I Flew For China

By Royal Leonard

I Flew For China, first published in 1942, is the first narrative of an American's experiences flying in China at the time of the Japanese invasion of China and during the conflict between Communist and Nationalist forces. Beginning in 1935, author Royal Leonard (1905-1962) flew first Chang Hsueh-Liang, a Chinese warlord, then Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese Nationalists. During his 6 years in China, Leonard recounts his many adventures and provides his recommendations – given to General MacArthur – for preparing for the looming Japanese-American conflict of World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barajima Books
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839741944

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

I FLEW FOR CHINA

Chiang Kai-shek’s Personal Pilot

By

CAPTAIN ROYAL LEONARD

I Flew for China was originally published in 1942 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., New York.

• • •

TO

MY FRIENDS IN CHINA

with the hope that their fondest dreams

of freedom and renaissance

come true

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

FOREWORD 5

INTRODUCTION 6

I: BREAD NOT BOMBS 11

II: THE YOUNG MARSHAL 19

III: FLIGHT OVER TIBET 27

IV: ROUTINE AND RECONNAISSANCE 41

V: THE KIDNAPPING OF CHIANG 48

VI: MY NEW BOSS 64

VII: JAPAN MARCHES 72

VIII: HEAD OF BOMBARDMENT 79

IX: TROUBLE IN HONG KONG 88

X: THE FIRST FLYING TIGER 93

XI: THE FALL OF NANKING 99

XII: FLIGHT FROM DOOM 102

XIII: C.N.A.C. 110

XIV: MARRIAGE AND HOME LIFE 123

XV: IN A TYPHOON’S EYE 127

XVI: SO LONG, CHINA! 131

XVII: REPORT TO MacARTHUR 134

XVIII: THE LAST BATTLEFIELD 145

MAPS 150

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 153

FOREWORD

I WISH to offer a word of grateful appreciation to the friends who have made this book possible. First, of course, thanks are due the Young Marshal, Chang Hsueh-Liang, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, whose carte blanche in all of China made it possible for me to write about and photograph anything I pleased.

To my wife Maxine, also, and her constant help in refreshing my memory on our days in China.

Lastly, to Richard G. Hubler, my thanks for assisting in the final drafting of the book and the preparing of it for publication.

ROYAL LEONARD

July 1942

En route to China

INTRODUCTION

CAPTAIN ROYAL LEONARD is one of the few men in the world to whom the gullies, plains, and mountains of China are as familiar as the lines in the palm of his hand.

From the end of 1935 to the end of 1941 he flew from one end to the other of the Chung-Hua Min-Kuo, the Republic of China. He is the only man who has flown over every town and village from the wilds of Outer Mongolia to the metropolis of Shanghai. He is the only man who knows every Chinese landing field, public, military, and secret, in the nearly three million square miles of that land.

For most of his six years over China, Leonard was the personal pilot of the two most prominent men in China. They were the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Young Marshal, Chang Hsueh-Liang. He was Chang’s pilot when his boss kidnapped the Generalissimo at Sianfu. Later the Generalissimo trusted Leonard to fly scores of diplomats from every major nation over the most difficult terrain in the world.

The thirty-seven-year-old Texan holds the rank of captain in the Chinese Army. He has more than eleven thousand flying hours to his credit in virtually every type of airplane. Leonard pioneered in the development of blind flying and the early days of airline and air-mail flights. He still holds the record of being the youngest senior pilot in the history of commercial flying.

Leonard also took part in the fifty-thousand-dollar, 12,000-mile air race from London to Melbourne, Australia, as co-pilot with Jacqueline Cochran. He surveyed one of the first transatlantic air routes and has flown for the United States Army Air Corps, for the Chinese Army, for the Chinese National Airlines, for the Western Air Express, and for Transcontinental & Western Airlines.

His last job in China was flying with the famous Chinese National Aviation Corporation Airline.

Royal Leonard is a little, dark-haired, soft-spoken fellow with a talent for spinning yarns. He has an engaging grin and the knack of side-slipping through adventure as though he were a suburban commuter rather than an experienced pilot-adventurer. Just now he is flying on secret orders for the United States Army Intelligence Division. His forte is reliability.

Leonard was born in Wisconsin, but his family moved to Texas when he was four years old. His father, a building contractor, was English. His mother was German. The Leonard family lived at Waco, and Royal attended grade school and high school there.

Flying was in his blood. As far back as he can remember, he wanted to be—not a pilot—but an aeronautical engineer. Even today he still works at engineering. He has patented several aeronautical devices and has drafted designs for more.

His first contact with pilots came when he was eleven years old. Cap Theodore, a burly barnstorming pioneer, was offering rides to the citizens of Waco for fifteen dollars a throw. Young Leonard approached him one day as Theodore was testing the pulling power of his ship by tying the tail to a giant scale and revving up the motor.

