EPILOGUE
On June 26, 1952, a decade after the Flying Tigers disbanded, a C-54 cargo plane flown by a trio of former AVG pilots left New York and made its way to Los Angeles. A large “Flying Tigers Line” logo was painted on its side, but it wasn’t embarking on a military mission. The plane belonged to the cargo airline started by a former AVG pilot after the war and was named for the old outfit, and it was making a special trip. The C-54 stopped in different cities to pick up former Tigers as it crossed the country, including Claire Chennault and his new young wife, Anna, the pretty Chinese journalist he had married in 1947 after a divorce from Nell.
The plane flew through the night, but no one slept as they reconnected with long-parted friends. On the morning of June 27, as they neared Los Angeles, four Air Force jets pulled up alongside as an honor escort for the final descent. Then a fifth plane flew alongside: a shark-nosed P-40.
After the plane taxied to a stop, the cabin door opened and Chennault walked down the staircase as an Air Force band played “Tiger Rag.” The Tigers themselves rushed to meet their squadronmates waiting on the tarmac. “It is impossible to describe the emotional impact of this moment as once again we saw the familiar faces of buddies and friends from the old AVG days, many of whom we hadn’t seen in ten years,” reported an article in the Tiger Rag, an alumni newsletter that was launched a few months later.
The party continued at the Ambassador Hotel, where noontime cocktails were served and the men settled in for lunch. A Los Angeles Times reporter noted that “the former combat pilots started swapping yarns immediately, wringing the hands of buddies they hadn’t seen for years and shouting vociferous greetings across the table.” Chennault gave some quick remarks and joked that he thought the food in Toungoo was better. There was a picnic the following day, where they were joined by their “mascot” for the weekend—an allegedly tame tiger lent by the Seattle Zoo. Its name was Toungoo.
Life had taken them in many directions: some had become lawyers, others had tried ranching or farming, and many were now military or commercial pilots. But having been a Flying Tiger was an honor that seemed to become only more meaningful as they aged. Many of the men were married and brought their wives and young children along, but one night had been set aside just for the men at the Hollywood Athletic Club. Thanks to sponsorships from companies like Lockheed and Texaco, they could live it up. There was a steak dinner, and they made good use of the open bar. They drank, danced, and partied like they were back in the Silver Grill.
The weekend culminated with a banquet on Sunday night. With guests, the crowd swelled to 350, filling the Blossom Room at the Roosevelt Hotel. Dinner was prime rib, followed by a brief ceremony. The first award was given to nine-year-old Joan Claire Petach, the daughter of John and Emma Foster Petach. Chennault presented her with a gold locket on behalf of the group, placing it around her neck. Its inscription read: “From all her dad’s old buddies.” The evening concluded with the Tigers honoring Chennault with a plaque marking the tenth anniversary of the AVG: “To Claire L. Chennault, our Beloved Leader and Friend.”
If Chennault had considered settling down to a quiet retirement in Louisiana after the war, he didn’t stick to those plans for long. As biographer Martha Byrd wrote, “He wanted to be part of what was happening . . . the idealistic yearning was still present; the instincts of the warrior who serves a noble cause still surged within him and demanded a means of expression.”
After World War II, the civil war in China between the Nationalists and the Communists had resumed, and Chennault believed that the Chiangs needed his help against the enemy forces. He returned to China in January 1946 and quickly drew up plans for procuring old U.S. Army transport planes—a mission that may have felt familiar—with which to start a new airline, Civil Air Transport, or CAT as it came to be known. The airline took part in the civil war but wasn’t a combat unit, for the job of its pilots was to carry supplies to remote areas. Some of the CAT airmen had been members of the AVG, including Erik Shilling, the pilot who had flown the reconnaissance mission right after Pearl Harbor. There were, unsurprisingly, rumors that Chennault wanted to turn CAT into a new AVG, but he always firmly denied them, insisting that it was strictly a cargo airline.
There was little discipline in the group, and the pilots wore whatever they wanted when they flew, whether a tropical shirt or an old military uniform. They were creating one of the world’s first freight airlines on the fly, and found themselves taking on any number of bizarre missions. They flew sheep to an area that had lost its livestock during the war. They flew an elephant that would tilt the plane if it stomped one of its feet. They flew whatever and wherever they were asked.
