RELUCTANT ENEMY
Following a brutal and deadly dogfight in November 1944 with five Nakajima Ki-27b Royal Thai Air Force fighters, a young American P-38 pilot from the 449th Fighter Squadron wrote to his parents: “I didn’t even know we were at war with Thailand. Hell, I didn’t even know what Thailand was—I thought it was called Siam.”
His confusion is understandable. In July 1939, Siam had indeed changed its name to Thailand and, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, declared war on the United States. Confusion about Thailand’s role in World War II, however, lingers to the present. Many military history buffs are not even aware that Thailand sided with Japan, nor that Thailand was the target of numerous U.S. Army Air Forces bombing raids, including the first B-29 combat mission.
The strange story of the Thai–Japanese alliance during World War II is far more nuanced than the sketchy versions in most historical sources, where aerial battles between Royal Thai Air Force pilots and their U.S. Army Air Forces adversaries are relegated to footnotes or a few obscure paragraphs scattered among dozens of sources. Yet those clashes in the air are as compelling and powerful as any in the China-Burma-India (CBI) Theater and add a vital dimension to the traditional CBI story. They’re even more remarkable because the Royal Thai Air Force was a service with a double life—flying on behalf of the Japanese, while also helping to fight Japan as a secret collaborator of the CIA precursor, the Office of Special Services (OSS).
BY NOVEMBER 1941 the Thai government was certain that war was imminent between Japan and the United States. As the traditional buffer state between British Burma to the west and French Indochina to the east, Thailand resorted to doing what it did best: accommodation. That meant favoring the strongest power in the region, which most Thais viewed as Japan. Yet by training and association, Royal Thai Air Force (RTAF) sympathies rested more with the Americans than with the Japanese. This was in part because throughout the 1930s the United States had supplied almost all the RTAF’s combat aircraft. The best and brightest RTAF officers also trained in the United
