100 Fair Pilots: The Men Who Became the Flying Tigers

By Daniel Ford

The Flying Tigers were the most famous fighter pilots ever to fly for the United States, yet they actually part of the Chinese Air Force. Who were these men, where did they come from, and what happened to them after their service with the American Volunteer Group? Novelist (and prize-winning historian) Daniel Ford answers those questions in this compelling account of the AVG and its commander.

 

"Boy," wrote Claire Chennault from China in 1938, "if the Chinese only had 100 good pursuit planes and 100 fair pilots, they'd exterminate the Jap air force!" It wasn't until 1941 that he began to make good on that prediction, persuading the White House to loan China the money to equip and recruit such a combat group, and to allow American airmen to fly for China. In the end, 109 pilots sailed for the Far East. This is their story.

 

Book 1 of the 'Tales of the Flying Tigers. Revised and updated March 2022

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warbird Books
• Release date: Dec 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781516346547

Daniel Ford

Daniel Ford has spent a lifetime reading and writing about the wars of the past hundred years, from the Irish rebellion of 1916 to the counter-guerrilla operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is best known for his history of the American Volunteer Group--the 'Flying Tigers' of the Second World War--and his Vietnam novel that was filmed as Go Tell the Spartans, starring Burt Lancaster. Most recently, he has turned to the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany and Soviet Russia. Most of his books and many shorter pieces are available in digital editions He lives and works in New Hampshire.

Book preview

Contents

Recruiting the Flying Tigers

100 Fair Pilots (plus 10)

About Those Combat Claims

Notes and Sources

Copyright

Newsletter

By the Same Author

Recruiting the Flying Tigers

CLAIRE CHENNAULT retired from the U.S. Army Air Corps as a captain and sailed for China in 1937 to become air advisor to the dictator Chiang Kai-shek. A few weeks after he arrived, the armed forces of Japan attacked China, first at the old capital of Beijing and then at the seaport of Shanghai where Chennault and most foreigners were based. He watched from the ground (and sometimes from the air) as Japanese fighter planes all but destroyed the Chinese Air Force. For more than two years, Russian planes and pilots kept China from defeat, but by 1940 the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin began withdrawing his air units, fearing they’d soon be needed to fend off a German invasion from the west.

Boy, Chennault had written to a friend in the U.S. Army Air Corps, early in the Sino-Japanese War, if the Chinese only had 100 good pursuit planes and 100 fair pilots, they’d exterminate the Jap air force! This was the formula he took with him to Washington in the fall of 1940, where he lobbied for an American unit to replace the Russians.

One hundred planes and pilots were duly authorized by the White House, the project to be financed by an American loan. The men would be released from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines and go to work for a front organization, the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company. About two hundred technicians and administrative staff would also be hired, mostly from the military but some from civilian life. Finally, CAMCO would sign up ten U.S. Army flight instructors to go to China and check out fledgling aviators for future training in the United States. With Chennault commanding both institutions — the American Volunteer Group and the Chinese Air Force Flight School — the barrier between them was very permeable, with one AVG pilot transferring to the flight school soon after he arrived, and eight of the check pilots eventually joining the combat squadrons.

For many of the military men, going to work for CAMCO and the CAF meant a tripling of their pay. As a further incentive, those who became fighter pilots were promised a combat bonus of $500 for every Japanese warplane shot down — the equivalent, in purchasing power, of at least $10,000 in our much depreciated greenbacks. (In 1940, a factory-fresh Plymouth could be had for $650, a Cadillac for $1,350.)

As matters turned out, one of Chennault’s fair pilots had flown as a mercenary during the Spanish Civil War. That hadn’t bothered the U.S. Army, and of course it didn’t bother the AVG recruiters. But the State Department felt differently. Americans weren’t supposed to fight in foreign armies, so with bureaucratic logic the department ruled that he couldn’t get a passport to join the Chinese Air Force since he’d violated his earlier passport by joining the Spanish Air Force! So it was that in the summer and fall of 1941, a total of 109 American pilots actually set sail for Burma, the entry port for China, in what AVG veterans like to regard as their country’s first clandestine military operation.