Chennault was reinvigorated by a new venture and a new wife, who worked for him as a publicist at CAT. But the company’s fate was tied to the Chinese civil war, and it wasn’t going well for the Nationalists. In 1949 CAT worked around the clock to help evacuate the Nationalists to Formosa (present-day Taiwan) as the Communists surged forward. By December of that year, the airline was nearly bankrupt and needed to find new sources of revenue. During a visit to Washington, D.C., Chennault met with officials from a new government body—the Central Intelligence Agency. What happened next would remain secret for years, but eventually the CIA disclosed: “On August 23, 1950, the Agency acquired the airlines’ assets through a ‘cut-out’ (a Washington area banker) and the company was reorganized as CAT Incorporated, ostensibly a private enterprise, but actually CIA’s new aviation arm.” CAT was used to drop tons of supplies to U.S. troops during the Korean War and then, in 1954, it repainted some of its C-119 planes with French Air Force colors and started flying covert American missions to supply French troops besieged by the Viet Minh soldiers at Dien Bien Phu. The Eisenhower administration had declined to provide U.S. military assistance to the French, but they could deny any involvement with the private airline—a strategy that paralleled the creation of the AVG. On May 6, one of CAT’s C-119 transports was shot down, and two American pilots were killed. The names of these airmen were never listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Officially, America wasn’t fighting in Vietnam in 1954. The day after their deaths, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered, shocking the United States and Western powers. Chennault promoted the need for a new “International Volunteer Group” that would be composed of pilots from around the world and would take on the Viet Minh. His proposal made headlines: CHENNAULT WANTS TO REVIVE FLYING TIGERS. The idea was discussed at the White House, and when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asked whether the president would control such a unit, an aide replied that it would be commanded by Chennault—just as the Flying Tigers had been. The plan never came to fruition but “in a broader sense Chennault’s arguments carried” the day in the U.S. government, as Martha Byrd wrote. There would be more covert missions executed far from the scrutiny of Congress and the public. CAT would be used for some of them. William Pawley was friendly with CIA director Allen Dulles, and he suggested other clandestine schemes, including overthrowing the government in Guatemala and launching an invasion of Cuba. When the British started to raise questions about operations they believed the CIA was conducting in the Far East, the agency denied that they were its doing, and intimated that they might be the work of a group run by Chennault.
The reality was that Chennault was in declining health and finally was forced to consider something of a real retirement. He was still the chairman of the board of CAT, but it was effectively a figurehead position. He and Anna had two young girls, born in 1949 and 1950, and he wanted to spend more time with his family. They bought a house in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1954, and he would invite old friends over to have a bourbon on the porch. He would spend long days tending to his garden and his daughters. He had bought about seventy acres of rugged land on the Tensas River, where he “seemed to be most at peace,” Byrd wrote. “He never outgrew his love for the outdoor life that had entered his blood when he was a boy.” He built a cabin on a bluff that overlooked the river, explaining that he wanted it to be a memorial to his AVG pilots who had been killed, and a place where the AVG men could gather for reunions. Thomas Corcoran, the lawyer who had been responsible for helping to organize the AVG, came to visit Chennault there. They went hunting and, as the story is told, Chennault had a good shot at a deer but didn’t pull the trigger. He explained to Corcoran that he no longer enjoyed killing deer. He wanted to let them live.
Chennault had suffered from bronchitis attacks for many years, and breathing became more difficult. Doctors treated him but he knew that the end might be near. His long career in the military had made him famous but it hadn’t made him rich, and he worried about money. He was angry that some of his and Nell’s children hadn’t finished college, and he wanted to leave enough of an inheritance to his two young daughters. The Flying Tigers was still a well-recognized name, and Chennault decided he would cash in.
He did advertisements for a number of different companies, including, ironically, cigarette ads for Camel. The photo shoots would sometimes take him to New York City, and on one visit he decided to call up an old friend—AVG’s chaplain Paul Frillmann.