I’ll go up with you, said Leonard, if you give me fifteen dollars. The youngster missed this first chance at flying, but his attitude was to remain the same. He never paid to fly. Other people always paid him.

The next time Leonard saw a plane was when he was twenty years old. He was accepted for the Army Air Corps flying cadets at Brooks Field, San Antonio, Texas. He went through primary school and graduated from advanced training school at Kelly Field. He was one out of twenty-nine that remained from a starting crowd of fifteen hundred.

He carried away with him his wings and one memory. One of Leonard’s friends, taxiing in a crosswind, had unconsciously speeded up his motor. The ship bore down upon the instructor, the instructor’s plane, and the instructor’s car, which were in a huddle together near a hangar.

The cadet’s plane ended up atop both the auto and the instructor’s plane. The instructor, who had escaped by a mad sprint, returned in the same way. He clutched his hair and shook his fist at the trembling student perched atop the wreckage.

My plane! he cried. My car! My God!

Leonard’s first job was as assistant barnstormer at Colorado Springs. He piloted an ancient spit-and-pray crate, a Hess Bluebird with a Hispano motor. His sponsor was an old-time wing-walker and rope-ladder stunt man. Leonard got the job because the latter had lost his regular pilot just before. The ship had wobbled into a spin and the crash had killed the man at the stick. But the wing-walker, who had hung on until the final crash, had been catapulted free. He had merely lost all his front teeth.

Part of the job, the part that paid, was taking passengers aloft at three dollars a head, two at a time. Leonard averaged about thirty dollars a day. One bonanza week end at Canyon City, Colorado, he got two hundred and fifty dollars in two days as his share of the receipts.

His barnstorming career ended abruptly. Leonard had been flying air mail on the side as well as taking passengers for the Western Air Express. The man who owned the Bluebird, a person named Smith, threatened to sue the airline if Leonard didn’t quit. Instead, Leonard quit barnstorming.

He flew the W.A.E. on the rocky route between Pueblo, Colorado, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. This continued for a year on a performance basis, then Leonard got a regular job. He remained with W.A.E. for the rest of its legal life. He also continued with Transcontinental & Western after the merger in 1931. He was to spend a total of six years in the big-time civilian air circles.

During that time Leonard was responsible for several out-of-the-ordinary items in aviation history.

He went to Los Angeles to start pushing the big passenger ships eastward. In those days there were no co-pilots, no natty uniforms, no radio beams, no emergency fields. The state of pilotry can be summed up in one fact: the insurance company demanded only seventy-five hours’ dual flying time on the books for each pilot.

The first notable event of those days was the inauguration of the first westbound passenger ship out of Kansas City, Missouri. Leonard was the pilot. His pride in being given the assignment was a little blighted by the fact that a guard caught him examining the instrument board.

What’re you doin’ in here? demanded the guard. C’mon, kid, run along.

The newsreel men also bawled Leonard out for walking in front of their cameras when they were trying to get a picture of Jack Dempsey, one of the passengers. Leonard had his revenge. When they asked for the pilot he wiped their collective eyes with a few earthy phrases.

As senior pilot, his youth belied his responsibility. Prior to the W.A.E.-T.W.A. merger, when he was twenty-four, Leonard was given the pilotship of the F-32, a thirty-passenger, four-motored Fokker. It was the finest and biggest passenger liner in the world, with a heft of twenty-six thousand pounds.

Leonard, by this time, had more than the usual veteran pilot’s experience, ability, and knowledge. He had also acquired a considerable reputation. In 1928, in the face of almost unanimous scoffing, he had taken up blind flying and proved it was not only possible but practicable.

Until that time the majority of airplane pilots held that blind flying was suicide. One widespread theory was that clouds did something to compasses, giving them a kind of magnetic St. Vitus’ dance. Leonard didn’t believe this, but he had no occasion to actively try to disprove the prejudice against blind flight until one night when he became lost on his Pueblo-Cheyenne run.

The cold clouds about him fogged up his goggles. Pushing them back, he tried the usual procedure of peering through his fingers for a landmark. He saw a glow on the clouds ahead, supposed it was Cheyenne, and went down with a sigh of relief. It wasn’t. It was a mirage, a reflection from the real lights.

Leonard went up again. In the blinding fluff of the clouds he swirled into a spin. He turned his controls loose, pulled out of it, and climbed above the clouds. Then he took a chance and decided to fly wholly by the seat of his pants.

Finally he located another glow and spiraled down. This time it was real. It was Greeley, on the way to Cheyenne.

After landing, Leonard found he had three minutes of gas left in his tank.

After that he decided to practice up on getting places without sashaying from visible landmarks or following roads or rail ties. On days with a 2000-foot, snow-bottomed ceiling Leonard flew up in the clouds and cruised about blind. He came out upside down more than once, but finally he managed to achieve the impossible triumph of ten minutes of level flight to a destination.

