When Claire Chennault walked into the imposing Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco to meet the American Volunteer Group pilot and ground crew recruits for the first time, on July 7, 1941, he was painfully aware of it being the fourth anniversary of the incident on the Marco Polo Bridge that tipped the dominoes across China and led him to this moment.
“Nobody who saw that odd assortment of young men, looking slightly ill at ease and uncertain in their new civilian clothes, could have possibly imagined that in a few months they would be making history,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Jim Howard, who was among the men who gathered in San Francisco that week, recalled Chennault as “a crusty-looking man of average height in his late forties.”
Howard went on to say that “in the months to come, I would appreciate him for his one-man assault on what he despised and for his unflagging support for what he firmly believed. He turned out to be a man of convictions and integrity, and was filled with compassion for the underdog. In other words, he was fair, but no pushover.”
Richard Aldworth was also present, and so too was Bill Pawley.
“Welcome to all of you who are about to embark on a mission to the other side of the world to defend American interests in that part of the globe,” Aldworth told the men gathered in the crowded lobby of the Mark Hopkins. He introduced Pawley, who briefed them on what CAMCO was, what it did in China, and explained that they would be assembling the P-40s that the 123 volunteers gathered in the lobby would be flying, maintaining, or supporting in the field. He also added that an advance group of about 30 ground crewmen had sailed two weeks earlier aboard the SS President Pierce of the San Francisco American President Lines. These were the “tall, bronzed American airmen” whom Time magazine had reported to have been “quietly slipping away” from American ports in the previous weeks. Part of this group was Paul Frillman, a Lutheran minister and a former missionary to China, better known as “Padre,” who was to be the chaplain of the AVG.
Howard noted that this was the largest of a half dozen AVG contingents that would be setting sail over the coming weeks, and that it included thirty-three pilots from all services, as well as a medical team of three doctors and a dentist, headed by a former Army doctor, Major Thomas C. “Doc” Gentry, who was to be the AVG’s chief flight surgeon.
There were also two women on the medical team, nurses Jo Buckner Stewart and Emma Jane Foster. The daughter of a Pennsylvania Country doctor, Emma had been to China as an exchange student five years earlier. In a 2004 interview, she told Mike Barber of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that “the most courageous thing I did wasn’t in the war. It was when I left my home for the first time to go to China in the 1930s with people I never met before. . . . I was so scared and homesick for two days riding that train to the West Coast to get the boat. I wanted out of it, but my pride wouldn’t let me. But after I got over it, I was never afraid again.”
When someone asked Pawley when they would be getting their aircraft, he told him that crated aircraft had already reached Rangoon and that he had an assembly facility there.
“By the time you arrive in Burma your planes will be ready to fly,” Pawley promised.
Howard recalled that someone asked Chennault for confirmation on a question that had already been asked and answered in interviews with recruiters, but that was on everyone’s mind.
“Won’t we lose our American citizenship if we fly against the Japanese at a time when we are not officially at war?”
Chennault replied that “the president has assured us that, as long as we fight for a country that professes democratic faith, your citizenship will remain intact. I might mention also that you will be officially part of the Chinese military so you won’t be classified as a war criminal if you are captured. While this mission is considered secret, it won’t be secret for long. I would like to remind you that the eyes of the world will be focused on this expedition, and its chances of success or failure depend entirely upon you. Therefore, it is imperative that all of us behave and act in such a discreet way, Americans will be proud of us.”
Pawley then handed out the passports to his new CAMCO employees. These were issued in their real names, but on the line where each man’s occupation was identified, nobody was accurately listed as a pilot or, perhaps more appropriately, by the title articulated earlier by Ed Rector, as a mercenary. Instead, they were bankers, clerks, musicians, or students. When he sailed with another group six weeks later, Greg Boyington was listed, with great irony, because nothing could have been farther from his persona, as a member of the clergy. Chennault still traveled under the passport identifying him as a farmer.
They each also received an envelope containing $100 in expense money, cash that would fuel numerous poker games over the coming weeks at sea.
The following day, Chennault caught the Pan American Airways Clipper bound for Hong Kong by way of Hawaii. He lamented the fact that the kerfuffle over Bill Pawley’s commission had cost the program three valuable months, but at least the AVG project was finally on track.