It was something of a miracle that Frillmann was still alive. He had returned to China in 1943, this time as an army intelligence officer, in which capacity Chennault had quickly dispatched him to help call in air strikes on enemy positions. However, Japanese forces were closing in on the area in which he was based, in a town called Changteh, and Frillmann was forced to flee on foot. He and another army officer set out, avoiding open spaces and staying close to the underbrush in case there was an assault. In the afternoon they climbed up a dike and “in horror discovered right below us more than a dozen Japanese soldiers lounging in a circle of sandbags while food cooked over a campfire. A big black machine gun stood among them and other weapons were stacked at hand.” His American comrade raised up his rifle to shoot. “Don’t be a damn fool,” Frillmann told him, and as they fled Frillmann lost his shoes in the muddy paddy, but there was no time to find them. With four or five Japanese soldiers in pursuit they didn’t stop “until the darkness was so thick we couldn’t see to run.”
Frillmann ultimately found himself with the OSS and was sent deep behind Japanese lines to live in the wilderness and report back his observations. By V-J Day he had been promoted to running the OSS office in Peking. The key question that hung over China’s future was whether the Nationalists led by the Chiangs would continue to rule or whether the Communists would prevail. Frillmann had spent months in the countryside and came to believe that the Nationalists “seemed to regard the peasants as nothing but an endlessly exploitable source of money, food and conscripts.” In the closing days of World War II, he wrote a secret memo to higher-ups in the OSS stating that “it is extremely important that definite overtures be made to contact the Reds.”
After the war, Frillmann became a U.S. diplomat, serving in posts throughout Asia, but was forced out in 1953 on suspicions that he had been friendly with Communists during his service in China—this was during the time when Senator Joseph McCarthy was holding hearings into un-American activities. Frillmann moved to New York City without much idea of what he would do, but ended up becoming a PR man. His apartment was soon a crash pad for former China hands, and “at odd hours we would be telephoned by former missionaries, AVG pilots, spies and the like, asking if we had a bed or a patch of floor where they might sleep.”
When Chennault came to New York, Frillmann would go to the Old Man’s hotel, where they would spend hours talking about the old days. During one trip Chennault invited Frillmann to come to the photo shoot he was doing for a cigarette advertisement. Frillmann was horrified to see how the young photographers treated Chennault, shouting out orders: “Look there! Look here! Hold your hands this way! Blow the smoke that way!” Frillmann could tell that Chennault hated every second of the ordeal and afterward asked him about it. Chennault said he needed the money and that “despite popular opinion, he was not a wealthy man,” as Frillmann recalled. It would be the last time the two men saw each other.
In 1956 Chennault was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was treated at Walter Reed Hospital and was then transferred to the Oschner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans. He was determined to beat the disease; he still had a young wife and children to live for. But the radiation treatments were wearing him down, and he felt increasingly alone. “No one paid much attention to me,” he wrote one day in his diary. He was “nervous, almost jittery.”
Madame Chiang was in the United States at the time and went to New Orleans in July 1958 to see Chennault for what she must have known would be their last reunion. When she arrived at the hospital, he was gaunt and exhausted. “I can’t talk very well,” he said in a low voice. “Well,” she consoled him, “you always talked too much. I want to do the talking this time. You have this wonderful fighting spirit. You were never defeated. Certainly not by the Japanese.”
On July 27, 1958, Chennault passed away. Anna wrote a note that day: “I lost my dearest one and the world lost a great leader. I wish I could die with him.”
There was one final flight for him to take. His body was placed in a flag-draped casket, and a Fourteenth Air Force transport plane flew him to Washington, D.C.
Six black horses pulled the caisson up the hill at Arlington Cemetery, where Chennault was laid to rest on the grass down the slope from the former mansion of another legendary general. It was a strange twist of fate that Claire Lee Chennault was buried in what had been the rose garden of his ancestor Robert E. Lee. Madame Chiang Kai-shek and T. V. Soong attended the funeral, representing the Chinese people. Tex Hill attended along with other Flying Tigers. Madame Chiang bowed her head beside the casket as an Air Force squad fired three volleys and a bugler played taps. Anna Chennault wept as she bade farewell to her husband.
