After Rangoon fell on March 7, the AVG would make their last stand in Burma on a small, barren airfield near a town called Magwe, about three hundred miles north of Rangoon. The RAF had set up a small base there, but it was little more than a few hangars and planes on a dirt field. Pilots from the First Squadron manned the post in early March and then they were relieved by a group from the Third. Bill Reed, a pilot in the Third Squadron, arrived on March 14 and could tell immediately that he wasn’t going to like this new posting. “So far there hasn’t been any activity here except reconnaissance work. Magwe is very hot and dusty—living is quite makeshift,” he wrote in his diary. To make matters worse, it didn’t look like they were going to have the opportunity to do any fighting in this desolate outpost. “On alert today . . . Had one call for patrol duty today, but nothing developed.” As he waited for the Japanese to appear, he ate the local watermelon and was “getting pretty tan again, and there is plenty of chance to read. Most of the time is spent in reading, sleeping, playing Acey-Deucey, etc.” But Reed wasn’t the sort of man who was content to spend his days reading and playing cards. “Action seems to make the days go by much more swiftly,” he wrote, “which is a thing much to be desired.”
Frustrated with waiting, he proposed a reconnaissance mission deep into Burma, where he could assess the Japanese forces. The mission was approved, and he persuaded Ken Jernstedt to join him. The twenty-four-year-old Jernstedt grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Oregon, where he shot gophers with a .22 rifle. He’d spent his whole life in Oregon until he signed up to become a Marine Corps aviator. When he heard about the secret mission in China, he signed on eagerly, like Reed, for the adventure of it all. The two pilots had become good friends. They played softball together during the training in Toungoo, they shared meals in Kunming, and they had fought together in the early battles over Rangoon in December. But this would be a challenge unlike anything they had done before—just the two of them flying deep into enemy territory.
Their first stop on the reconnaissance mission was an overnight rest at Toungoo. They arrived on March 17 and took a walk around places they had known well. If they assumed they would encounter the familiar setting from their days before the war, they were gravely disappointed. The town had been bombed by the Japanese and was “ruined,” as Reed characterized it in his diary. A pile of corpses stacked in a field was a particularly gruesome sight. That night, they went back to their old barracks and went over their reconnaissance plan, though they may have discussed doing something more ambitious, as their .30-caliber and .50-caliber machine guns had plenty of ammunition. They even had been able to fit a couple of makeshift bombs into the flare chutes on their P-40s—an indication they were intending to do more than just look at the Japanese forces.
The two pilots awoke before dawn on March 18, 1942, and readied their P-40s. It was still dark as they prepared to depart, and the only light came from the North Star, visible on the horizon at the end of the runway. “I just kept my eye on the old North Star, and when I got up to flying speed, I pulled off,” Ken Jernstedt recalled. The pair climbed to twenty thousand feet and flew along the Gulf of Martaban. They encountered a heavy rainstorm that forced them to descend to as low as seven thousand feet. When they were about twenty miles south of their objective, the Moulmein aerodrome, they caught sight of the railroad that would lead them straight to the airfield. As they were approaching their destination, they saw something unexpected—a landing strip with about thirty Japanese planes parked on it.
If this had ever been just a reconnaissance mission, those plans were shoved aside. This was an irresistible target, so the two pilots dove down to strafe the field. On the first few runs Reed initially scattered his shots but then found one plane to concentrate on. “[I] observed my fire going home and pieces of the ship flying off and the canopy smashed,” he wrote in his combat report. Both pilots made six passes each, and when they left they could see five large conflagrations on the ground. Shockingly, it didn’t seem as if the Japanese had put up any defense. “It was a complete surprise, for as far as I could see there wasn’t even any ground fire,” Reed wrote in his diary.
Emboldened by their success they decided to carry the attack to the main air base at Moulmein, just a few miles away. There they found more enemy planes arrayed beneath them. Jernstedt dove and “concentrated my fire on a fighter warming up and it immediately burst into flames.” He released one of the bombs he’d packed in the flare case, aiming for the hangar. It missed but did “hit an Army 97 bomber parked in front of the hangar. This ship was soon ablaze.” Reed dropped down with “all guns blazing at a field loaded with heavy bombers. This time we met pretty heavy antiaircraft, though, and as I pulled up and turned for another dive I saw [Jernstedt] crossing the field with little black mushrooms of smoke bursting all around him.” Although he was concerned that “the antiaircraft fire was pretty heavy and too damn close,” Reed made one final run. “On my last dive across the field I had only one [.50-caliber machine gun] and [two .30-caliber machine guns] firing, but I succeeded in setting what appeared to be an Army 98 fighter plane on fire,” he wrote in his combat report.
Seeing that the Japanese planes were preparing to take off, and being almost out of ammunition, the Americans pulled out and followed the road back to where they had come from. “On the way back I strafed a boat, a Jap staff car, and some boxcars,” Reed wrote in his diary. He also dropped a bomb on a compound. They landed at Toungoo, refueled with the assistance of some Chinese soldiers, and then returned to the field at Magwe.
“A pretty good day’s work, so [we] took the rest of the day off,” Reed added. They inspected their planes and discovered that each had only a single bullet hole. “It would be hard to estimate the amount of damage done to ther [sic] aircraft but I feel that it was considerable,” Jernstedt wrote in his report. They were ultimately credited with taking out fifteen Japanese planes on the ground, many of which had been hidden under a camouflage net: seven by Jernstedt and eight by Reed. The impromptu raid was a massive success for the AVG, and Chennault would have been proud that his pilots were taking the offensive.
In Iowa, the Des Moines Register heralded the raid with a huge banner on its front page: IOWAN BAGS JAP PLANES. When an Associated Press reporter tracked down Reed’s mother for a comment about her son, she was succinct: “Just say we are proud of him.” Time magazine described how “Pilots Kenneth Jernstedt and William Reed popped out of a cloud into the hot blue sky over Burma” and left behind “a junk heap of burning, exploding Jap planes.” The article added, “The AVG flyers were doing deeds that a movie director would reject, in a script, as too fantastic.”
Although Reed had succeeded in breaking the monotony that had been plaguing him, he soon settled back into his old routine at Magwe. On March 19 he noted in his diary: “Not much doing in the way of alarms. Dust storms on the field that remind me of desert scenes in the movies. If it weren’t for the watermelons, this place wouldn’t be worth patrolling.” Thinking about the surprise raid he’d just succeeded in carrying out, however, he assessed his own base and observed with some trepidation after a false alarm, “This field is too full of planes, though, to suit me.”
As he had feared, while he was getting lunch on March 21, Reed heard the unmistakable buzzing of planes approaching. He ran to take cover in a trench, but Ken Jernstedt hurried to his P-40. He took to the air, and “went like a scared jack rabbit for miles, making sure no one was on my tail.”
