To understand Claire Chennault you have to trace his roots to the backwoods of northeast Louisiana. The Chennault house was a few miles south of Gilbert, a town of just a few hundred people. Raised up several feet to protect it from the floods that plagued the flatlands, the house was a small, single-story cottage with gingerbread trim and an inviting porch in the back. It was a modest abode, but it was the pride of John Chennault, Claire’s father, a cotton farmer who had built the house with his own hands in 1905 when Claire was a boy. Claire Chennault would fondly recall “roaming the oak woods and moss-draped cypress swamps of the Mississippi flood plains in northeast Louisiana.” The Tensas River basin was Chennault’s childhood playground—he spent time hunting and fishing by himself in the swamps. As he grew older, his father would let him go on treks for days at a time. Claire would take a fishing rod and survive on whatever he could catch, frying catfish and bream with a slab of bacon. He would live in a lean-to he built out of tree branches and sleep on a pile of leaves, and when he wanted to bathe would jump in a watering hole. He shot his first gun, a Winchester rifle, at the age of eight and soon graduated to shooting squirrels. He learned how to build a pyramid trap, a box that was held up by a twig with some oat or corn flakes as bait. He became self-reliant during this idyllic childhood, which resembled that of the hero of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of his favorite books. His solitary adventures in the woods, however, may have masked a darker side of his childhood. His mother died when he was only five, and a stepmother he loved passed away a few years later. The woods were always there for him.
Chennault also had a vivid imagination that drew him to distant lands, and he dreamt of someday seeing more of the world. Although he didn’t excel at school—he didn’t like following instructions or sitting still—he found a collection of books at his grandfather’s house about the ancient Greek and Roman wars and would spend hours transfixed by reading them. He recalled, “Although I had no idea where Greece, Carthage and Rome were, I was enthralled by the charging elephants, armored warriors and burning ships in the colored engravings of the battles of Thermopylae, Zama, Cannae and Salamis.” He wanted to escape from his seemingly inevitable fate as a cotton farmer like his father, and instead become a soldier. In fact, he came from a long line of fighting men. He could trace his paternal lineage to a soldier who had fought in the American Revolution; his mother was a direct descendant of General Robert E. Lee.
In 1909 Chennault enrolled at Louisiana State University to study agriculture, the only course that was open to him based on his primary education, but quickly signed up for ROTC training. He was determined to live up to what was expected of him as a soldier. When he was ordered to stand guard over a stairway, marching back and forth with a bayoneted rifle in hand, upperclassmen poured buckets of water on him from the floor above, but as he later recalled, “I continued to walk my post, drenched to the skin.” Whatever merit he may have had as a soldier, he quickly found that he couldn’t keep up academically due to his limited primary education. He also found that despite his efforts, he struggled with attending to the minute details that characterized life as a cadet. He racked up forty demerits in just one month. During a dress inspection, he was caught with his trouser legs rolled up, which was against regulations. An officer yanked him front and center and yelled in his face: “Chennault, you will never make a soldier.” The experience scarred Chennault, who came to feel that perhaps his lot in life was to be a cotton farmer after all. Over a break he returned home to fish, a source of comfort since his youth, and never returned to Louisiana State.
He dreaded what the future might hold. He knew cotton farming would mean “trying to eke a living . . . in a losing battle against palmetto root, bad weather, fluctuating prices, and the passing years.” He’d seen the toll that life had taken on his father. The low price of cotton during the financial panic of 1907 had nearly wiped out the family’s small farm, and an infestation of boll weevils could destroy an entire year’s crop. “The future seemed very dull indeed,” Chennault recalled, and though he was “looking for bright new worlds to conquer,” he couldn’t seem to find in what direction they lay. That all would change on one Sunday afternoon at the state fair.
The Fifth Annual Louisiana State Fair was held in Shreveport in November 1910. It was primarily a celebration of the state’s agricultural traditions, with prizes awarded for the best crops and livestock, but it also featured horse races, tightrope walkers, and concerts by a military band. At eight o’clock each night a thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks lit up the skies, a spectacular performance set to the music of the “Last Days of Pompeii.”
The fair was a place where Louisianans could gather to take pride in the state’s history, but it also offered them a glimpse of the future with a display of some new technology. The big attraction in 1910 was a biplane. Less than seven years after the Wright Brothers’ achievement at Kitty Hawk, few Americans had actually seen a plane in flight.