Two days later, on July 10, the men set sail aboard the MS Jagersfontein of the Verenigde Nederlandse Scheepvaart Maatschappij (VNSM, or United Netherlands Navigation Company). It was a reminder both of the extensive Dutch maritime presence in the Pacific, and of the fact that the Netherlands—because of its sprawling colonial possession in the East Indies—had a crucial stake in the war that was looming in Southeast Asia. Their homeland may have been occupied by Hitler’s legions a year earlier, but the people and troops in the Dutch East Indies were still very much allied with Britain and China and preparing to confront the feared and anticipated Japanese onslaught into their territory.
“Our departure was uncomfortably cold,” Jim Howard recalled, noting the counterintuitive meteorological anomaly that always makes San Francisco colder in July than in November. “We were told to enjoy it since we would be wishing for this same cold weather in Burma. A loud blast from the ship’s horn signaled to everyone within miles that the time for departure had arrived. . . . As she passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and disappeared in a blanket of fog, many showed signs of sorrow and anxiety. The curtain had fallen on those who may have had second thoughts. There was no turning back.”
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Despite the efforts that had been made to obfuscate the existence of the American Volunteer Group and its movements, their departure was far from secret. It was ominously reported by Radio Tokyo, which announced in advance that the Jagersfontein would be sunk along with its contingent of American mercenaries. It was not sunk, but the cat was obviously out of the bag. The Japanese probably had better sources even than Time magazine.
Two weeks later, the second major contingent of AVG pilots and support personnel converged on San Francisco. This time the rendezvous point was the seven-story Bellevue Hotel on Geary Street, which R. T. Smith and Paul Greene found “small, and filled with well-worn furnishings” that “would never be mistaken for the Mark Hopkins.” A decade earlier, the Bellevue had been the model for the Belvedere Hotel in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the place where Sam Spade met with Cairo. The Bellevue still exists, having been renovated as a boutique hotel called the Monaco.
Smith and Greene, who were traveling under passports identifying them as a plantation foreman and a salesman, respectively, had their covers blown almost immediately. They had barely had a chance to order a drink when a tall man at a neighboring table asked in a Texas drawl, “Hey, you fellas AVG by any chance?”
David Lee “Tex” Hill was sitting with Ed Rector and Bert Christman, all of them late of VS-41 aboard the USS Ranger. Before the war, Christman had achieved notoriety as a cartoonist and as one of the creators of the Sandman character for DC Comics. Between 1936 and 1938, when he had enlisted as a flying cadet, Christman was well known as the illustrator of the Scorchy Smith syndicated comic strip about a crime-fighting freelance pilot—a role to which Christman himself now aspired.
After a round or two of drinks, they all reported to the hotel’s conference room, where Skip Adair greeted them and about twenty other pilots. He briefed them with the usual caveat that what was discussed inside the room should stay inside the room, but admitted that the Japanese “already know enough about what’s going on, and they’ve made official protests to our State Department recently, so the less said about what we’re up to, the better.”
As he adjourned the meeting, Adair told them that their ship would sail a few days later, and in the meantime they should “keep your noses clean and your lips buttoned up,” to which he added that “every man is to check in at the office in [room] 314 every day between one and five p.m. Incidentally, Mrs. Hamilton will be glad to help you with anything that requires typing; making out wills, mailing instructions, that sort of thing.”
Wills?
Smith recalled in his memoirs that “The room seemed terribly quiet. It must have occurred to a number of us that we hadn’t even thought about making out a will. . . . Flip a coin, heads or tails. But even had we known the odds in advance, it’s doubtful that it would have changed our outlook. We were all aware of the danger to be faced, but it was a case of thinking, perhaps subconsciously, Sure, somebody’s going to get killed, but it won’t be me—the age-old philosophy that has sustained men in combat since wars began.”
Smith, Greene, Hill, Rector, Christman, and the others sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge on the afternoon of July 24 aboard another VNSM liner, the MS Bloemfontein, a ship the Americans came to refer to simply as “the Bloom.” Former US Navy pilots, used to life aboard aircraft carriers, awoke the following morning refreshed by the cool sea air. The former Air Corps men were a bit green in the face for the first few days at sea.
“It was a relaxed, congenial group, already bound together by the promise of still unknown and mysterious adventure that lay ahead,” R. T. Smith observed. “And for the first time in a long while I felt completely at home; these were my kind of guys, all of them, seeking adventure and willing to accept the risks and pay the price.”
The last batch of two dozen American adventurers included Charlie Bond and Greg Boyington, who filtered into San Francisco nearly two months later. Boyington recalled in his memoirs that his mother and stepfather came down to San Francisco from their apple ranch near Okanogan, Washington, to see him off and to return north with his car.