From his trench Reed peered out and watched as the Japanese bombers attacked their secondary field and “blew it sky high.” When the raid seemed to be over, he emerged to assess the damage but saw another wave of Japanese aircraft approaching. “We ran until we heard the sound of the bombs falling and then fell flat.” As Time later reported, “Bomb fragments wounded a pilot and two mechanics in a trench flanking the runway. An AVG doctor lugged the pilot to a jeep and drove it across the field to a hospital, with Jap bullets chasing him in the dust like puffs from his own exhaust pipe.”
Jernstedt, meanwhile, had followed the Japanese bombers as they turned back to their base, and though he was only a single P-40 chasing a formation of enemy planes, he recalled that he “got into some skirmishing” and was “trying to close in on a kill” when his windshield was shot out. He had neglected to put on his goggles, and for a moment was blinded. But he quickly focused and was able to open his eyes against the streaming air, and landed safely.
The shooting was over but the toll from the raid had left the base in chaos. John Fauth, a mechanic from Red Lion, Pennsylvania, had been badly injured and would die later that night. Pilot Frank Swartz and ground-crew member Bill Seiple were flown to a hospital in India. It became clear to the AVG pilots that they were going to have to retreat, and they pulled back to a CAMCO factory in Loiwing, just over the border into China, on March 23.
The AVG wanted revenge. “We’re going to make them pay,” First Squadron commander Bob Neale said. Chennault was of the same mind, his anger compounded by guilt. The Americans suspected that the enemy planes were operating out of Chiang Mai, a key base in Thailand, and Chennault blamed himself for not conducting sufficient reconnaissance there. Now he didn’t want to just spy on the base, he wanted to attack it with a surprise early-morning raid.
The squadrons were starting to mold together as numbers dwindled, and this plan would involve pilots from Neale’s First Squadron and Newkirk’s Second Squadron. Tex Hill, perhaps in deference to Newkirk’s status as a married man, put himself forward for the dangerous job leading the raid. Hill wouldn’t forget that conversation. “No, Tex,” Newkirk replied. “I’ve got to do that. The guys might think I’m kind of chicken or something, you know.” He had proved himself in battle time and again, but he may still have been worried about the reputation he’d got from his first encounter with the enemy. Coincidentally, on March 22 a full-page feature appeared in newspapers like the Albuquerque Journal profiling Jane Newkirk, one of America’s “waiting wives.” The feature described how she was “wistfully awaiting the day when, war clouds passed, reunion—and happiness” would return. Until then, she was volunteering for the Red Cross in Los Angeles and trying to keep busy reading, listening to the radio, and making a rug. She wore wings pinned to her dress as a reminder of her husband’s absence and scanned the newspapers for any mention of Scarsdale Jack. The feature said that Jane loved going out to dance but she was holding off until he returned, when “we’ll make up for all the months we’ve been separated.”
On March 22, on the other side of the world, a group of ten pilots, including Newkirk, Boyington, and Bond, took off from Kunming. They landed in Loiwing, directly across the border from Burma, and spent the night at the CAMCO facility there. They were pleased to discover that the luxurious facility included a clubhouse where the men could relax. Bond took a seat in one of its comfortable chairs and looked out the three windows at the “panoramic view of the distant mountains.” The next morning, they woke up early and found that they had been joined by some of the survivors retreating from Magwe. “All of the men and pilots have been deeply affected by the bombing,” Bond wrote in his diary. “They have a fear of bombing imprinted in their minds. I can understand it.” Now, the Americans would try to carry out a retaliatory raid.
On March 23, the American pilots flew to a small Royal Air Force base near the Thai border around Namsang, Burma, where they would spend the night and review their plans one final time. They would take off in two groups before dawn the next morning. First up would be Bob Neale’s men with six planes, after which Newkirk would advance with his group of four. All ten aircraft would rendezvous at a set point at ten thousand feet and would fly into Thailand in a single formation. They would then split up, with Neale’s group striking the Chiang Mai airfield and Newkirk’s a nearby military airfield at Lamphun. The surprise was key to their success—and their survival. If the Japanese had warning of the attack, they could overwhelm the Americans with superior force. One pilot called it “the most dangerous undertaking the AVG has done,” adding that even if they didn’t get shot down by ground fire or scrambling Japanese fighters, the pilots would be in “enemy territory where if you have to force land and the Japs don’t get you the jungle will.”
That night they placed trucks and lanterns around the runway to guide their predawn departure. They had dinner at the RAF barracks then prepared for bed. An RAF officer warned them that they could use the water to wash but not to brush their teeth. Boyington would recall that Newkirk ignored the advice, saying, “Well, after tomorrow, I don’t think it’ll make any difference.”
“All right you curly-headed fellows, it’s time,” an RAF officer yelled as he barged into their room on the morning of March 24. They dressed in the darkness, had a quick breakfast, and gathered at the flight line, making jokes to keep their spirits up. The headlights of a truck parked on the end of the grass strip were turned on, toward which the planes would accelerate and then ascend. They began to warm up their fighters at around 5:25 A.M., and then, at 5:49, Neale was the first to take off, with Bond following closely behind.
Bond rose safely into the sky, but because he “couldn’t see a thing” he flew based on his instruments. He was finally able to make out the navigation lights on Bob Neale’s plane and followed him, wondering “how in hell those other guys will make it to rendezvous over the field at ten thousand feet.” His concerns were well-founded, for while the six planes from Neale’s group assembled successfully, Newkirk’s contingent failed to appear at the rendezvous point. After waiting about twenty minutes, Neale decided to proceed without them. They couldn’t afford to lose the cover of darkness for the mission. They formed two Vs of three planes each and turned to a course of 150 degrees. “What was passing by in the jungle below us, or how close we came to any mountains, was in my imagination only,” Boyington would recall. The “early-morning haze hid any landmark that would have been helpful,” but Bond could tell as they crossed over the Salween River that they were closing in. He had conducted a reconnaissance mission here once before and was hoping that his memory would help direct him. Recognizing a mountain off to the left, he knew that the field would be close by, but Neale didn’t seem to be turning toward the target. Bond couldn’t break their radio silence but took his plane next to Neale’s, wagging his wings to signal that he knew where they were and that he would take over as leader for the final push. They had been in the air for more than an hour.
Bond took his P-40 into a “gradual descent,” not knowing what he would find beneath him in the darkness. As he drew closer to the ground he finally made out something that looked like a “square shape.” Pulling down lower he saw buildings that looked like hangars and spots on the field that had to be Japanese planes. When he descended to just a thousand feet he fired a burst into the darkness—the signal to the P-40s behind him that they had located their target. Another three P-40s dove down to join him in strafing the field, while Ed Rector and William McGarry remained above them to provide top cover.