The local papers promoted the event, promising that the pilots would “astonish the people who visit the Fair by their daring skill in the air.” The main pilot, Stanley Vaughn of Ohio, had designed his plane himself, modeling it after one constructed by Curtiss. On November 3, the second day of the fair, his biplane ascended but as it rose fifty feet above the field it suddenly plummeted to the earth, just “like a duck suddenly shot,” as the Shreveport Times described it. After the plane hit the ground, the stunned crowd ran toward it, but Vaughn “stepped out of the [plane] without a scratch, though he had received quite a jar from the fall.” He vowed that he would fly again and his machine would be ready. His next performance would be on Sunday, November 6.
“Sunday was a big day at the Shreveport State Fair,” the New Orleans Times-Democrat reported. There were thousands in attendance, coming from all over Louisiana, as well as neighboring Texas and Arkansas. Claire Chennault had traveled a hundred and fifty miles from Gilbert. The Shreveport Times reported that “the sky was perfectly clear and it was just cool enough to make the exertion of sightseeing a pleasure.”
As the sun began to set, Chennault and the other spectators crowded into the stands. From the tent at the edge of the field, “the whir of the engine on the aeroplane was heard, and the people soon saw the slim lines of the heavier-than-air machine roll out of the tent, and make for the center of the race course.” As the craft began to roll, “eyes were strained through the dusk to see the machine, and soon outlined against the sky lighted by the setting sun, the machine arose like a mighty bird,” and started to climb. After flying for a quarter mile, however, Vaughn experienced engine trouble and brought the plane down, crashing through the race-course fence. Once again he walked away unharmed.
Still, the crowd considered the flight a success—the plane had gotten off the ground. For Claire Chennault, witnessing the plane gliding overhead, even for just a few moments, was a revelation. He now saw “a new frontier” that “sowed the seed of my desire to fly,” one that would shape the rest of his life. His urge was intense and immediate, but years would pass before he got his first chance to take to the sky.
Chennault was studying at Louisiana State Normal and, when he finished, set out on a new course: he was going to become a teacher. He got a lucky break when his uncle, a respected teacher in the area, helped him get a job teaching at the one-room country schoolhouse in Athens, Louisiana. Chennault was warned that he might have to raise a fist to keep discipline among the older students in his classroom. Legend has it that on his first day of teaching he was writing on the blackboard when he felt something hit him in the back. He turned around and demanded to know which of the students had thrown an eraser at him. A boy the size of a man stood up. Chennault dismissed the class and invited the perpetrator out back, where he beat the daylights out of him. That was the end of the disciplinary problem at the Athens School. Teaching was rewarding, but Chennault couldn’t envision himself spending years tending to the “annual crop of oversize farm boys [who] made the life of a teacher miserable and had cut the average tenure to less than a term.”
At the conclusion of the 1910 school year, Chennault’s uncle, a principal at another school, invited him to come watch the graduation ceremony. It “was just like any other graduation, with the girls and boys in their best clothes, with the decorated rostrum, the school choir singing hymns, and the address of welcome by the best scholar.” That address was delivered by a graduating senior, Nell Thompson, and Chennault was captivated by the stunning brunette. That one glimpse of beauty seared him, and he began to court her. A biographer noted that Chennault was “impressed by her independence, her lively curiosity, her quiet strength, and her cheerful spunk.”
Even though they were both only eighteen, he and Nell were wed on Christmas Eve in 1911 and settled into married life. The routine didn’t cure his desire to do bigger things with his life, but that desire was superseded by the need to support a family; he and Nell had their first son, John Stephen, in 1913, and their second, Max, the next year.
His growing family convinced Chennault that he had to leave Gilbert and finally take his chance to make his mark on the world. The Chennaults moved to New Orleans, the largest city in the South, where Claire Chennault earned a diploma in typing, the sort of degree that could set him up for an office job. On the side, he was working as the athletic director at the local YMCA. The physical culture movement, a fairly novel belief that men needed to be concerned with fitness and to go to the gymnasium to exercise, was sweeping the nation. That was the work that seemed to excite Chennault and he would take jobs in a series of YMCAs in Ohio and Kentucky and eventually would become the director of the YMCA in Louisville. He embraced the virtues of physical rigor and was proud of his own strength. But working at the Y didn’t pay well, even as a director. He knew he’d need something more to support his loved ones.