“There are other ways of paying off one’s indebtedness,” Grace Gregory Hallenbeck told her son in a vain attempt to talk him out of his adventure at the last minute.
“Oh, don’t worry, Mom, I’ll get by okay,” he reassured her. “I haven’t got an enemy in the world.”
That was except for the million or so Japanese troops who were in China waiting for him.
“I didn’t know anything about the Orient, other than what little I had learned in school,” he admitted to himself.
As the earlier contingents of AVG airmen were greeted by the likes of Claire Chennault and Skip Adair, Bond, Boyington, and their group were met by the colorful Dr. Margaret “Mom” Chung. Born in Santa Barbara and educated at the University of Southern California, she had earned a reputation as a “physician to the stars” in Hollywood before opening a practice in San Francisco. An ardent and outspoken supporter of her parents’ homeland after the Japanese invasion, she also developed an interest in American naval aviators that grew to include Marine and Air Corps fliers. “Mom” started an American aviators’ club called the “Fair-Haired Bastards,” and “adopted” some fifteen hundred pilots through World War II, inviting them to Sunday dinners at her home and giving each of her “Bastards” a silver ring with a jade Buddha. She was naturally very interested in the AVG.
At midmorning on September 24, when the men boarded MS Boschfontein, the VNSM sister ship of the earlier vessels, they received their send-off from Richard Aldworth. According to Boyington, he showed up “immaculate in a fresh uniform . . . shook hands with us, placing an arm around each, telling us how badly he wanted to go overseas with us.” He then disembarked and drove away.
Whereas many of the AVG men wrote of a wistfulness as they sailed, Boyington was overcome by cynicism.
“When we left San Francisco, I knew that I was trying to escape my own common-sense reasoning,” he recalled. “If this was strictly a service deal, our mission to further democracy didn’t quite gel. And I knew it. . . . Just the same as cattle. The two ingredients necessary to accomplish this human sale were greedy pilots and a few idealists.”
While he and his fellow pilots had been pub-crawling through San Francisco for the several days prior to sailing, Boyington had relished telling people that he was, as his passport erroneously identified him, a member of the clergy. Naturally, when he sat down for dinner on his first night at sea, he continued the ironic charade.
“At my table were two men and a woman doctor,” he remembered. “But what I did not know, not until after I finished shooting my mouth off, was that the other three members of my table were honest-to-goodness missionaries. And furthermore, there were 55 of them aboard—men and women. How phony I felt. My orders on what to say, my passport, couldn’t possibly cover my feeling of embarrassment. If only I had let them talk first!”
Naturally, the missionaries had figured Boyington out before he spoke, but they played along and snared him at his own game. A few days later, one of the real missionaries asked if he would give the sermon at the services on the following Sunday. He declined, but later wished he had accepted the invitation.
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The Pacific crossings were punctuated by concern—more than fear—of being intercepted by the Japanese, or even by German surface raiders who were rumored to be stalking Dutch ships in the Pacific. There were nightly blackouts that lasted until sunrise, and many pairs of eyes scrutinized the horizon until nightfall. The first of the ships to depart, and the one that carried the lion’s share of the AVG personnel, the Jagersfontein had been escorted west from Hawaii by two US Navy cruisers, but the other ships had traveled alone.
For more than a month, each of the Dutch ships made its way slowly and indirectly to the Far East, crossing the international date line, crisscrossing the equator, making port calls in Australia and Manila, and extensive layovers in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the capital of the Dutch East Indies. In Singapore, each group of AVG volunteers was wined and dined by the Chinese consul general at the legendary Raffles Hotel.
By all accounts, the food that was served aboard the ships was not merely good, but also extraordinary, and the AVG men got along reasonably well with their fellow passengers while trying to maintain the fiction that they were not combat pilots going to war. Along the way, several AVG volunteers decided that they did not want to be combat pilots, and jumped ship at an enticing tropical port. Since they were no longer military pilots, they were not deserters—except in the eyes of Chennault; they had just defaulted on their one-year employment contracts.
In Surabaya, on the Dutch East Indies island of Java, Charlie Bond ran into two men who had gone over on one of the earlier ships and who were now trying to make their way home.
“They are throwing in the towel and returning to the States,” he wrote in his diary of October 20. “They painted a bad picture of the organization and raised doubts in my mind: what am I getting myself into? I’m still looking forward to getting into the cockpit of a P-40.”
As the weeks dragged on, cabin fever set in. R. T. Smith recalled “the cramped quarters, and now the heat and humidity as we crossed the equator again, plus the constant presence of others, the same faces day after day, were starting to get to us. We were becoming considerably more testy with each other, more apt to take offense at some imagined slight.”