“Now it was clear: we had caught them flat-footed without any warning,” Bond would later recall. He made his first pass over the field, firing on a row of fighters. The planes were parked so close their wingtips were nearly touching. “Hell,” he recalled, “I hadn’t seen this many aircraft in years. Seemed like the whole Japanese Air Force had tried to crowd into this one little field. I couldn’t miss.” He made another pass and saw that fires had broken out. He was flying low enough to see details on the field: men running and propellers starting to rotate. As he turned, tracer bullets whizzed by his cockpit, and puffs of black smoke in the sky were signs that the Japanese had manned their antiaircraft guns. He scanned the sky for Japanese aircraft, but there were none to be seen. Now that the base defense was heating up, he made what he thought would be his final run, but his aim was poor, so he came around for another one. As he came back for another strafing run, he spotted one large plane that “stood out from the others; perhaps it was a reconnaissance ship.” Selecting this as his final target he fired, watching as the plane “seemed to shake itself to pieces.” He considered going back again but decided against it, thinking, “To hell with pushing my luck.”
“I looked back at the field as I rounded the southwest corner of the mountain, and it did my heart good,” Charlie Bond wrote. “What satisfaction!” The attack had taken just seven or eight minutes.
Bond joined up with another pilot who had done strafing runs, William Bartling, and with Rector and McGarry. The four planes set a course back to Burma. The plan had been established: they would refuel at Namsang, then hopefully rendezvous with Newkirk’s group at a farther airfield, and then they’d all head back to Loiwing. Bond could hardly wait to get word to Chennault in Kunming that they had pulled off a successful offensive strike. “It was a mission exactly according to Chennault’s plan. How proud he would be. Hell, I was.”
As they made their return flight, Bond could see that one of the P-40s was falling behind, dropping lower and wagging its wings as if to signal that it needed help. It was McGarry. He hadn’t been on the strafing runs but must have been hit by one of the antiaircraft rounds as he circled up above. As his craft continued to lose altitude, he pulled the canopy open. A trail of smoke was now streaming from his plane. It was clear that the P-40 wasn’t going to make it, but Bond, knowing it would be safer for McGarry to bail out over Burma than into the Japanese-occupied jungles of Thailand below, tried to direct him toward the Salween River, which was the border. It lay just ahead, but it seemed as if McGarry’s plane was losing altitude too quickly to make it.
McGarry finally rolled his plane over and jumped from about a thousand feet while the others circled overhead and watched. He landed on a plateau, a short distance from where his plane crashed and burned. He stood and waved to the P-40s, but there was little they could do for him. Bond circled the spot where he thought they were on his map and marked the time, 7:41 A.M. He flew overhead and dropped the map down to McGarry, while Rector contributed a candy bar. The three remaining pilots then made their way back to Namsang, where they found that Boyington and Neale had already returned safely.
McGarry had been nicknamed “Happy-Go-Lucky” for his carefree attitude and “Black Mac” for his thick head of hair. Before joining the army, he had been an art student at Loyola University in Los Angeles, and had demonstrated his artistic talent in the AVG by helping to design the insignias. The RAF pilots at Namsang assured the Americans that they would do everything they could to assist with search and rescue. McGarry was only twenty-five or thirty miles from the border, and there was some hope that he could get out on his own. But given the “rough mountainous jungles,” Bond had his doubts about McGarry’s chances, and “couldn’t get Mac off my mind.”
Bond and his group then flew to another airfield where they had arranged to rendezvous with Jack Newkirk and his contingent of pilots. Once again they failed to appear, so the group went back to Loiwing. At least they could relax in those comfortable chairs while they waited.
Newkirk’s group had gotten lost in the dark earlier that morning, and decided to head into Thailand on their own. They tried to find the city of Chiang Mai, knowing that the airfield wouldn’t be far away, but they couldn’t seem to locate it. After a while they were getting desperate enough that anything they saw started to look like a good target.
When they happened upon a railroad station they noticed what pilot Robert Keeton described as a “large building which was undoubtedly a barracks.” It was set next to a grass field that appeared to be a small airfield. As Keeton, a former football player at Colorado College, strafed the barracks, he saw a row of wooden storehouses neatly lined up next to a rail track, and targeted them as well.
As he was finishing a strafing run, he glanced back and saw a “large ball of fire” in a field. The fire appeared to trail back over a hundred and fifty yards, and it looked as if his squadronmates had ignited some “gas dumps or oil tanks.” He pulled up and was able to find two of the other three P-40s from their group. They flew on and eventually found the Chiang Mai airfield, and abundant evidence that their comrades had been there first. The airfield was covered in more fires than Keeton could count. Antiaircraft rounds were “popping all around” his plane, so Keeton turned back with the two other P-40s. He scanned the sky for the fourth plane in their group, but it was nowhere in sight. At 8:35 A.M. they landed at the airfield at Heho in Burma to refuel.
When Keeton stepped out of his cockpit to confer with the other two pilots, he was told why they were one plane short: Jack Newkirk had gone down. The fire Keeton had seen near the barracks, which he had thought was burning gas or oil, had in fact been Newkirk’s P-40 incinerating as it skidded along the ground. Frank Lawlor, who had been flying alongside Newkirk, described what had occurred in his combat report: “Immediately after leaving the area of the barracks Squadron Leader Newkirk headed back up the road to [Chiang Mai]. He went into a dive to strafe what appeared to be an armored car and I sa[w] his plane crash and burn. Since by this time visibility had improved considerably and there appeared to be no unusual circumstances it was evident that Newkirk had been hit by enemy fire, possibl[y] from the armored car.”
Over the decades, historians have not been able to establish with certainty what caused Newkirk to crash. Interviews with Thai eyewitnesses on the ground suggested that the “armored cars” were actually oxcarts carrying rice. Hank Geselbracht, a pilot accompanying Newkirk in those final seconds, was a bit hesitant in his own description of the “armored cars,” perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that the pilots weren’t sure what they were firing at. In fact, when he wrote the report in pencil he just called them “vehicles,” and they became “armored cars” when it was typed up. The typed version reads: “The two vehicles we fired at were I believe armored cars. They were a camouflage brown and were squattish in appearance.” He had fired on them and thought they had destroyed one, only to find that Newkirk was missing when they came up—realizing then that the “flash of flame” was his squadron leader.
After refueling, the three remaining members of the group set out to meet up with the rest of the pilots at Loiwing. It was only 10:45 A.M. when they reconvened and discussed the morning’s events in detail. Bond listened to the account of Newkirk’s crash and couldn’t determine precisely what had befallen him: “We don’t know whether he was hit and couldn’t pull out or he waited too long to pull out.”
As they were talking, the air alarm sounded. Bond took cover in a ditch while other pilots scrambled to their planes and took off, ready to face what they presumed was a retaliatory Japanese attack. But it was another false alarm, and the men returned in time for the lunch prepared by CAMCO’s chef. Another CAMCO employee who played the role of bartender poured the pilots some much-needed drinks. Before long the whole group was at the bar “celebrating the day’s work,” as Bond described it.