In 1916, he took the train to Akron, Ohio. He showed up with a few suitcases and a trunk, one of thousands of men who poured into America’s fastest-growing city looking for work. He rented the attic of a house for five dollars a week, then his family followed. It wasn’t much, but Chennault finally found a rewarding line of work. Every morning he’d get up and ride the trolley to the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. factory. Goodyear was known for their tires, helping to put Henry Ford’s Model Ts on the road, but in 1917 the company was hired by the U.S. Navy to make blimplike balloons that could be used to spot U-boats along the coast. Chennault signed on as an inspector on the balloon-production line, a small step closer to his dream of flying. With his salary, the family was able to upgrade to a full house, paying fifteen dollars a week rent. It was a comfortable life. He liked the work, and Nell could stay at home with their kids.
Chennault might have followed that path for years. But on May 7, 1917, a German U-boat sank the Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians, including 128 Americans. America entered the Great War. Even though it would mean leaving his family, Chennault felt that he had to prove to himself that he could make it as a soldier. The army had sent out a request for pilots, particularly men who could operate the observation balloons that Chennault was making at Goodyear. Applicants had to be between nineteen and twenty-five years old, and the twenty-three-year-old Chennault was confident that he’d finally get his chance to fly.
But the army was looking for a certain type of man to become a pilot, one who was “energetic and forceful and of good moral character and clean habits,” as a newspaper described the ideal candidate; it said, too, that he must “have a good education.” Hiram Bingham, a Yale professor and an explorer who had rediscovered Machu Picchu, was in charge of recruitment. In his view a pilot should be “‘an officer and a gentleman.’ He must be the kind of man whose honor is never left out of consideration. . . . He must be resourceful, keen, quick, and determined.” Unsurprisingly, the army believed that Ivy Leaguers made the best pilots, especially polo players and quarterbacks. Few Americans in 1917 had flown in a plane, and the army concentrated on finding the best and the brightest from the flying clubs on Ivy League campuses to serve as America’s pilots in the Great War. A factory worker like Chennault didn’t stand a chance. He received a cruelly blunt rejection letter that he’d remember for the rest of his life: “Applicant does not possess necessary qualifications for a successful aviator.” The army believed men like Chennault, common men, were needed for the infantry, and he accepted the job he was offered. He reported for basic training at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, one of the newly established bases where the army was turning civilians into newly commissioned officers. He spent three months there, making him one of the “90-day wonders” that filled the army’s burgeoning ranks.
Though he was an infantry officer, fate showed its hand when he was ordered to a base in Texas connected to Kelly Field, where the army was training its new pilots. Chennault spent his days drilling new infantry soldiers, but would visit the field where the planes were taking off, drawn by “the roar of their motors, the harsh thrashing of their propellers and the strange rattle they made as they flew,” as biographer Keith Ayling wrote. He desperately wanted to fly.
He eventually finagled from one of the flight officers an unauthorized lesson in the “Jenny,” a two-seater with a place in front for the instructor and one behind for the student. As the Jenny jolted into the air, shaking like a kite in the wind, Chennault could see the white tents in neat rows at Kelly Field and the open Texas landscape that spread to the horizon. Seven years from when he’d first seen that plane take off at the state fair, he was finally flying. Soon he was even trying his hand at soloing. The instructors, impressed with Chennault’s drive to learn, or maybe just worn down by his persistence, would taxi to the flight line, then climb out as Chennault “jumped in and took off.” In total, he estimated that he accrued eighty hours of “bootleg” flying time. But in the army’s books, he was still an infantryman.
Chennault’s unit was getting ready to deploy to France in the fall of 1918, but they only made it as far as Mitchel Field in New York before they were told that there would be no trip overseas. The German surrender was expected imminently; Chennault had missed his chance to fight in the Great War. His unit was ordered to Langley Field in Virginia to work on a ditch-digging project. While he was on a troop transport, he caught the Spanish flu, a deadly disease that was spreading rapidly, brought by troops returning from Europe.
Chennault was quarantined in an aircraft hangar. The flu “hit me hard. I was hauled away one afternoon to a small outbuilding where the dying spent their last hours. The officer next to me died early in the evening.” Barely conscious, he could hear a doctor and nurse discussing his prognosis. He “isn’t dead yet,” the nurse said. “He will be before morning,” the doctor replied. Someone slipped him a quart of bourbon, hoping to ease his final hours. But by morning he was still breathing and clutching the bottle in his hand. Chennault would have lasting respiratory problems that he traced back to this episode, but he always believed he had been spared for some reason. He came to believe that God had something planned for him and that there was some great mission that would guide his life. When the Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, he was on a train going back to Kelly Field, determined to become a pilot.
