There was more to the morale problem during that spring of 1942 than the uncertainty over the induction issue. AVG unit cohesion, which had once been inviolate, had begun to fray around the edges. The fissures in the airframes of war-weary P-40s were not the only cracks that were becoming a serious dilemma for the Flying Tigers.
Operationally, nothing was more dispiriting than the much-detested morale missions, the aggravating insistence by the Chinese that the AVG continue to show up over the battlefields in Burma and show the Chinese flag to the Chinese armies that were engaged and losing. The only practical value of these operations was observation, which the AVG pilots resented because they had signed on to fight the enemy in the air.
As Chennault explained, visual reconnaissance of Japanese front-line positions “could not be done in high-speed P-40s from low altitudes, without making the planes clay pigeons in a shooting gallery of Japanese flak gunners and fighter pilots. . . . Several of our morale missions had close calls after being jumped from above. Lack of reliable intelligence from the ground forces sent other missions into Japanese flak traps where supposedly friendly forces were reported. . . . Even at an altitude of 1,000 feet ground troops could hardly distinguish a fighter’s insignia in the smoke haze, and visual reconnaissance of jungle-screened troops was useless. . . . Personally I agreed with the pilots’ views. . . . The missions were unnecessarily dangerous and, with the exception of strafing enemy airdromes, offered no compensating results. . . . However, 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.”
When he reflected cynically that “there is nothing that can take the joy out of flying faster than hours and hours of strafing just above the jungle treetops in the face of heavy ground fire,” he precisely summarized the feelings of his men, feelings that were closely intertwined with their emotions around the losses of Jack Newkirk and Mac McGarry during the Chiang Mai strafing mission in March.
Because Chennault dutifully carried out the mandate issued by Chiang Kai-shek and Joe Stilwell for continuing the unproductive “morale missions,” the feelings of the men, which he shared, were turning against him. Chennault was starting to earn the annoyance of the pilots who had once idolized him. This whole matter finally came to a head on April 20, when orders were posted at Lei Yun for a return to the infamous Chiang Mai. The mission called for escorting slow-flying RAF Blenheim bombers into what was now well known to be a flak trap—where the Japanese remembered March 24 as clearly as the AVG did.
At Lei Yun, someone had even started circulating a mass resignation petition.
When it reached Tex Hill, Newkirk’s successor as commander of the 2nd Pursuit Squadron, he took exception. “I’m not going to sign this damn thing,” Hill exclaimed. According to his biographer Reagan Schaupp, the alert shack quieted immediately as everyone looked at Hill. “Look, I don’t like these missions any more than y’all do. Hell, I know they’re dangerous. But this thing at Chiang Mai wasn’t going to be any ‘morale mission.’ There were legitimate targets down there. There were Japs on the road we were going to strafe. How many of you fellows really think the Old Man would send us down there to get killed on some useless deal? We came over here as mercenaries—there are no bones about that. We all know it. But our country is at war now, and if you’re part of the country, then you’re at war too—uniform or not. These missions are the orders we’ve got, and the Old Man is giving ’em. I think we ought to follow them. I’m going to fly where I’m told, when I’m told. I’d say with that guy, we’re in pretty good hands.”
When Hill announced that he was going, and leading the mission, Ed Rector stood up and confirmed that he too would go to Chiang Mai. One by one, there were others, including Duke Hedman, Frank Schiel, and R. J. “Catfish” Raine. When word of the “revolt” reached Kunming, Bob Neale, commander of the 1st Pursuit Squadron, contacted Hill, telling him “if those bastards won’t fly for you, I’ll bring my boys down to take over.”
Mission day, however, proved anticlimactic. Hill and his volunteers took off to fly the mission as briefed, but after the Blenheims failed to show up at the staging base, they returned to Lei Yun. Yet another Chiang Mai operation a few days later was aborted because of bad weather, again without contact with the enemy.
The resignation petition, with more than twenty signatures, did reach Chennault’s desk, but he took no action whatsoever. He simply let it lie in his desk drawer, a symbol of the state of his organization. Back in the fall of 1941, Chennault had seen resignations as a useful means of weeding out men who were not up to the task at hand. However, after combat began, the Old Man came to look upon resignations with a great deal of disdain. As Charlie Bond wrote later in his diary, “he feels that anyone leaving now that we are at war and in actual contact with the enemy waxes of dishonor!”
There was probably no one in whom the festering infection of discontent and near-insurrection took a deeper hold than Greg Boyington. “I became so anxious to get out of Kunming, and all that it meant to me, that I damn nearly would have volunteered to walk back to the United States,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Long the hard-drinking baddest bad boy of the AVG, Boyington had become the poster boy for the discord that had been rippling through the ranks. His combat career with the group seemed headed for a spectacular cataclysm, but instead it circled the drain and dribbled into an ignoble demise. When he cracked up his P-40 taking off from Lei Yun on an alert mission, he blamed engine trouble, but there were rumors that he had been hungover or drunk.
“I didn’t even have the opportunity of getting the wheels retracted before my plane slammed into the ground, wheels and all,” he recalled of the crash. “The impact was so great that my safety belt had broken and I was flung forward in the cockpit. My instrument panel tore into my knees and I damn nearly gargled the gun sight. Fortunately it didn’t get my teeth, but the gun sight split my head open near my temple. . . . I was completely dazed as I struggled out of the cockpit, but I knew almost by instinct to get away from possible fire and to try to take cover before the Japs came. While half crawling and staggering in a torn and bloody condition I asked some nearby Chinese farmers to lend me a hand. They apparently didn’t want any part of me.”