Later in the day, Bond would return to the solace of his diary. He wrote a detailed narrative of the raid in line with the extensive combat report he filled out. In noting their celebration of the victory over drinks, he wondered whether it was the right attitude to strike: “It’s surprising how quickly one gets over the horrible loss of his buddies in wartime and revels in the successes of the day. Everyone was laughing and enjoying the moment. Yet Jack [Newkirk] was gone and we weren’t sure of [McGarry]. It makes one wonder about the nature of human beings. . . . Indeed, this was a great success for the AVG and the Allies. But can the AVG afford to lose such men as Jack Newkirk and Mac McGarry and two P-40 aircraft in these times? We wonder.” Chennault, the old warrior, felt no such ambivalence. He was triumphant about the raid, and felt that the cost of losing two pilots “was more than justified from the tactical results obtained.”
Americans mourned the loss of Scarsdale Jack. Obituaries were featured in papers across the country, emphasizing his all-American upbringing. He was described as a boy who had learned to shoot a bow and arrow, an Eagle Scout, and a young man who passed on an easy life of wealth because he wanted to serve his country. For months Americans had been reading about his exploits and had come to feel some degree of connection with him, as if he were a nephew or a neighbor. The Honolulu Advertiser ran a full-page ad invoking his legacy to sell war bonds: “He had a lot to live for. Ask his father . . . Ask his widow.”
Newkirk’s own family grieved the loss of a son, a brother, and a husband. His father, Louis, was devastated and couldn’t bring himself to talk with reporters. He attended Saint Thomas Church in midtown Manhattan for a ceremony commemorating his son. The Reverend Roelif Brooks offered remarks on the solemn occasion: “There is something gallant about youth, and youth responds very quickly to a sympathy for the oppressed and downtrodden. Those who go perhaps have accomplished more than many of us who’ll live to a ripe old age. Let that be a comfort when we remember this gallant young airman, who gave his life that others may live.” On the other side of the country, Jane Newkirk struggled to come to terms with her widowhood. She was visiting a friend in San Francisco when she got the news. A reporter found her at the airport, waiting for a flight back to Los Angeles, and said she “became hysterical every time her husband’s name was mentioned.” An Associated Press photographer snapped shots of the bereaved widow with the wings pinned to her dress. She made it back to Los Angeles, but was despondent about her future: “I don’t know what I’ll do, now that Jack is gone.” Eventually she decided to leave California and return home to Lansing, Michigan, and take time to mourn. Jack had promised her a reunion party in Hawaii, but now all she had were his letters and the framed picture of him she’d kept on her desk. She remembered waving good-bye to him on the dock in San Francisco. After his death she would say of his departure, “I had a premonition I’d never see him again when his ship sailed.”
In the days after the Chiang Mai raid the men of the AVG heard the victory being cheered on the radio. Combined with the regular visits from reporters, the pilots were beginning to have a notion of the sensation they were becoming back home. But there were concerns arising in their ranks. They had signed up for a one-year commitment to CAMCO and then planned on heading home, with the assurance that they could take up their old commissions in the military. Many were set on returning to the Marine Corps or the navy. Their future felt uncertain.
Chennault called a meeting with the pilots in Kunming on the evening of March 26. He spent an hour with them discussing the rumors and found that there was overwhelming opposition to the idea of induction into the army. The pilots groused that the one-year contracts they’d signed with CAMCO were being abrogated, and there was some grumbling from men who wanted to resign immediately. Chennault assured them that he could find replacements if they weren’t willing to stay for the long haul. For his part, he had committed his life to defending China and was planning to stay on no matter what—even if it meant having to put on an army uniform again.
However safe the hostels in Kunming felt from the bloody war raging in Burma, the Japanese were edging closer to the Chinese border. The army had sent Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell to China to work with Chiang Kai-shek. He had visited Kunming and impressed upon Chennault the importance of the AVG’s induction into the Army Air Forces. He thought that he had Chennault’s acquiescence, but that would turn out to be a touchy subject.
Stilwell had been placed in command of the Chinese Expeditionary Force in Burma and was entrusted with halting the Japanese offensive, though he would lament that the Chinese troops wouldn’t follow his orders. The mission wasn’t going well. “The edge of war moved north with incessant air raids, villages in flames, more and more refugees choking the roads in a long frieze of bullock carts, heat and thirst and dust,” historian Barbara Tuchman wrote. Stilwell was growing frustrated that the Chinese troops refused to go on the offensive as the Japanese closed in. Toungoo fell to the Japanese on March 30.
That same day, Life hit the newsstands with the article on the FLYING TIGERS IN BURMA. George Rodger’s photographs were published two months after his photo shoot with the AVG. The article had a triumphant tone, noting: “One shining hope has emerged from three catastrophic months of war . . . [the AVG has] violently wrenched from the Jap Air Force control of the skies over Burma and southeast China.” That was old news. The Flying Tigers had launched several successful raids, but by March 30, 1942, they had retreated across the border into China. They would use the CAMCO clubhouse at Loiwing as their new base.
It sounded like a mythical place.
In the press, the factory at Loiwing, the one the Americans had stayed at before and after the Chiang Mai raid, was known as Pawleyville, after the CAMCO executive who had designed it. Pawley seemed to have taken his inspiration from Henry Ford’s Fordlandia in Brazil. Pawleyville was a remote outpost built deep in the jungles that had more luxurious accommodations than what you would encounter in most places in the United States. The public could hardly believe the reports. The Honolulu Advertiser told of a “famed but hidden city.” It was a “mysterious workshop,” the location of which “was a closely guarded secret.” In 1939 Time described it as being “miles from civilization of any sort . . . a community of 15 U.S. experts, their families, nearly 1,000 Chinese workers, living in a modern town with electric lights, running water, bungalows, playgrounds, and a $4,000,000 plant of U.S.-owned Central Aircraft Co. which will produce fighting planes to help China win.” Other accounts told of how Pawley’s team had to overcome malaria, the bubonic plague, and Japanese air raids to build and maintain it. Pawley had originally housed his facility at Hangchow, where the American instructors taught Chinese pilots, but in the wake of the war it had been moved all the way to this remote outpost.
When the AVG pilots began to move into the CAMCO facility in late March 1942, they marveled at their lavish quarters, a remarkable upgrade from the dirt field at Magwe. “I certainly welcome the rest and relief from the tension,” Bill Reed wrote in his diary. They could play pool or listen to phonograph records, and plans were made to screen movies. Best of all, there was “Ma,” as the men took to calling her. Marion Davidson, the chef who had prepared lunch for the Chiang Mai raiders, cooked the men thick steaks and served up treats like fruit salad. “It’s good for morale,” she explained. When an American reporter visited, he said the pilots looked like “mild-mannered ex-college boys mothered by a plump dormitory manageress.” Seated in the dining room beneath an eight-foot American flag, the men could escape from the war for the length of a hearty meal.