After his recovery, he applied again and his perseverance paid off. His orders for flight training came through. With his hours of flight experience, Chennault was impatient with the slow pace of the formal training. His instructor didn’t appreciate his attitude and recommended that Chennault be washed out. He had one last chance to stay flying, and that was to sufficiently impress a senior instructor in what might be his final flight. Not only did Chennault redeem himself, but the instructor, Ernest Allison, recognized something special in him. Allison took him in hand and taught him acrobatic flying, daredevil stunts that pushed the limit of the airplane. Chennault learned how to flip the craft upside down, hanging tight against the safety belt. He loved the “kaleidoscope of sky and earth” as the plane turned upside down. This unrestrained brand of flight hooked him, he said, “like a Tensas River bass on a minnow-covered barb.” From then on, “I had the taste of flying in my craw and could not get it out.” Chennault finally obtained a permanent commission in the Air Service in 1920 and was assigned to the Twelfth Observation Squadron in El Paso, Texas, in 1921. He flew unarmed planes over the deep canyons of the Big Bend district, a sort of aerial border patrol. The work wasn’t exciting, but he was accruing valuable hours in the cockpit and gaining greater confidence in his skills as a pilot. He brought his family with him to El Paso and Nell gave birth to their sixth child, David. It was a happy time for them. “We were a very close family in the early years,” Chennault’s daughter Peggy recalled. “He made time to be with us. We had bridge sessions every night.”
As he grew into a more mature pilot, Chennault came to see the potential for using his aerial stunts as a type of entertainment. He hadn’t grown up with much exposure to theater, but he intuitively understood how to create a good performance. On Washington’s Birthday in 1923, Chennault’s squadron put on a public display in El Paso. During the first part of the show Chennault remained in the stands, wearing a long wig and Nell’s coat and shoes. At one point in the program, the announcer called for the oldest woman in the crowd to come down and ride in the airplane. “Grandma Morris” walked onto the field. This woman, the announcer told the crowd, was so old that she remembered traveling in a covered wagon. Now she would get to experience flight. As Grandma made her way into the cockpit, the pilot climbed out to check on the engine. Suddenly, the plane darted forward with the helpless old woman holding the stick. “Spectators gasped as the runaway plane rose into the air, narrowly missing trees, hangars,” a witness recalled. For the next fifteen minutes, Grandma kept the crowd mesmerized as she circled overhead “performing impossible loops, banks, dives.” And then, to the shock of the crowd, the plane landed perfectly, and jumping from the plane, Chennault removed his wig and revealed the ruse.
Chennault was undergoing a transformation. He had been born a Southerner but was now acquiring a more global perspective. After the stint at Fort Bliss, he transferred to Hawaii, where he was stationed at Luke Field on Ford Island, right next to Pearl Harbor. He was like “a boy with his first love,” he’d later write, as he took his biplane out over the Pacific Ocean. He was put in command of the 19th Fighter Squadron, the “Fighting Cocks,” and taught his squadron how to fly their MB-3 biplanes in a coordinated attack when they took on the enemy.
Under the Pacific sun his body was “growing lean, tanned and hard,” he recalled in his memoir. With his wing-tipped mustache and his white dress uniform, he was “in the best fighter-pilot tradition.”
By 1932, now one of the army’s more experienced pilots, he was assigned to Maxwell Field in Alabama. He was to serve as an instructor in the Air Corps Tactical School, a job that reflected Chennault’s growing reputation. But the commander had another idea: Would Chennault help start the army’s first flying acrobatic team? The plan was to establish a performing troupe that would travel to the country’s air shows, serving as a sort of public relations team for army fliers. Chennault eagerly took on the task, assembling a three-person team that became known as the Three Men on the Flying Trapeze, after the popular song. Chennault went through a number of wingmen, but would eventually settle on two, William “Billy” McDonald and John “Luke” Williamson, whom he would learn to trust with his life.
“Our team was picked by the simple process of inviting all candidates to try to stick on my wing for thirty minutes of violent acrobatics.” McDonald and Williamson made the grade. The three men flew their Boeing P-12 biplanes in unison, only a few feet separating their wingtips, dipping and twirling as if they were one. Their ease in the air took a lot of practice. But all the practice in the world couldn’t change a basic fact. Stunt flying was dangerous. Fatalities were not uncommon.
