40s he got lacked a modern
gun sight.
His pilots were “aiming their guns through a crude, homemade,
ring-and-post gun sight instead of the more accurate optical sights
used by the Air Corps and the Royal Air Force,” he wrote.
What the P-40 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-40 would lose.
A ragtag group of fliers
The pilots Chennault enrolled were far from the cream of the crop.
Ninety-nine fliers, along with support personnel, made the trip to
China in the fall of 1941, .
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 or because they were simply
bored.
Perhaps the best known of the Flying Tigers, – around whom the
1970’s TV show “Black Sheep Squadron” was based – was in it for
the money.
“Having gone through a painful divorce and responsible for an ex-wife
and several small children, he had ruined his credit and incurred
substantial debt, and the Marine Corps had ordered him to submit a
monthly report to his commander on how he accounted for his pay in
settling those debts,” according to a US Defense Department history
of the group.
Chennault had to teach his disparate group how to be fighter pilots –
and to fight as a group – essentially from scratch.
Training was rigorous and deadly. Three pilots were killed early in
accidents.
During one training day, which became known as “Circus Day,” eight
P-40s were damaged as pilots landed too hard, or the ground crew taxied
too fast, causing collisions.
Chennault expressed his disappointment at his group’s first combat
mission against Japanese bombers attacking the AVG base in Kunming,
China, on December 20, 1941. He thought the pilots lost their
discipline.
“They tried near-impossible shots and agreed later that only luck had
kept them from either colliding with each other or shooting each other
down,” the Defense Department history says.
Still, they shot down three Japanese bombers, losing only one fighter
that ran out of fuel and crash-landed.
Establishing a legend
The pilots quickly conquered their steep learning curve.
A few days after Kunming, they were deployed to Rangoon, the capital of
British colonial Burma and a vital port for the supply line that got
allied war materiel to Chinese troops facing the Japanese army.
Japanese bombers came at the city in waves over 11 days during the
Christmas and New Year’s holidays. The Flying Tigers ripped holes
through the Japanese formations and cemented their fame.
“The AVG had officially knocked 75 enemy aircraft out of the skies
with an undetermined number of probable kills,” . “The AVG losses
were two pilots and six aircraft.”
The Flying Tigers spent 10 weeks total in Rangoon, never fielding more
than 25 P-40s.
“This tiny force met a total of a thousand-odd Japanese aircraft over
Southern Burma and Thailand. In 31 encounters they destroyed 217 enemy
planes and probably destroyed 43. Our losses in combat were four pilots
killed in the air, one killed while strafing and one taken prisoner.
Sixteen P-40’s were destroyed,” Chennault wrote in his memoir.
Despite the Flying Tigers’ heroics in the air, allied ground forces
in Burma could not hold off the Japanese. Rangoon fell in March and the
AVG retreated north into Burma’s interior.
But they’d bought vital time for the allied war effort, tying down
Japanese planes that could have been used in India or elsewhere in
China and the Pacific.
Claim to fame
Though news didn’t travel quickly in 1941-42, the United States –
still reeling from the devastating – was eager for heroes. The Flying
Tigers fit the bill.
Republic Pictures cast John Wayne in the leading role of “Flying
Tigers” in 1942. Movie posters showed a shark-toothed P-40 diving in
attack mode.
Meanwhile, the AVG’s sponsors in Washington asked the Walt Disney
company to make a logo.
Disney artists came up with “a winged Bengal Tiger jumping through a
stylized ‘V for Victory’ symbol,” the US history says.
The logo didn’t include the iconic shark mouth featured on the Flying
Tigers’ aircraft.
Chennault wrote that the shark mouth didn’t originate with his group,
but was copied from British P-40 fighters in North Africa, which in
turn may have copied them from Germany’s Luftwaffe.
“How the term Flying Tigers was derived from the shark-nosed P-40’s
I never will know,” he wrote.
Whose country to fight for
When the US entered the war, US military leaders wanted the Flying
Tigers assimilated into the US Army Air Corps.
But the pilots themselves either wanted to go back to their original
services – many came from the Navy or Marine Corps – or wanted to
stay as civilian contractors of the Chinese government, where the pay
was much better.
Most told Chennault they’d quit before doing what Washington wanted.
When the Army threatened to draft them as privates if they didn’t
volunteer, those who’d considered signing on opted out.
Chennault was made a brigadier general in the US Army and agreed that
the Flying Tigers would become a US military outfit on July 4, 1942.
Though the Flying Tigers continued to wreak havoc on the Japanese in
the spring of 1942 – striking ground targets and aircraft from China
to Burma to Vietnam – it was clear the force was entering its waning
days, according to US military history.
The AVG flew its last mission on the day it would cease to exist, July
4.
Four Flying Tiger P-40s faced off against a dozen Japanese fighters
over Hengyang, China. The Americans shot down six of the Japanese with
no losses of their own, according to a US history.
A contribution never forgotten
Despite frosty relations with Washington in recent years, the bond that
American mercenaries made with China 80 years ago remains untarnished.
There are at least half a dozen museums dedicated to or containing
exhibits about the Flying Tigers in China, and they’ve been the
subject of contemporary movies and cartoons.
The Flying Tiger Heritage Park is on the site of an old airfield in
Guilin where Chennault once had his command post in a cave.
In the US, the website for that bears Chennault’s name sums up what
he hoped his legacy would be at the top of its mainpage, using the last
lines of the general’s memoir:
“It is my fondest hope that the sign of the Flying Tiger will remain
aloft just as long as it is needed and that it will always be
remembered on both shores of the Pacific as the symbol of two great
peoples working toward a common goal in war and peace.”
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