He was patched up by Dr. Lewis Richards, one of the well-liked AVG flight surgeons, who bandaged his battered head and his injured knees. Without access to X-ray equipment there was no way of knowing whether the latter were broken. That night, however, Boyington got drunk at the wedding of Hell’s Angels pilot Fred Hodges and his British-Burmese girlfriend, Helen Anderson. On the way home, Boyington fell in a ditch and his bandages became undone.
“Greg, will you do me a favor?” Richards said as he repaired the damage for a second time. “I wish you would stop drinking, because if you don’t, I’m afraid you’ll end up dead.”
“Don’t worry, Doc,” Boyington replied. “I promise, I’ve had enough.” Despite what may have been his best intentions or merely self-delusion, it would be a very long time before he fell down drunk for the last time.
One could almost leap to the conclusion that Boyington was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—except that at the time, there was nothing “post” about his stress and his disorder. “I was an emotionally immature person of the first order, which does not help peace of mind or make happiness. Frankly, this is what makes screwballs, and I’m afraid that I was one. Regardless of any of my self-manufactured troubles, or any troubles a mature person may have that he solves by himself, there was one thing that dwelled in my mind. If I were forced to continue my occupation for any length of time, I might not survive, for this war had all the earmarks of being a lengthy affair.”
In the meantime, the last letter he had received since mail deliveries ended in December had been from his mother, who had to rescue his three youngest children after a juvenile court in Seattle had taken them away from his ex-wife. It was enough to drive a man to drink.
Boyington never flew another AVG combat mission, but when recuperating in Kunming grew too much—or too little—for him, he spent a week or so test flying overhauled aircraft while he waited for confirmation of the number of Japanese aircraft he had shot down so that he could apply for his bonus money. As he explained in his memoirs, “the only reason I had hung around this long was that one of Chennault’s stooges in my squadron claimed that some of our Rangoon combat reports had been lost, but they would straighten it out for pay purposes later [but] that never did fully happen.”
He had claimed that he shot down six Japanese aircraft, but the AVG officially credited him with 3.5, of which only two were in air-to-air combat.
Charlie Bond noted in his diary that he saw Boyington “completely looped and staggering” at dinner on the night of April 21. Bob Neale observed that Boyington had been “that way for six days and nights.”
The next day or shortly thereafter, Boyington did start walking out of Kunming—with a briefcase full of currency, most of it Chinese. He went into the CNAC terminal, where he bought a ticket to Calcutta.
When the list of individuals receiving honorable discharges from the AVG was eventually published, Boyington was conspicuously absent, but the worst of his troubles still lay ahead. Tex Hill’s biographer Reagan Schaupp later observed that “if the AVG were a military outfit, Boyington would be shot as a deserter.”
Soon the AVG would be, but by that time, Boyington would be long gone and destined for notoriety beyond the imagination of anyone in Kunming, including Boyington himself.
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On April 23, the day after his promotion to brigadier general and three days after the pilots’ revolt hit the fan in Lei Yun, Chennault received an answer to a personal letter he had written to Madame Chiang pointing out the practical futility of the morale missions and the damage that was being done, ironically, to the morale of the men who flew them. She wasted no time in replying. She wired back, telling Chennault “Generalissimo consents use of AVG for fighting Jap planes fighting our troops and not for low-altitude recon.”
That night, when the Old Man again spoke to the men at Lei Yun on the subject of induction of the individual pilots, the rancor of the pilots’ revolt still hung in the air like the odor of spoiled meat. Chennault was candid with the men, telling them that there would be few regular US Army commissions available and that anyone wanting one should decide for himself whether he wanted to apply. By now, the enthusiasm for being part of the USAAF was rapidly evaporating.
As R. T. Smith put it so succinctly, “not many of us were terribly interested in regular army commissions at this point, although we knew that soon we’d have to decide what to do. . . . Our main concern those days 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 US of A.”
—
Coincidentally, it was also on April 23 that the civilian who had created the AVG wrote to Chennault from the White House, telling him that “the outstanding gallantry and conspicuous daring that the American Volunteer Group combined with their unbelievable efficiency is a source of tremendous pride throughout the whole of America. The fact that they have labored under the shortages and difficulties is keenly appreciated.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt continued by promising that “there are reinforcements on the way, both ground and flying personnel, and more are to come. The United States is making a tremendous effort to get the necessary material into hands of the men overseas. Unfortunately we have lost planes by sinkings in the Indian Ocean and west of Australia which has delayed us at a critical moment, but now planes are going forward rapidly. Leaves of absence should be given to AVG veterans just as soon as replacements have absorbed your experience, training and tradition for rest and recuperation. It is planned that when replacements are adequately trained selected AVG veterans will be recalled to the States or other theaters of operations to impart their combat experience and training to personnel in newly formed units.
“Your President is greatly concerned that the 23rd Group be fully supplied and kept in operation during the critical phase of the operations now pending. He has taken great pride in the worldwide acclaim given the Group and places great hope in its future fighting as rapidly as it is re-equipped.”
Time would tell.