By the final months of 1938, Claire Chennault’s new home, Kunming, would become one of China’s last centers of resistance. The city was far up in the mountains, remote, and like no place Chennault had ever seen before. He took in the sights: creaking pony carts rattled and groaned over Kunming’s cobbled streets, and water buffalo, cattle, and herds of fat pigs wandered among the pepper trees that lined the main street. But the pastoral calm was giving way to a feeling of rush and bustle. Refugees flooded in from the front but the city was transforming itself into an industrial center that could help keep China fighting. There was still hope. Out in the jungle along the Burma border, William Pawley’s aviation company, the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, known as CAMCO, was assembling new fighter planes. The facility had been moved with the war, and this site came to be known as Pawleyville, named for CAMCO’s owner. It was an important part of the strategy to replenish the depleted armaments of the Chinese Air Force.
Although Shanghai, Nanking, and now Hankow had fallen, the war seemed to have come to a stalemate. The mountains protecting Kunming made it difficult for Japanese armored units to advance rapidly, and the enemy appeared to be focused on maintaining control of the occupied territories. The Japanese bombed Chungking and sometimes even reached Kunming, but the stalled war on the ground gave the Chinese a chance to regroup for the long war ahead.
Chennault’s job was formidable. He was the lead instructor at the Central Aviation School, which had been moved from Hangchow. This was the hub for teaching a new generation of Chinese pilots. The New York Times reported that hundreds of young men were receiving instruction in modern aerial warfare using scores of American and Russian training planes. Chennault noted in his diary that these new cadets were “below average, some were very bad,” but he kept at it, and soon in the dusty streets of the old city, Kunming’s residents could hear the drone of airplane engines and see the aircraft sweeping overhead, encouraging signs that the students were making progress.
Chennault had a group of approximately fifteen American pilots working at his side, including Billy McDonald, who wrote to his parents that “life now is rather tame in comparison with our earlier experiences at Nanking.” For the first time since his arrival in China, Chennault could relax. He played tennis at the Kunming French Club and there were games of poker and cribbage with friends. The theater showed old movies, and that was where he spent his evenings.
Still, it was impossible to forget that there was a war going on. Chennault carefully logged each Japanese bombing raid in his diary. “23 Jap bombers came over about 3:00 P.M. in three units,” he wrote on April 8, 1939. “None shot down.” For now, Chennault couldn’t muster the planes or pilots to turn back the bombers.
In early May 1939, Chennault traveled to Chungking, now the capital, and saw the resumption of Japanese air strikes. On the afternoon of May 3, he heard the air-raid siren ring out and grabbed his binoculars. He recounted standing on a hill, and seeing overhead a formation of twenty-seven Japanese bombers flying in a perfect V. For a moment they looked just “like Canada geese heading north from Louisiana in the spring.” Their bomb bays opened and they unloaded their deadly cargo on the city. After the bombing, Chennault hurried to join the fire brigades as they battled the flames with hand pumps and bucket brigades. It was like “trying to quench a forest fire with a garden hose,” he thought. Amid the “exploding bamboo sparks and crashing wooden walls,” he would never forget the “sickeningly sweet stench” of corpses burning in the wreckage. The Japanese came back again the next day, May 4, and the results were even worse. “Large section of city set on fire and burned,” Chennault wrote in his diary, “many people killed.”
“Many” was an understatement. Approximately four thousand people were killed in those back-to-back raids, making them two of the most devastating air attacks in history up to that point.
“This is the most terrible thing I’ve seen in my life,” Chiang Kai-shek wrote in his diary. “I can’t bear to look at it.” Madame Chiang despaired that the war was destroying China: “The bombs have reduced rich and poor, wise and stupid to one common level—pieces of burnt flesh which are extracted from the smoldering piles with tongs.”
The war felt hopeless, and after more than two years in China, Chennault’s longing for home was growing. The one connection the American pilots in Kunming had to the outside world was a radio kept in McDonald’s apartment that would beam in music from stations in Manila, Hong Kong, and Hanoi. McDonald would fiddle with the channels to find the clearest signals amid the static. One day when he was scanning for new stations, he suddenly heard an American voice broadcasting from a station in California coming in loud and clear. “[My] hair just stood on end. Chennault and I got up and cheered mightily.” He wrote to the station, thanking them and asking them to play the 1936 hit song “Is It True What They Say About Dixie”:
Is it true what they say about Dixie?
Does the sun really shine all the time?
Chennault had a provision in his contract that allowed him to take a vacation, and he began to feel that the time had come. He decided he would try to make it home for Christmas, then return to Kunming in early 1940 to continue pilot training.
When Chennault returned to Chungking in September 1939 to meet with the Chiangs, he must have worried his employers would not want him leaving at such a critical time. But they saw an opportunity. Increasingly isolated from their allies in Italy and Germany, they believed Chennault could help persuade the United States to step up support of their struggle against the invading Japanese. His journey would become more than a trip home to see his family. He would be an emissary for China, pleading for assistance in a war they were on the brink of losing.