His instruments were altimeter, air-speed indicator, compass, and turn indicator. Nothing else. He continued his practice and managed to freeze his face twice. Finally he managed to make the whole Pueblo-Cheyenne run by blind flying.

Two years later he flew the giant F-32 up and down the California coast with the windows blacked out with cardboard, just to show that blind flying was possible.

About this time the London-Melbourne air race fell due. It offered a prize of fifty thousand dollars to the first crew to cover the twelve thousand miles. Jacqueline Cochran, sponsored by Floyd Odium, a wealthy businessman, entered. Leonard and another pilot, Wesley Smith, were approached to be co-pilots. Both accepted.

Leonard got seven hundred and fifty dollars a month and all expenses. His first job was to take a sixty-day tour around the world to establish bases. This he did, building bases complete with parts, mechanics, and supplies at Bagdad, Persia; Allahabad, India; Singapore and Charleville, Australia, eight hundred miles south of the port of Darwin.

He returned to the United States with five days left to test Miss Cochran’s new plane. It was a sleek Northrop Gamma with a Curtiss Conqueror engine. The latter packed 1100 horsepower and was one of the most powerful engines then known. It also proved to be one of the worst as far as Miss Cochran and Leonard were concerned.

Going from California to New York, the motor spewed huge streamers of flame back over the fuselage and stabilizer. Over the Continental Divide it conked out. Leonard asked Miss Cochran to jump. She couldn’t. Her parachute, specially cut to fit her form, would not go on over her heavy clothing. So they were forced to ride the ship down.

By great good luck Leonard put it safely on the ground. Miss Cochran went ahead by airline, but Leonard grimly took the Northrop up again. Again the motor cut out, this time over New Mexico, and Leonard landed it via barbed-wire fences and arroyos. It was the first—and last—time in his flying career that Leonard ever so much as scratched a plane.

Leonard gave the Northrop up as a bad job and went on to New York. Miss Cochran had already procured a spare plane, a GB-Racer with a 550-horsepower engine. Leonard continued to India. He was to meet Miss Cochran and Smith there and make the final dash to Australia.

They never arrived. The mechanics whom Miss Cochran shipped to doctor up the GB-Racer on the boat to England were unanimously seasick. She took off late and, over the Alps, discovered that the gas-tank valves were on backward, the hatch cover of the cockpit was jammed, and the stabilizer wires dangerously corroded. She landed in Rumania but got no further. Scott and Campbell-Black won the race, and Leonard lost his chance to collect the percentage of the prize money that was promised him.

When he got back to the United States, Odium sent him on an extended tour of the Atlantic to prepare bases for a transatlantic airline. Leonard visited the Caribbean, Ireland, the Azores, and the Canaries. He turned in an exhaustive report to Odium.

Back in California for a rest, Leonard got a cable from China, WOULD YOU LIKE TO FLY FOR CHINA, it read. It was signed by Julius Barr, pilot to the Young Marshal, Chang Hsueh-Liang.

Leonard thought it was a joke, but he decided to check up anyway. It was no joke. Chang had been told by Barr, one of Leonard’s classmates at Kelly Field, then in China, that the young Texan was a crack, experienced flyer.

Royal Leonard left the United States on November 4, 1935. He arrived in China on December 6. He stayed in China for the next six years.

This book is about those six years. It is the story, primarily, of Royal Leonard and his experiences. The people in its pages are his friends. But it is more than the chronicle of a span in a single man’s lifetime. It is also the story of men who crossed the threshold of an ancient world to build a new one. It is the tale of the last pioneers and of the last adventurers too.

Most of all, perhaps—in a world where the citadel of the individual is assaulted by the rising tide of communal enterprise, where it is being said more loudly that a man must submerge himself in Man to fulfill his destiny, where rugged individualism is becoming a term of reproach and blind obedience is feted above clear thinking and action—this book is a monument.

It commemorates free men. It is the story of the few who did not care for the many and went out to life and death in that single faith. There was in them a single fault: they passed so close to the fundamental axis of existence that they remained as amoral and happy as children in the midst of chaos.

There will not be many more of them in our time. There is not enough freedom left in the tightening net of politics and economics for them to move and breathe.

But they did and do exist. Royal Leonard was one of them, and for that his history deserves to be told.

RICHARD G. HUBLER

Los Angeles

July 1942

I: BREAD NOT BOMBS

THE RIFLESHOTS sounded like twigs breaking. Snap and snap again. We heard them nearly a mile away—straight up. The sound came clearly to us, jabbing through the blanket of sound from the Boeing motor.

Julius coasted into a steep glide and began a circle above the city. I could see it now: flat-topped huts, narrow alleys, surrounded by little walls and a great wall round the city itself. The whole scene looked as if a big brush had laid on snow and dirt in alternate streaks.