By 1934, the Flying Trapeze had started to travel the country and the act was a hit. Future major general Haywood Hansell served with them for a time. They were greeted by newspapers like the Miami News as “the outstanding thrill producers of all time in the aviation world.” Girls would rush out from the crowd to have their pictures taken with the smiling pilots. Newsmen from Fox, Universal, Hearst, and Paramount filmed them in action. They even got a sponsor, and Chennault became a pitchman: “You will find that all fliers use gum, and I consider Wrigley’s the best.”
At the time, air races were major sporting spectacles. Mired in the depths of the Great Depression, Americans were turning their eyes heavenward, looking to these soaring planes to imagine a better future for their country. Perhaps someday everyone could fly. “It is true that aviation hasn’t reached the stage where the farmer going to town with a basket of eggs can get a lift from a passing airplane, but possibly this will come in the future,” was a typical take in Popular Aviation.
There were so many shows for Chennault that the extraordinary became routine. But an appearance the Three Men on the Flying Trapeze made in Miami would shape the contours of Chennault’s life for years to come.
The Seventh Annual Miami Air Races in January 1935 marked one of the largest gatherings of airplanes in American history up to that time, with five hundred planes expected to converge on Miami from across the nation. Thousands of Miamians paid sixty cents for a chance to see the nation’s best pilots push the limits of what could be done in a plane. This was advertised as “the thrills of a lifetime crowded into three short afternoons.” Crowds at the municipal airport reached over 7,500 people. The British and Nazi air force attachés made the trip from Washington, D.C., to see the latest developments in aviation, and a contingent of Chinese officers scouting out new planes were in the stands as well. There would be parachutists, demonstrations of bomb dropping (using sacks of flour), and races featuring an array of different styles of planes. But no attraction was more anticipated by the crowd than the Three Men on the Flying Trapeze.
As they’d practiced countless times before, the three pilots began to twist and turn together. “They were in so tight a formation during the performance that from the ground the wing tips seemed to overlap,” the New York Times reported. The planes did wing-overs and spins with “a perfection that seemed as if the three planes were controlled by one mind.” After the death-defying stunts, Chennault walked to the announcer’s podium to receive an award for acrobatic flying. It featured a plane mounted on top of a globe—a fitting prize for a man who had come to believe that planes would control the future of the world.
Chennault felt he was finally being recognized for the talents in the cockpit he’d spent years perfecting. When businessman William Pawley extended an invitation to his yacht to the three men, Chennault accepted, as Pawley was nothing short of the godfather of aviation in Miami. He’d established the city’s routes to Central America and Cuba, and had developed a lucrative trade selling Curtiss-Wright planes to the Chinese. An adventurer who liked to make deals, Pawley would be described by his biographer as a “cross between Indiana Jones and Donald Trump.” He’d recently opened a factory in Hangchow (modern-day Hangzhou) to assemble the planes from American-made parts. Now he was back from China with a small entourage from the Chinese Air Force, whom he wanted Chennault to meet.
When they gathered on the yacht, the leader of the group, Colonel P. T. Mow, must have impressed the Americans with his nearly perfect English. Mow had been traveling with his team to Russia, France, Germany, England, and Italy seeking to buy more planes for China and hire more pilots to train its air force. He believed that China, “a young country, in aviation,” had much to learn from expert pilots in the West. He already had a number of former army pilots working as instructors at one of China’s aviation academies, led by West Point graduate John Jouett, but he wanted more. When he met the Three Men on the Flying Trapeze, Mow quickly got to the point, telling Chennault and his team that they should come to China. Such an invitation wasn’t unusual at the time. Lured by adventure and money, dozens of American pilots were flying under foreign flags. Pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille had fought for France in the Great War before America’s entry. After the Armistice, the Army Air Corps had been reduced in size but many of its members were eager to take part in combat abroad. Some formed the Kościuszko Squadron to help Poland in its struggle against the Soviet Union, while others joined the Cuban Air Force and the small air forces of South American republics. In 1928 Chennault himself had received a tempting proposal to take his skills abroad, when, after viewing some drills, a visiting Soviet general had given Chennault some vodka, chocolate, and caviar as preliminary gifts to open a conversation about coming to advise the Red Army’s new air force. Chennault got them to agree to $1,000 a month, which was a steep raise over the $225 he was earning in the army, but he ultimately turned them down. However tempting Mow’s offer might have been, Chennault, McDonald, and Williamson declined. Chennault had his job in the army and a large family to look after—he and Nell now had eight children. But Mow was not a man easily discouraged. The pilots remembered him saying, “You will hear from me again.”