The pilots had been hardened by combat and the loss of their squadronmates, but they were still young men who wanted to have a good time. On April 1, they threw a party “for no reason at all + everyone cut loose,” as R. T. Smith noted in his diary. The following night there was a wedding. Fred Hodges married an Anglo-Burmese woman he had met in Rangoon. The men didn’t miss an excuse to enjoy a wild night, and the ceremony was followed by a bacchanalia. Greg Boyington attended wearing a bathrobe—he had recently crashed a plane on takeoff and explained that his knees were too swollen to wear slacks. Predictably he took things a bit far and got “full of whiskey.” As the celebrating went on into the night, an air-raid alarm sounded and people ran outside to seek cover. Boyington wandered into the darkness in a drunken stupor and fell off the side of the hill. It was another false alarm, but his injuries, including a deep cut on his head, were severe enough to warrant his evacuation to Kunming, where he would recover in the hospital. By now he enjoyed little about the AVG except for Olga Greenlaw, who was in Kunming when he returned. She brought him a pack of Camels and kept him company. He complained that he felt dirty in his clothes so she brought him a pair of her husband’s silk pajamas. As he recovered, he would go over to her place for tea and sympathy, and he talked about his growing unhappiness and his increasing certainty that his tenure with the group would soon be coming to an end.
The American pilots remained concerned about another Japanese attack, and for those who had survived the raid on Magwe, the idea of being caught in a surprise raid once again was terrifying. They would rather take cover or scramble their planes in response to any number of false alarms than find themselves again the victims of a surprise attack. “They should bomb this place any day now,” Bill Reed wrote in his diary on April 2. Still, the Japanese bombers didn’t appear.
April 5 was Easter Sunday, and services were conducted by an RAF chaplain after dinner. The musical accompaniment was less professional, as a drunken pilot, Duke Hedman, downed a few scotches and then tried a few tunes at the piano. Reed was overcome with a sense of wistfulness: “Nice services considering the circumstances, but I couldn’t help thinking of Easter Sunday services at home.” Afterward, the men played pool late into the night. The good news on the holiday was that eight RAF Hurricanes had landed on the Burma side of the border, an invaluable addition to the existing forces when the battle finally got started. A heavy rain on April 7 gave the pilots some assurance that it would be a quiet day for those on alert duty, and as expected there were no reports of Japanese planes.
Reed had planned to sleep late the next day, but was awoken at 9:00 A.M. by an air-raid alarm, and though it again turned out to be a false one, it ruined his morning: “My day off today, damn it!” At 12:30 P.M. three new planes—a revised version of the P-40—showed up as reinforcements. They had hardly landed when another air-raid alarm sounded. From a hilltop, Reed scanned the skies with binoculars and saw a cluster of enemy aircraft approaching.
Because they had little time to react after the air alarm sounded, the pilots took their P-40s into a “balls out” climb. R. T. Smith was leading the group, and he could tell that this battle was going to be the “damndest rat-race imaginable.” He told the P-40 pilots to spread out, pick their individual targets, and hope for the best. When the Japanese planes approached to hit the planes still on the runway, the P-40s went into steep dives to hit them from above. Soon the American pilots could see smoke rising from their airfield and enemy fighters “buzzing around like flies.”
Twenty-six-year-old Fritz Wolf was one of the airmen flying that afternoon. Though he had lost much of his bulk while overseas, he had been a fullback for Carroll College’s football team, an All-Conference player, and had nearly gone on to try out for the Green Bay Packers, but instead decided to become a naval aviator. Wolf came out of his dive directly behind two Japanese fighters and began to shoot. They didn’t go down, but when he saw another fighter doing a roll, he decided it would make a good target. He opened fire and watched as the bullet-riddled fighter plummeted, and then attempted to climb back up before finally crashing onto the field below.
The P-40s seemed to have the upper hand. Smith pulled in to the rear of a fighter that was completing a strafing run and kept his finger on the trigger until the Japanese plane went down in a ball of flames. The enemy planes still airborne seemed to be turning back. Smith was tempted to follow them but chose to return to the base, writing later in his diary that it had been “the most thrilling experience I’ve ever had.” Wolf claimed two kills that afternoon, part of a total of ten that the AVG estimated for the day.
When the pilots landed they basked in the compliments of their squadronmates who had watched the fight from the trenches. It “looked just like a movie only better,” one remarked. Reed had watched the dogfight from the hill and then spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the field examining the downed Japanese planes. However celebratory the mood, some pilots privately expressed concerns about the enemy’s capabilities. John Donovan, who had been in the air that morning, wrote in a letter home that “the Japs can afford to lose 10 out of 13 planes, because they always come back with a flock of new planes the next time . . you can depend they’ll be here again.” He added: “That red circle on their wings looks ‘big’ when they surprise you.”
Throughout this period, Chennault, back in Kunming, had been working on plans to have the U.S. Army supply them with new and improved P-40s. He wanted the P-40E, or Kittyhawk, as it was called. The Kittyhawk would be an improvement over their older P-40, which was known as the Tomahawk. The Kittyhawk had six .50-caliber machine guns, an upgrade over the four .30-caliber and two .50-caliber machine guns on the Tomahawk. The Kittyhawk could hold a series of smaller bombs in underwing racks and a larger bomb on a centerline rack. Chennault and the pilots had spent months trying to build a makeshift bomb rack on the older P-40 but they hadn’t had much success.
Claire Chennault’s lobbying of Lauchlin Currie finally paid off. The White House adviser was able to free up some Kittyhawks for the AVG.
The planes were first shipped on a freighter to Accra. The problem then became getting them from the west coast of Africa to China—a daunting “ferry mission” to which Chennault assigned a group of six pilots led by George McMillan. In February the men hitched rides on CNAC and Pan Am transports to Accra. They saw this as “an unbelievable opportunity to see more of the world’s exotic and mysterious places,” R. T. Smith would recall. In Accra, they picked up the new P-40Es, which one pilot, C. H. Laughlin, described as “a bit bulkier than the B model we’ve been flying.” There were small improvements—the instruments in the cockpit had a better layout, the iron ring sights were replaced with a reflector gunsight. It was like picking up a car from the dealer. The P-40E was like a “new Buick,” he felt.