As the China Clipper went out into the bay in Hong Kong on the morning of October 19, 1939, the four Pratt & Whitney engines began to roar, pushing the plane’s full weight of twenty-six tons against the water and slowly lifting it into the air to begin its multileg journey from Hong Kong to San Francisco. The largest plane of its day, the China Clipper was a Martin M-130. The Clipper was famous for its luxury: there was a lounge stocked with board games and a small library, and stewards in white suits served hot meals, like chicken fricassee. Chennault didn’t fixate on the amenities, though. He cared more about the tremendous power of the airplane. He carefully tracked the plane’s progress to each stop along its route: the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and Hawaii. The plane reached San Francisco after five days—a vast improvement in travel time over the weeks it would take on a ship. There Chennault boarded a Southern Pacific train crossing the Southwest. In Houston he transferred onto a train to Beaumont, Texas, where one of his sons was waiting to drive him to Waterproof.
“Home again,” was all he wrote in his diary.
It had been over two years since Chennault last touched American soil, and now he reveled in the idyllic country life that he’d missed so much. His boys had grown to be young men, and Rosemary was now eleven. While her husband was away, Nell had a full life in the small town of just over five hundred. She had become involved with the Waterproof United Methodist Church, where she taught Sunday school, and was known for her quiet charm and friendliness. Life on the farm, which provided almost all of the family’s food, kept her busy. While she looked forward to finding the occasional letter from her husband in the tin mailbox at the end of the dirt driveway, China was little more to her than a glimmer in her imagination. Her husband had increasingly become a distant memory during the years he was away. He arrived now seemingly out of nowhere. While Claire wanted to shape history on a grand scale in China, Nell was content to stroll through the orchard of pecan trees and fruit trees behind the house. Inevitably, the pair found their marriage in a precarious position now that they were reunited.
After only a few days at home, Chennault was off again, this time to observe the massive rearmament program that was under way and to try to press China’s case. He first went to see his son John, who was stationed with the Army Air Corps at Selfridge Field, outside of Detroit. The new vigor in the Air Corps impressed him, and he was filled with fatherly pride to see his son follow in his footsteps. The droves of new pilots were a striking contrast to the cutbacks he’d seen when he was in the army.
Chennault alluded in his diary to working on “contracts” to get more aircraft for China, and now he wanted to get out and see the planes for himself. With new companies popping up across the United States and investment in military planes spurring innovation throughout the industry, the country was experiencing an aviation explosion. Chennault went to Buffalo, New York, to see his old friend Burdette Wright. One of the legends of early aviation, Wright had won a Distinguished Service Cross during the Great War for attacking enemy positions with his damaged plane and causing the Germans to abandon their posts. Burdette, who was not related to the famous Wright brothers, left the Air Corps after the war to become vice president of Curtiss-Wright, the premier airplane manufacturer in America, and to run their factory in Buffalo. The company churned out thousands of planes, including the Hawk 75, and the Buffalo plant was considered to be among the most advanced aircraft manufacturing facilities in the world. The factory was guarded like a military installation, and Chennault received a privileged view into an unparalleled technological marvel: new advances like automatic reaming machines and hydraulic presses manufactured plane parts en masse. Curtiss was planning to increase production to keep up with demand for fighters by the French Air Ministry, and Chennault could envision how much difference such fighters could make in the war against the Japanese if they could be sent to China.
To gin up support for China, Chennault traveled to Washington, D.C., to brief the staff of the Army Air Corps on developments in China. He knew it would be a hard sell, but even his low expectations weren’t met. When he arrived for the meeting, it took over an hour for the officers to locate a large-scale map of China, and the one they did finally produce had such little detail that Chennault had to pencil in most of the locations where the war was actually being fought. He gave his presentation, but the officers showed little interest. Chennault thought it was his responsibility as an ex-army officer to warn the Air Corps about the capabilities of the Japanese planes, and he handed over his dossier of intelligence, but he felt it would be ignored.
Discouraged and disgusted, Chennault returned to Louisiana for Christmas, and though being home for the holidays was simple and inviting, he wasn’t there to stay. He felt that China needed him, but it was equally true that he needed China. The war had given him a chance to be part of something larger than himself. “Nell seemed to have made a life for herself in Waterproof,” biographer Jack Samson wrote, and “after the novelty of having their father home had worn off, his children had plunged back into the world of their friends and activities, jobs and school.” Increasingly Chennault felt more of a foreigner in Waterproof than he had in Kunming. In January 1940, he bid farewell to his family with no indication of when he might return.
Before Chennault crossed the Pacific once more, he stopped in Los Angeles for a meeting with William Pawley. Southern California had emerged as an important area in America’s aviation renaissance. Thanks to the dry, mild climate, planes could be built outside, and an array of companies had opened manufacturing facilities to keep up with the growing demand from the government. Pawley took Chennault to tour the Lockheed, North American Aviation, and Vultee factories in Los Angeles, then the Consolidated Aircraft and Ryan Aircraft factories down in San Diego. “No doubt [Chennault] was quietly and discreetly feeling out the prospects” of getting more planes for China, his biographer Martha Byrd wrote.