Back at Maxwell, Chennault focused on his teaching. He was one of the small cadre of instructors at the base charged with developing the army’s air strategy. What kind of planes should they use in combat? What were the most successful tactics? It was an academic task, involving debates among the faculty and the drafting of long articles. Since 1911, when an Italian reconnaissance pilot decided to drop grenades on Turkish forces in Libya, aerial bombing had excited the imagination of military planners. By the 1930s, the prevailing view in the Army Air Corps was that bombers were the future of air power. As British prime minister Stanley Baldwin famously put it, “the bomber will always get through.” Fighter planes, like the one Chennault flew in the Flying Trapeze, were judged to be useless against the overwhelming force of the bombers. Chennault dissented vehemently with this position, arguing that the fighter could control the skies. He didn’t see his work with the Flying Trapeze as just a stunt—he thought of his aerial finesse as “convincing proof . . . that fighters could battle together through the most violent maneuvers of combat” and take down the bombers. This debate, waged in academic journals and in classrooms, wasn’t just theoretical. It would determine how the Army Air Corps invested its budget and what tactics it would teach its pilots.
Chennault’s colleagues dismissed his ideas and came to resent him. It didn’t help his cause that he was brash and arrogant about his opinions. He wrote strident articles and fired them off to senior army officers, who greeted them with stony indifference. “Who is this damned fellow Chennault?” General Hap Arnold wrote after reading one of Chennault’s papers. “The personal battles within the tactical school began to wear on Chennault,” one historian noted.
In addition to the emotional anguish of having his ideas rejected, his physical health was in decline. He smoked cigarettes by the pack, and crisscrossing the country to put on air shows had begun to take a toll on him. Flying in the open cockpit of his plane irritated his lungs. He was put on a diet of raw liver, which was supposed to help give him strength, but it didn’t do much more than make mealtimes unpleasant. He was coughing uncontrollably, and when doctors diagnosed bronchitis he was sent to the Army Navy Hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to recuperate. “Lying on a hospital bed in Hot Springs,” Chennault wrote, “there was ample time to look back over my forty-seven years and think about the future.” Chennault was struggling with more than poor health. He felt stymied and belittled. “When you’re thwarted in every respect, you’re just depressed,” his oldest daughter, Peggy, would later recount.
During his recovery he received news that only confirmed his disillusionment with the army: his wingmen, McDonald and Williamson, had been passed over for promotion. Chennault had by then worked with the two men for years, and he took the army’s decision as a personal rebuke. He wrote and urged them to take up the offer to go to China. Recognizing that their army careers were limited, they decided to take his advice.
William McDonald, who had grown up in Birmingham, Alabama, was then thirty years old and about to embark on an adventure unlike anything he’d contemplated before. Luke Williamson was from South Carolina and was the kind of pilot who would earn his way into the South Carolina Aviation Association’s Hall of Fame for taking an army plane and flying to his hometown. He would perform acrobatic stunts for the residents before landing the plane and going to see his family. This would be an adventure on a much grander scale. The Flying Trapeze pilots were joined on their journey east by a handful of other Americans who would be going to China to work with the air force, including Sebie Smith, an airplane mechanic who had helped the Flying Trapeze team. On July 11, 1936, this band of former army men boarded the Empress of Russia, a large steamer ship in Seattle, almost giddy with excitement about what lay ahead. On July 27, they arrived in Shanghai, which was overwhelming, beyond what they had imagined. It was, as Smith recalled, “the busiest place any of us had ever seen. Throngs of Chinese and some foreigners bustled about the docks and embankment mostly on foot, bicycle or rickshaw.” Chinese officers escorted them to a tailor to have their Chinese uniforms fitted. They then headed southeast to the Central Aviation School at Hangchow and were housed at a luxurious hotel. From their new home, they could look out at the West Lake, and on the weekends would have picnics by the water and hire boatmen to take them out for pleasure cruises. They would go into town to see somewhat out-of-date American movies at a small theater that had a Chinese interpreter who stood next to the projector and explained the plots in Chinese. They bought bicycles to explore the area and found a Buddhist temple deep in a bamboo forest that they liked to visit.