They turned back for Kunming, a trip that would take them across Africa, the Middle East, India, then a part of China itself. “Roughly the equivalent of a flight from New Orleans to the South Pole,” R. T. Smith wrote. But he felt like Murphy’s Law was governing the trip, as everything went wrong. The compartments on the P-40E were smaller than those on the Tomahawk, so they had to shove their clothes into parachute bags. They flew across endless miles of desert, enduring sandstorms, engine problems, and tire problems. But despite the taxing journey, they still took in the sights. McMillan rode a giraffe in the Sudan, and when they made it to Egypt they flew by the pyramids. The highlight of the trip, McMillan’s diary reveals, was finding American beer and cigarettes at their hotel in Cairo. R. T. Smith bought a German Luger pistol there—“a honey of a gun”—that a British soldier had captured while fighting in North Africa. They continued on their journey, going across India, and finally arrived back in Kunming by March 22 to a hero’s welcome. They were necessary reinforcements as the AVG was in the midst of intensive fighting. As they all knew, “new planes would add a good deal of much-needed firepower,” R. T. Smith wrote. Though everyone wanted to know about their trip, the ferry pilots were exhausted when they got back. It was “the sort of thing you wouldn’t trade for a million dollars, but wouldn’t do again if paid a million.”
Chennault had already dispatched another group of six pilots to pick up more P-40Es. The Kittyhawks could be used, Chennault believed, “to attack the enemy effectively.” Loiwing needed reinforcements, so he sent three of the Kittyhawks down to the front lines on April 8, and they made it just in time for the air raid, during which one Kittyhawk was destroyed while it sat on the ground and another was damaged. On April 9, Tex Hill, John Petach, and seven other AVG pilots set out from Kunming to bring Loiwing more planes, goosing the total number to around twenty.
Once again war forced Petach to part from his wife. He kissed Emma Foster good-bye, with no certainty that he’d be back. She knew what combat could do to the pilots. She had seen it with her own eyes. “That fight was life or death,” she recalled. “If I had seen it in a movie I would not have believed it, but I literally saw them go out as boys, and return with different faces, as men.”
That same day, a CNAC transport brought Chennault to Loiwing. He hadn’t seen actual combat since the December 20 battle over Kunming, and his arrival must have spurred rumors through the ranks about the reason for his appearance at the front lines. What the pilots didn’t know was that he was carrying a secret that would essentially bring an end to the AVG. He had been facing continual pressure to induct the AVG into the U.S. Army Air Forces. He wasn’t the type to defer to authority—a source of tension throughout his whole career in the army—and he guarded fiercely the independence of the AVG. But in early April he had gone to Chungking with Stilwell to attend meetings. U.S. diplomat John Davies, one of the State Department’s original “China hands,” assured Chennault that his work was appreciated but that he would have to “play ball” and join the Army Air Forces if he wanted to obtain additional planes. There was no denying that the AVG had been effective, but the army, and Stilwell in particular, wanted to take control. Chennault was determined to continue fighting, and if a change of uniform meant more planes, he figured it was worth it. The plan was signed off by the Chinese and American leadership, and as Stilwell noted in his diary, he was glad to “finish off the damn AVG thing.”
Chennault’s official induction took place the day he arrived at Loiwing. Though he had long been known as the “Colonel,” this was just an honorary title, originally bestowed by the governor of Louisiana. Now he was designated a true colonel in the U.S. Army. He would soon be promoted to brigadier general, but that appointment was carefully dated one day behind the elevation of Clayton Bissell—a rival of Chennault’s from his days at Maxwell, who was working for Stilwell—ensuring that Bissell was technically the senior aerial officer in the China-Burma-India Theater. The insult stung, but Chennault was all in, and a general himself now, so he simply took it. Going forward, the plan was for the AVG to focus on providing combat support for the Chinese troops that Stilwell was commanding in Burma—a task for which the new Kittyhawks were well suited.
But now, Chennault had to tell the men the news and explain their options: they would have the choice of applying to stay in the army, or they could return home after the date set for induction—the Fourth of July.
Chennault was welcomed to the front lines on the morning of April 10 by a surprise Japanese raid. The raid damaged almost half of the twenty planes on the runway, which were later taken to the CAMCO factory to be repaired. As John Petach recorded in his diary, the attack left them “not hurt but plenty scared.”
Then Saturday night, April 11, the men gathered in the clubhouse to hear a speech by the Old Man. For many of the pilots, he had been a figure largely in the background during their service in the AVG, someone they had hardly seen for months. But they still knew that he was their ultimate boss. He announced that the AVG would become a fighter squadron in the Army Air Forces. The men could apply to join the army, but their acceptance wouldn’t be guaranteed—an induction board would be established to assess what kind of commission they could receive. They were almost unanimous in their reaction to the news—they were going to leave for home on Independence Day, less than three months away.
Having been the first combatants in the war, they felt they had earned a break to see their families and luxuriate at home. John Donovan, who had fought in the April 8 battle, had written to his parents: “I admit to being lonesome and homesick. What a joy it would be to drive a car down a smooth American boulevard with modern stores and homes on both sides!” They were exhausted. The months of fighting “had taken their toll, and the signs of stress were apparent in gaunt faces, and bodies that had lost many pounds,” as R. T. Smith said. They were ready to go home.
However loyal to Chennault the pilots may have been, that loyalty had its limits. To become just another fighter squadron didn’t seem to suit men who had started the war as an independent unit. Although they admired Chennault, they did not share his deep desire to fight, and apparently even die, for China. “The demands made on him and the AVG are so great as to be absolutely impossible, except that Chennault will never admit impossibility,” as one pilot put it. Chennault had given up everything—his wife, his children, his beloved backwoods in Louisiana—to devote his life to China. If he had longings for home, he had long ago learned to suppress them. He intended to keep at it until the end. But for his men, the end was in sight. Three months may have seemed like no time in the abstract, but they knew every day in this war could mean death.
In the meantime, the pilots found they had a new mission as the war continued to evolve. From the beginning of their service they had been primarily engaged in fighting air battles. Now they were tasked with providing aerial cover and conducting reconnaissance missions for General Stilwell, who needed intelligence on the deployment of Japanese forces. “God,” Stilwell complained to an aide, “I feel like a blind man.” Though it wasn’t stated explicitly to them, they were effectively functioning as Stilwell’s eyes in the sky.
They spent long days flying deep in Burma on these dangerous missions. To conduct reconnaissance, a pilot would place a map on his lap and try to mark down any sighting that looked like a troop movement, sometimes having no idea whether the troops he saw were Chinese or Japanese, as the front lines of the war were changing quickly. Forest fires were burning across the country, which left the pilots trying to navigate through smoke. “A thick layer of the stuff seemed to hang like a blanket over Burma, about like the smog in L.A. at its worst,” R. T. Smith recalled. The conditions forced them to keep low to the ground, which exposed them to ground fire from Japanese troops, and they had to hope they wouldn’t run into a formation of enemy fighters. Even landing at one of the Allied airfields was potentially perilous. A reconnaissance report reminded the pilots to wag their wings as they flew in to land or “it is probable that the ground forces will fire. Extreme caution must be exercised in landing at these friendly airdromes.” Chennault knew these missions left the P-40s like “clay pigeons in a shooting gallery of Japanese flak gunners and fighter pilots,” but he had little choice about the matter given that he was back in the army.