After the tour, Chennault flew to San Francisco, where he spent a couple of days socializing with some of the city’s prominent Chinese residents, then boarded the China Clipper and headed across the Pacific once again. When they landed in Hong Kong after the endless blue of the Pacific, the winter air hung heavy. Madame Chiang was in Hong Kong to see a doctor and, according to one account, had dinner with Chennault the evening he arrived. If she hoped that he would have good news from the United States, she was disappointed; all he could tell her was that America seemed indifferent to China’s plight. For now, China would have to continue to fight on its own.
Chennault arrived back in Kunming in February. During the quiet months of winter, thick fog shielded Kunming from enemy attacks, and Chennault could pass the time playing poker and tennis. There was a small social circuit in Kunming, and he got to know the wives of some of the men as well. A younger Chinese woman, Kasey Sutter, was married to Harry Sutter, a Swiss businessman in Kunming. Although Chennault had a friendly business relationship with Harry, he still invited Kasey to join him at social events. There may have been something more than a social relationship: Jack Samson has said that Chennault had affairs with Kasey and with another woman while he was in Kunming. In any case, his distance, physical and possibly emotional, from Nell and Louisiana had never been greater. He knew the bombings would return when the weather cleared and he had little idea when, if ever, he would make it home again.
With spring and the lifting of the fog, the bombing returned with a fury, bringing “thick columns of smoke, angry tongues of flames, the crackling of burning houses . . . and the incessant sputter of machine guns,” as Madame Chiang described it. In the midst of a bombardment, Madame Chiang wrote to a Wellesley friend living in New York. “The bombers are circling overhead,” she wrote. “They come in formation—in droves—looking like enormous black crows.” She even described the dropping of the bombs: “Thud, thud, thud!” Chennault, too, was growing despondent over the situation. “We are not doing well out here,” he wrote in a letter on July 24. “I can’t win the d[amn] war alone and I am tired of fighting almost alone against such odds that we face.”
Chennault’s growing sense of isolation wasn’t helped in April when Billy McDonald left to take a job as a pilot for CNAC in Hong Kong. “What I like about this job is that it has a future,” he wrote to his father. Left unsaid, but implied, was the obvious contrast with fighting for China, which did not.
Worse was still to come. On September 13, a group of Chinese pilots flying Russian-made I-15 and I-16 fighters took to the air to fend off a raid. The Japanese bombers completed the run and then withdrew. Once the Chinese planes were in pursuit, Japanese fighters dove from out of the sun and opened fire. The Chinese pilots scrambled to defend themselves, but the enemy planes were faster and more agile than any the Chinese had ever encountered. Within half an hour, more than twenty Chinese planes had been lost—a massive blow to the Chinese Air Force. It was an unqualified disaster. Chennault mused that the Chinese had been shot down before they even knew what hit them. What had hit them was a new Japanese plane, the Mitsubishi A6M. It would come to be known by a simpler name: the Zero, and it would be feared not just in China, but throughout the Pacific.
Victory had never felt more distant. A mere two weeks after the rout, on September 27, 1940, Germany and Italy signed a new treaty with Japan, the Tripartite Pact, which cemented their military alliance with Tokyo. The geostrategic plates were shifting. By April 1941, the Japanese and the Soviets, both now aligned with Nazi Germany, would sign a nonaggression pact—a diplomatic shift that would leave China increasingly isolated on the world stage.
Meanwhile, as China struggled for its survival, Chiang Kai-shek knew he could no longer afford to rely on his old allies. Though he had received only a limited number of American planes, the United States increasingly appeared to be China’s best hope. In Chungking on October 18, 1940, Chiang met with U.S. ambassador Nelson Johnson and begged for more planes. China needed, he said, five hundred to a thousand planes a year and “it is also hoped that American volunteers will be able to aid us in carrying on hostilities.” He pleaded that the situation was dire. It wouldn’t be long until “the people’s spirit and sentiment might become so disturbed as to render the situation impossible of support.” It was a stark warning, but one that went unheeded. Chiang had diplomats in Washington working on getting more aid for China, but he decided to add an American.
On October 20, Chennault received an urgent summons to come to Chungking. He flew in the next day and went to the Chiang residence. The Generalissimo launched into his plan: he wanted to buy the latest American fighters and hire American pilots to fly them. When asked his opinion, Chennault replied that he was pessimistic because of the overwhelming indifference most Americans felt toward China. Chiang was undeterred.
“You must go to the United States immediately,” he ordered. “Work out the plans for whatever you think you need. Do what you can to get American planes and pilots.” “Ordered back to the U.S. for duty,” Chennault wrote in his diary. Once again, he boarded the China Clipper and the plane “settled down in a plume of spray at the now familiar milestones.” The long trip gave him plenty of time to ponder his chance to shape history.