The work itself was rewarding for the pilots. They woke at 6:15 each morning and with the help of interpreters taught tactics to the Chinese recruits until 6:30 P.M. They were pleased with the progress the new pilots were making. After a few months, they were ready to graduate a class, and the ceremony was as festive as a Fourth of July celebration. The Americans were guests of honor, invited to sit on the reviewing stand with Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Madame Chiang.
The Curtiss biplanes roared overhead in formations of three, and “the successive flybys of so many new aircraft were an inspiring sight for everyone.” As if to underscore that the men had been trained for a potential war, targets had been placed on the ground, and “the ships came roaring down past us with their machine guns blazing away.” The graduation festivities lasted all day and culminated with a spectacular fireworks display.
In December 1936, one of the senior American aviation instructors died of a heart attack just before he was to conduct a comprehensive survey of the Chinese Air Force. Madame Chiang, who spoke fluent English with a Southern drawl acquired during her years studying at schools in Georgia, was at the funeral. She asked the American pilots whether there was a suitable pilot back in the United States who could come to China to replace him. They told her they knew the perfect candidate—Claire Chennault. At her instruction, they wrote him a letter with an invitation to come to China.
This time Chennault would not refuse.
Chennault’s career in the army had stalled. He likely faced a future that would involve no flying, and he didn’t want to just sit behind a desk. The letter asking him to go to China couldn’t have come at a better time. This wasn’t just an offer to teach at the aviation school. He was being asked to do a survey of the Chinese Air Force and offer ideas about how to develop it in the years ahead. This was the recognition he wanted—not just as one of America’s best pursuit pilots, but as a strategic thinker. The pay wasn’t bad either at a thousand dollars a month for the three-month assignment. He would also be provided with a car, chauffeur, and interpreter, and he could fly any plane in the Chinese Air Force that he wished.
Chennault explained his decision to accept in a letter to his brother: “When an old, well-plowed road is blocked, a new path must be opened.” His work in China, he speculated, “may amount to very little except a good paying position or it may amount to a great deal. . . .” He felt destiny calling in no small way: “It is even possible that my ‘feeble’ efforts may influence history for some few hundreds of years.”
China was not actively at war, but in 1931 Japan had invaded China and annexed Manchuria, and the status quo in the Far East was far from stable. Chennault understood his job with the Chinese would be “to prepare them to whip h[ell] out of Japan.”
For some time, Chennault had managed to balance his two great loves, flying and family, but this time Nell and the children, who had accompanied him from base to base, would remain in America. Despite the demands of his career, the Chennaults had a happy marriage, and Nell supported his flying. She would sit on the front porch and watch the pilots fly down the Selma Road in front of her house, taking notes on improvements that were needed. After years of seminomadic existence, the family had finally settled in a large antebellum home a few miles outside of Birmingham, Alabama. The family played bridge together, and Chennault taught his younger sons how to hunt and fish. He loved his children and his wife, but he felt that he was stuck in an eddy and being “sucked under.” China looked to him like a life raft.
Nell opposed the whole idea and worried about the impact on the children. But she couldn’t control her husband and, besides, they had always been short of money, and there were still young children they needed to feed, and someday send to college. If he took on this mission in China, their financial problems could be addressed, and Claire assured Nell that he wouldn’t be gone long. Still, his family never believed this had been about the money. His daughter Peggy would later say that her father left “because he wanted to prove his theories.” While Chennault explained the job as a three-month assignment, one historian suggests that he already knew he was signing up for a longer two-year contract.
Before he left, Chennault helped the family move to a farm in rural Louisiana. Nell had been born on a farm and he hoped that she’d feel at home there. The house was in a town called Waterproof, on the banks of Lake St. John. There was a porch out front and plenty of space in the back for Nell to grow a garden and raise chickens, as well as orchards of fruit and pecan trees nearby.
Chennault handed in his army resignation in April 1937. The Shreveport Times took note, saying that the officer had been “ill several months,” and that this was the reason for his retirement. In reality, Chennault felt invigorated by the mission that lay ahead. He had no second thoughts as he boarded a train on May 1 for San Francisco. “I felt a compulsion to go,” he would recall, “that I couldn’t resist.” He began a diary to chronicle the “great adventure.”