“The flight of another airman is over,” the chaplain said, and Chennault was lowered into the earth. On his gravestone his name is inscribed in English on the front, and on the back, in Chinese.
The memory of World War II, and the young men who fought in it, receded as the decades wore on. New wars came to claim new warriors, and those from the Greatest Generation grew gray, paunchy, and arthritic. And like their old leader, they passed away, one by one. Their obituaries were featured in publications like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, reminders of when young Americans had dared to undertake bold deeds.
But the last of the Flying Tigers wanted one final victory—recognition that they had been on active duty and were not just mercenaries, as many had considered them. Finally, in 1991, a Pentagon special service board reviewed the old documents and concluded that the AVG members had indeed qualified as a bona fide part of the American war effort. They found a secret army report from 1942 that explained: “To avoid a breach of international law, the entire project was organized as a commercial venture.” The lawyer representing the AVG vets put it in terms that could be more easily understood: the AVG “makes the Iran-Contra affair look like a small-scale operation.”
Tex Hill was as proud as ever of what they had accomplished. “We have a record that is second to none,” he said. “Nobody will ever match that again.”
At the 1996 AVG reunion in Dallas, each pilot was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross, and all the ground crew received Bronze Stars. As the surviving Tigers slowly made their way across the stage to receive their long overdue medals, some needed canes or walkers, but the eighty-one-year-old Hill walked without assistance. Air Force Chief of Staff General Ronald Fogleman pinned a medal on each man’s lapel. One pilot who attended was Ken Jernstedt, who had been a state senator in Oregon after the war. He had lost his vision, and as he told an interviewer: “I’ve got to be the only person to get one of those [medals] 55 years late and with a seeing eye dog.”
They grew old, but they didn’t forget. Emma Foster married a former CNAC pilot she met at a reunion in the 1960s, their marriage grounded in shared memories of China. By 2000 she was in “God’s Waiting Room,” as she put it, but she wanted to go back to see China one last time. She returned to the places she had first visited when she was an exchange student in 1937, but nothing was familiar. The cities “are like New York, traffic jams, cars, cars, cars, and more cars.” Her time with the Flying Tigers had been filled with love and loss but still, she “wouldn’t change that year for anything.” She never forgot about John, saying, “I had the kind of romance that girls would dream of.” She passed away in 2009.
By the 2012 reunion marking their seventieth anniversary, only six former AVGers remained, and only four of them made it to the reunion in Columbus, Georgia. It was an easy trip for AVG crew chief Frank Losonsky, who had retired to Columbus after a long career with General Motors’ Allison Division. He grew old with his wife, Nancy—the high school sweetheart he left behind when he joined the AVG and then married when he got back. In his nineties, Losonsky would spend hours at home looking over his wartime diary and old photos of his squadronmates, staring at the faces and trying to recall distant memories. “I just remember that we were doing what we really had to do,” he told a reporter.
In September 2016 the Flying Tigers Association hosted its reunion for the seventy-fifth anniversary in Atlanta in conjunction with the Commemorative Air Force, an organization that maintains World War II–era planes. At ninety-six years old, Losonsky was one of only three living former Tigers, and one of only two who were able to attend. After the war he had spent a few years as a commercial pilot, but he had never achieved his original dream of flying for the army, having failed the physics section of the test for flight school. He had dutifully accepted his career working on planes. Not long before the reunion he got a call asking if he would participate in a special activity there, one that might be a bit risky for a man pushing the century mark. He didn’t hesitate to say yes.
On a crisp fall day, Losonsky was driven to the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport. There, poised in front of a large American flag, was a P-40, complete with the shark-nose design and an added rear passenger seat. With the assistance of his son, Frank climbed into the back seat and settled in. The engine roared to life, and the plane sped down the runway and lifted off.
Frank looked out the cockpit and watched as the ground fell away; the runway, people, vehicles, and buildings seemed to disappear below. The plane rose ever higher, reaching the clouds.
“It felt,” Frank said, “like I was starting all over again.”