John Petach described a reconnaissance flight in a letter to Emma: “Yesterday I went with Rector and Ricketts to Toungoo again, we patrolled for 3 hours and landed at Pyawbwe [an Allied base] at 6:30 P.M. We stayed there overnight and took off at 05:30 A.M. this morning and patrolled for 3½ hrs more we didn’t see any doggone Jap in all that time. . . . I imagine I’ll go again tomorrow, they are rough! You come back feeling all washed out after concentrating so long. Maybe we’ll have better luck next time.” It could be worse than exhausting: during one flight, Petach had to make a forced crash landing in a dry riverbed. He was all right but the P-40’s propeller was ruined.
The pilots were also required to fly along the front lines to provide aerial support to the Chinese troops. The men called these “morale missions” because they believed the entire point was to display the twelve-pointed Chinese star beneath their wings to the Chinese forces below. “Well, nobody wanted those missions. They really didn’t,” Tex Hill recalled. “Low-level operations are real dangerous, because some guy with a rifle, standing behind a tree, could knock you off, and you’d never see him.”
Then there was a real “stinker” of a mission. On April 16, a request went out for eight pilots to volunteer as fighter escorts for RAF Blenheim bombers to attack the Japanese airfield at Chiang Mai the next day—the very spot where Newkirk had been killed less than a month before. “Volunteers were scarce as hen’s teeth,” Smith wrote in his diary, for the pilots knew that Chiang Mai was deep into enemy territory and was heavily defended by antiaircraft guns. The mission was ultimately called off due to bad weather, but the pilots had made it clear that they weren’t going to fly assignments that they considered unreasonable. Disobeying orders was unthinkable in the army and sufficient cause for a court-martial, but Chennault had created a unit in which military discipline was lax, and now that was coming back to haunt him. Smith, who had become something of a ringleader in the opposition, wrote in his diary: “Now they intend to hold the line + want us to give them air support. Our twelve ships against the whole damn Jap air force. It seems mighty futile to all of us + we’re wondering what’s taking the U.S. so damn long to get something over here.” Smith was no coward, but in his mind they had been asked to do the impossible, and he wasn’t afraid to stand up to the Old Man.
Everything seemed to come to a head when Chennault called a meeting on Saturday, April 18, a week after he told the men about the upcoming induction. This gathering, though, had a far angrier tone. He announced that he was now a brigadier general (even though that promotion wouldn’t go into effect for a few more days) and was taking orders from General Stilwell—which meant that the pilots were going to have to follow whatever orders were given. He described the upcoming missions and, as Smith put it in his diary, they “sounded pretty bad—suicide in fact.” The men responded by taking a “load off our chest as to how we felt,” insisting to Chennault they couldn’t just keep fighting without reinforcements. Accounts of the heated argument differed, but Smith recalled Chennault’s being clear that any pilot who didn’t intend to obey commands should resign, as refusing to fly a mission would effectively be showing the “white feather” to the Japanese.
Smith leapt up and “told the old man that there was a hell of a big difference between common sense and cowardice, and after all we’d been through I couldn’t believe he was now calling us cowards.” When his protest was met with a “murmur of assent” from the men, Chennault insisted that wasn’t what he meant, but he couldn’t bring himself to apologize. The meeting wrapped up after that, but the pilots, still angry, assembled later that night at the alert shack to discuss their response. “It was almost like a union meeting, lots of arguments back and forth,” Smith recalled. He asserted that they should call Chennault’s bluff and resign, which was the only response that was appropriate to the disrespect they had been shown. Most of the men agreed, though they may have meant this more as a symbolic resignation to lodge their protest. “The guys were tired by that time . . . literally just living from hand to mouth going back up there,” Tex Hill recalled. Still, he felt they should support Chennault and not question the orders. He was part of a small minority.
The men finally decided to draw up a petition: “We, the undersigned, pilots of the American Volunteer Group, hereby desire to terminate our contracts with the Central Aircraft Mfg. Co. and our services with the AVG.” Chennault may have returned to the army, but the pilots were firm in their conviction that they had not. There had been a number of resignations throughout the AVG’s tenure and the pilots felt that they could resign when they wanted to. The letter was typed up on First American Volunteer Group letterhead, the signatories trailing down the page in a long list. Twenty-six of the more than thirty pilots at Loiwing signed the document, with some notable absences—Tex Hill and, surprisingly, John Petach. He had spent much of the month writing love letters to Emma, and though he was eager to get home, loyalty to Chennault and Hill, or his sense of duty, kept him in the battle.
The resignation letter was presented to Chennault the following morning. He called another meeting for that night, and the group’s existence “hung rather precariously throughout the day,” as Bill Reed put it. Privately, Chennault sympathized with the pilots. He didn’t approve of the aerial support missions or the escort service for the RAF, but as he wrote in his memoirs, “as long as these orders came down from my immediate superiors, the Generalissimo and Stilwell, I was obliged to execute them regardless of my personal feelings.” But his conviction was more than a matter of simply following orders. He remained zealously committed to the cause of China, even if it meant the loss of his pilots. The pilots had increasingly come to reject that perspective. “Our main concern,” Smith recalled, “was simply survival from day to day, each of us hoping his number wouldn’t come up before it was time to head back for the good old U.S. of A.” Chuck Older, one of the pilots who signed the letter, recalled explaining to Chennault: “We don’t mind risking our lives but we just don’t want to throw them away, that’s the feeling.”
That night the men gathered at 8:00 P.M. to hear Chennault address the matter of the resignation letter. His speech was blunt. He told the men that he would not accept their resignations and that “anyone leaving would be guilty of desertion etc.,” as Smith summarized the warning in his diary. Chennault knew that others in the army had questioned the lack of formality with which he ran the unit, and if he were to allow the AVG to disband now, it would be judged as a black mark on his reputation. He had sought to lead without being the sort of domineering commander he had hated as a pilot, but now he felt he had little choice but to give forceful orders if he wanted to keep the unit intact. The pilots accepted their fate, hoping that their protest had at least made a point. Indeed, it seemed that Chennault at least reached out to Madame Chiang to ensure that the AVG wouldn’t again be asked to escort the Blenheim bombers.
The men were all eager to put the Loiwing Revolt, as it came to be known, behind them. “So [Chennault] and all of us are forgetting the whole affair + carrying on as usual,” Smith wrote in his diary. There were no mentions of the revolt in the newspaper articles that regularly celebrated the pilots’ exploits. Neither Chennault nor his men wanted to tarnish the legend of the Flying Tigers by revealing how perilously close the entire operation had come to ending in a mass resignation. Chennault hoped that soon it would be “all but forgotten.”