Some quit because the climate and living conditions in Burma, where the fighter pilots would train. Others may have gone home because they were frightened by the specifications of the new Type Zero Japanese Navy fighter, the Mitsubishi A6M, though as matters turned out they would never have met the Zero in combat. And one or two might have joined the AVG in order to get out of the U.S. military and go to work for an airline, a profession that seemed safer, less stressful, and more remunerative.

And three were killed in training accidents.

Of those who stayed and survived, not everyone had the right stuff to fly a Curtiss P-40 fighter — what the British Royal Air Force, from whose Lend-Lease allocation the AVG fighters were taken, called a Tomahawk. The P-40 had a thousand-horsepower engine, narrow landing gear, and a taildragger configuration that made it excruciatingly difficult to land, or even to taxi on the ground. In the end, Chennault had about sixty Tomahawk-qualified pilots when combat operations began that December.

The AVG training base at Kyedaw airfield near Toungoo, north of the capital city and seaport of Burma, was only a few minutes’ flying time from the Thai border. And the kingdom of Thailand was occupied by the Japanese on December 8, 1941, the same day (west of the International Date Line) that they bombed the Hawaiian islands and landed troops in Malaya and the Philippines. Honoring an earlier promise to the British, Chiang Kai-shek ordered that one AVG squadron — about twenty planes and planes, with a skeleton ground crew — go to Rangoon to help the Royal Air Force defend the city.

The other two squadrons flew off to Kunming in southwestern China, as did some critical staff, and most of the remaining personnel set off overland the Burma Road, China’s lifetime ever since the Japanese had cut off all other supply routes. A small force kept Kyedaw open as a backup and repair base for the squadron at Mingaladon airport outside Rangoon.

The fighting began on December 20 — at Kunming, to everyone’s surprise. Then Rangoon too came under attack, and the fliers of the American Volunteer Group won immortality as the &dquo;Flying Tigers." Over the next six months, British and Chinese armies would be defeated in Burma, and the AVG would fall back to China, to be replaced in July 1942 by uniformed airmen of the the U.S. Army’s 23rd Fighter Group.

Chennault of course was wrong in his prediction of what it would take to exterminate the Jap air force. Tens of thousands of planes and fair pilots — and almost four years of total war — would be needed for that. Like most westerners, he hugely underestimated the fighting and manufacturing ability of the Japanese, and he assumed that the fighters and bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy were the only weapons his pilots would have to worry about. In fact, the American Volunteer Group never met a navy fighter in combat, regularly mistaking the Imperial Army’s similar though less awesome Nakajima Hayabusa for the Zero.

But the job was done eventually, and it was the Flying Tigers — Chennault’s irregulars — who showed the way.

With every year that goes by, it seems, we learn a bit more about those 100 fair pilots and 10 flight instructors who went to Burma and China in the summer and fall of 1941. In consequence, this little encyclopedia will always be a work in progress. If you have anything to add about any of these men, please write or email me at the addresses given at the back of the book. — Daniel Ford, April 2020

100 Fair Pilots (plus 10)

A FIGHTER ACE, as understood in most air forces, is a pilot credited with five or more air-to-air victories. Over the past hundred years, some 60,000 men (and in recent years a few women) have flown fighter planes in U.S. service, of whom only 1,447 have earned the distinction of ace, including 19 of the AVG Flying Tigers. For each, I provide a small mug shot, usually from his AVG identification card, and I provide a list of his victories by date.

In the biographies that follow, the 100 men recruited as fighter pilots for the American Volunteer Group are shown in roman type, whether or not they ever qualified in the Curtiss P-40. The ten CAF flight school recruits are shown in italics, even if they eventually joined the AVG combat squadrons.

In the text, I sometimes have occasion to mention the Japanese Army Air Force units that met the AVG in combat. The basic force was the sentai, which is sometimes translated as regiment but is actually more like an American or British group, commanded by a major and containing three squadrons. The Japanese units, however, were smaller than their Allied equivalents — say 35 aircraft to a sentai, including a small headquarters flight. A chutai is a squadron (sometimes operating independently) of about 10 planes.

Frank Adkins of Miami Beach, Florida, joined from the U.S. Navy. As a wingman in the 3rd Squadron, he was credited with a Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa (Falcon)