The boredom was offset mainly by nonstop card games. A Chinese-language professor aboard the Jagersfontein held classes for a dollar, but only thirty-five signed up. Jim Howard, who enrolled to brush up on a language he had known as a child, recalled that only a half dozen students were still in class at the end of the voyage.
At the succession of ports, the men sought out the companionship of the local female population, and there were even side trips with hired cars from Surabaya to Bali, where the bare-breasted Hindu girls—made iconic by their having been featured in National Geographic—were a contrast to the somewhat more modest Muslim girls in neighboring Java.
“These young women were very congenial,” Boyington wrote of the hospitality girls he met in Singapore. “They would ask you if you cared for a drink. And you would say, ‘Yes, scotch and soda,’ which was the drink in that part of the world. So then she would take a large brass key and unlock a carved teak cabinet and pour you a glass of good scotch and fill it with chilled soda. No ice. She doesn’t join you in a scotch and soda. She doesn’t care to drink, she says, because drinking in a hot climate like Singapore is not good for one. And before the evening is over, you begin to realize the same thing. . . . To this day, and I’m not trying to be naive, either, I don’t know how to describe the status of these lovely creatures: In some cases I am sure that it is not what one would ordinarily assume.”
Meanwhile, though, sparks also flew between the sexes aboard ship. On the Jagersfontein, Jim Howard admitted developing an attraction for nurse Emma Jane Foster, “with tousled red hair reaching to her shoulders, deep blue eyes. . . . I found her breathtaking. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I’m sure she must have felt slightly embarrassed for she tried to avoid my gaze.”
Having spent a year in China as an exchange student before the war, she was well aware of the situation into which she was sailing. Nicknamed “Red” by the pilots, she later became the wife of another AVG man named John Petach.
Aboard the Boschfontein, Tex Hill was engrossed in a romance that kept him in high spirits for weeks. As R. T. Smith observed, “there was a missionary woman of about 30, single, reasonably attractive and built along the lines of Dorothy Lamour, whom Tex was doing his damndest to convert. She, of course, was trying equally hard to make him see the light and give up his fun-loving ways. I’m not sure how the contest finally came out, but knowing Tex, I’d never have bet against him. At least they seemed pretty chummy by the time they finally parted company in Singapore.”
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After seven weeks of transit time, the men who had embarked on the first two of the Dutch ships reached their destination by mid-September. The Jagersfontein anchored in the broad and muddy Irrawaddy Delta south of Rangoon, but the Bloemfontein dropped its passengers in Singapore, where the AVG men had to transfer to the Chinese-registered coastal steamer Penang Trader. The Boschfontein finally arrived in Rangoon on November 12.
Bill Pawley sent his brother Ed to meet the Jagersfontein, but he and Skip Adair were both on the dock when the Penang Trader and the Boschfontein came in. Each contingent got a welcoming speech that included the phrase “only 160 miles to go,” an envelope filled with Burmese rupees, and dinner and drinks at the Silver Grill, a nightclub that had become a sort of aviators’ bar for the RAF pilots posted to Rangoon.
The “160 miles” referred to the last leg of their journey, which was to be made aboard a rickety, narrow-gauge railroad to Toungoo (now Taungoo), which was to be the first operational base of the AVG. Located on the Sittang River due north of Rangoon and due south of Mandalay, Toungoo was a city of about twenty-five thousand, where the local economy revolved around the hardwood lumber industry.
The delays earlier in the year that had pushed Chennault’s timetable back three months had pushed the schedule into the monsoon season. Having originally planned to finish his training during the spring at Kunming, he had intended to undertake air defense operations over Chongqing by the summer. However, the heavy rains turned his unpaved landing strips into swamps and sent him knocking on British doors, asking for the use of paved RAF fields in Burma to use as his training fields.
When Chennault and P. T. Mao sat down with British officials in Rangoon, they were told that the United Kingdom was not yet officially at war with Japan and the British hoped to avoid provocations and keep it that way. Indeed, as late as the summer of 1941, the prevailing British point of view was that Japan would not attack Burma unless somehow provoked. Mao argued that because Japan had not declared war in the ongoing Sino-Japanese War, the AVG could not be considered belligerents in the context of violating British neutrality. It cost Chennault another three months, but in October, the attorneys in His Majesty’s government in London finally concurred with Mao’s opinion.
With the caveat that the American volunteers could not conduct combat training activities at RAF bases in Burma, the British gave the AVG a green light.