One signatory to the resignation letter, Robert Brouk, wrote in his diary that the pilots were going to “stick together and follow orders and see the thing out.” Following orders actually came naturally for Brouk. The twenty-four-year-old had been participating in military organizations since his days in the Drum and Bugle Corps at Morton High School in Cicero, Illinois. After college, joining the army seemed like a better option than working for his father’s sign-painting company; then in 1941 he signed up for the AVG.
On April 21, Brouk was back in his cockpit as one of four pilots on a patrol deep into Japanese-occupied Burma. As they flew over enemy territory, they saw puffs of black smoke from antiaircraft guns. To evade fire, they would “twist and turn, dive and soar, never flying the same pattern for more than four or five seconds.” They survived the flight and spent the night at a remote outpost in Burma. The British had evacuated the site in advance of the Japanese attack, but Brouk found two cooks who prepared some food for the pilots. As they worked to get their planes ready for another patrol the following morning, Brouk discovered some serious problems with his P-40, and decided he would have to return to Loiwing.
The next day, Brouk woke, had a quick breakfast, and got into his plane. As he ascended, he saw that his oil temperature was too high, so he decided to land and see if he could determine what was causing the problem. He taxied back to the hangar that he’d just left. Suddenly, he saw white flashes and felt a searing pain in his legs. A roar overhead made him look up, and he saw a low-flying Japanese plane above him. He was being strafed. His plane was barely moving, so he undid his safety belt and jumped from the cockpit. As he ran, he was attempting to pull off his parachute and struggling with its buckles when he saw a bullet hole in his thumb just below the first joint. The Japanese fighter was circling back, and he raced twenty feet toward a covered dugout, diving in headfirst and landing between two Chinese soldiers. He saw blood seeping from his left foot, and when he pulled off his shoe and sock he found a “ragged wound.” He had been shot in the leg, so he pulled off his pants. A Chinese soldier helped apply handkerchiefs to try to stanch the bleeding. On the runway, his P-40 was incinerating, its .30-caliber and .50-caliber bullets cooking off as it burned. “Soon the enemy planes left and only the flaming plane and shooting bullets broke the stillness of the morning,” he recalled in his diary.
Brouk needed a doctor and was fortunate that his squadronmates tracked down the “Burma Surgeon,” Gordon Seagrave. Educated at Johns Hopkins Medical School, Seagrave was a surgeon-missionary who had spent most of his life along the China-Burma border. Within hours he was operating on Brouk, who, as he later described, had “six holes in his leg and another in his thumb. I extracted three bullets and some scraps of airplane metal.” He saved Brouk’s life but couldn’t remember the young man’s name when a reporter asked him about it. Brouk was evacuated to Lashio, where medics took X-rays and then operated again to remove more of the shrapnel. He was then flown back to Kunming on a CNAC transport.
Word of Brouk’s condition reached the men back in Loiwing, who were reminded anew of the danger they faced. As it had become clear that all of Burma would soon be in Japanese hands, the question for many of the pilots was whether they could just stay alive until July 4.
Chennault would never accept defeat easily. He was determined to achieve one final victory over the Japanese in Burma. For the past months, the aerial combat in which the AVG had engaged had been on a small scale—nothing like the Christmas battle in Rangoon or the December 20 fight in Kunming. But Chennault believed that might be changing. Japanese reconnaissance flights had been spotted over Loiwing, and he predicted they would launch a major strike soon. He even had a hunch about the timing: April 29 was Emperor Hirohito’s forty-first birthday, a day that would be marked by celebrations in Japan.
In 1938, Chennault had been advising the Chinese Air Force and had a hunch that the Japanese would want to launch a major strike on Hankow for the emperor’s birthday. Chennault had tricked the Japanese the day before—instructing the Chinese pilots to take to the air in an apparent departure and then return at a low altitude just as the sun was setting. As he suspected, the Japanese spies reported that the planes had departed and launched a major raid. Once the Japanese planes had started the attack, the Chinese pilots swooped onto them in a surprise attack. It was a bizarre plan, but it had worked: “When the smoke cleared,” historian John Pomfret wrote, “thirty-six of thirty-nine Japanese planes had been lost in the biggest pre-World War II battle in aerial history.”
Chennault now wanted to replicate that feat. This time, however, he suspected that the Japanese bombers would strike a day before the emperor’s actual birthday so that the commanders could relay the news of their victory in a communiqué that would reach the emperor in time to celebrate the occasion. Chennault was taking a risk putting so many Flying Tigers in the air on a single patrol, but he trusted his hunch.
The field at Loiwing was abuzz the morning of April 28 as a large group of P-40s took off at 9:30 for Burma. Tex Hill was flying cover at fifteen thousand feet with a small group of P-40Es, while a few thousand feet below was a larger group of P-40s, both the P-40E Kittyhawks and the P-40 Tomahawks. As they flew south one pilot suddenly “heard a strange tongue over the radio,” and Hill saw a group of Japanese fighters overhead. He made radio contact with a squadronmate, then “turned my flight on an interception course of the enemy.”
In addition to the fighters he had already identified, Hill found “a formation of 27 bombers,” and then, farther away, what appeared to be around a dozen, maybe more, additional fighters. He flew up to meet them and knew he would have to choose his shots carefully. He focused on one Japanese fighter, firing off a series of short bursts. On the fourth burst, his target began to smoke, then plunged into the jungle below. The fight quickly devolved into a “rat race,” with the combatants circling each other, each trying to get on the other’s tail as if their lives depended on it, because they actually did. Lewis Bishop fired a “long burst” at a fighter that “had managed to get on Hill’s tail,” and the Japanese pilot bailed out of his smoking plane. Though the Japanese had the high ground and “engaged us heavily,” they “seemed to be inexperienced as their defence [sic] was not coordinated,” Hill wrote. The only P-40 lost that day was R. T. Smith’s. But Smith wasn’t shot down. He ran out of gas after the battle, landed in a field, and hitchhiked with some Chinese soldiers to regroup with his squadronmates. He was somewhat embarrassed about the incident, but everyone was in a triumphant mood.
However great the AVG victory that day, Japanese ground troops continued their push north, beating back Chinese and British resistance in northern Burma. On April 30, Lashio, the Burmese city where the Burma Road began, fell—a sign to Chennault that the CAMCO factory at Loiwing would soon follow. He had no choice but to order a retreat. The facility was a scene of chaos in those final days. There weren’t enough planes for all the pilots to fly out so some of them would have to retreat up the Burma Road in a convoy of trucks. Hill selected who would fly and who would suffer the danger and discomfort of driving. Then he faced an even tougher decision. “Hell, I was the last guy out of [Loiwing], [and] had to make the call whether to burn the airplanes,” Hill recalled. He knew what had to be done. The planes in the repair shop were ignited as the last Flying Tigers fled.
When the Japanese soldiers captured Loiwing, they saw those charred shark-nosed P-40s as a war prize. A Japanese newspaper printed a picture of the wreckage, evidence that the Japanese had the famed Flying Tigers on the run.