The city was Kwanchuen, a fair-sized town in northern China. It was under siege by Communist bandits. Inside the mud walls were fifteen hundred soldiers, part of the army of Chang Hsueh-Liang, the Young Marshal.

The rifleshots we heard were from the Communist troops. They were scattering and burrowing into the earth to escape any bombs they thought we might drop, but they were shooting too. However, we carried no bombs. Our plane was loaded to ceiling with bags of Chinese bread. It was our job to drop this bread to the starving troops of the Young Marshal.

Julius zoomed down. We were about two hundred feet above the city, near enough to see the soldiers inside the walls running wildly and waving at us. Under power, we squared away to drop our bombs of food.

We had approximately one hundred 25-pound bags of bread. The bread was balled and doughy, like a fistful of dirty dough taken from the middle of an American loaf. Frank and I began piling the rough burlap bags near the cabin door. We had removed this door before we had taken off from Sianfu, one hundred and fifty miles away. A freezing wind had been roaring through the plane ever since we had taken off an hour before.

We beat our hands together and waited for a signal from Julius.

Hey! said Julius. He lifted his arm.

Frank and I kicked simultaneously at a bag. It fell out, and we saw it swoop toward the ground. We were aiming for an open rectangular space in the middle of Kwanchuen. The bag hit in the exact center, slid like a skipped stone, and broke open.

Soldiers rushed out to pick it up. At the same time the shots from the Communists outside the gate increased, sounding like a battery of machine guns trained on us.

Julius zoomed up again to two thousand feet, and we circled back for another dive. We did this a dozen times, kicking out four or five bags at every swoop. Each time we dove the fire increased. We could hear bullets smacking past the plane, but none of them hit.

On our next-to-last swoop Julius went lower than usual. Frank and I had just dumped as many bags as we could. We were pulling up, when suddenly there was a terrific crash in the rear of the Boeing.

I thought the tail had been ripped off and so did Frank.

Get out of here! I yelled to Julius. They’ll blow us apart!

Julius put the plane into a steep climb and leveled off.

Where do you suggest we go? he shouted back.

I realized that we could not return to Sianfu before our job was finished. While Julius was circling to dive again, I went back to see what the damage had been. A bullet coming through the bottom of the fuselage and striking a cast-iron tool had smashed it into a thousand pieces. These fragments, flying with great force, had knocked a thousand holes in the rear compartment.

Julius was coming down for the last time. I stood with my foot on the remaining bags of bread and wondered. What was I doing in China in the winter of 1936, flying over the muddy snows of a desolate land, dumping bread to besieged soldiers?

Six months ago I had been in San Francisco. I had recently returned from a trip which took me across the Atlantic on a survey of possible bases for a commercial airline, and I wanted a rest. I had money in the bank and nothing to do except take it easy. I was sure I could get back my old job with T.W.A. when I wanted it.

In the middle of October I received a cable from China that said WOULD YOU LIKE TO FLY FOR CHINA. The name signed was Julius Barr. He had been an old buddy of mine at Brooks Field, San Antonio, Texas, the United States Army Air Corps training base. I remembered him as a big blond guy, bouncing with life, and as I couldn’t imagine him in ancient China, I thought the cable was a joke.

It wasn’t. After three or four checking cables I discovered that Julius was the personal pilot of a Chinese war lord called Chang Hsueh-Liang or the Young Marshal. Julius wanted me as his assistant and as instructor in a Chinese flying school. It sounded good to me, as I was getting stale for want of action. I cabled an acceptance and received in return a five-hundred-dollar advance for passage money.

I sailed from San Francisco on November 4, 1935, on the President Lincoln of the Dollar Line. Although I left in a hurry, I had already packed four trunks and eleven suitcases. The salary offered me for the China job was one thousand American dollars a month.

We sailed at twilight, just as the early evening fog was coming into the bay. Only my mother and my sister saw me off. As we churned along, miles out of the Golden Gate, the first Pan American Clipper to fly to China passed over the liner and dipped its wings. I took it for a good omen.

There was no one particularly interesting on the boat.

I talked mostly with an American ex-serviceman who had fought in the Philippines. He died a year later. Two hundred miles past Honolulu we looked back to see a rose glow in the sky. The ship gossips said that one of the Hawaiian volcanoes was erupting, but I never bothered to find out.

The only trouble I had crossing was in Yokohama. The Japanese customs officials saw that the occupation listed on my passport was Flyer. They questioned me very politely but thoroughly. Was I to fly in civil aviation or military aviation? I told them Civil. This was not exactly true, but it got me through.

My first view of China, the place I was to stay for six years, in and over, was through a porthole. I saw green, flat fields, partially covered with water, and later learned that they were fields for growing rice. Though it was early in the