Though the mission over Burma had morphed from ground support and flag-showing back into “fighting Jap planes fighting our troops,” the men of the American Volunteer Group were taking advantage of the bomb racks on their few P-40Es to attack the Japanese columns that were closing in on Lashio, 120 miles away at the start of the Burma Road. Though attacking well-armed troop concentrations or heavily fortified positions like Chiang Mai remained objectionable, shooting up strings of trucks along a highway was okay with the Tigers.
On April 24, one month after Chiang Mai and one day after Roosevelt’s message and the official end of the morale missions, the Pandas of the 2nd Pursuit Squadron ran their first bombing mission over the Burma Road. A half dozen P-40Es took part, with Tex Hill leading four others flying top cover in their P-40Bs. The only interference, aside from ground fire, came from a lone Japanese Ki-15 reconnaissance aircraft that not so much intervened as got in the way. Four pilots, including Hill, had a low-level cinematic moment, dramatically chasing the Japanese aircraft into a box canyon, where they destroyed it. They shared the victory four ways.
Four days later, on the eve of Emperor Hirohito’s birthday, the Japanese mounted their long-awaited major follow-up to the April 9–10 attacks on Lei Yun. It was coordinated with their final ground push against Lashio, and designed to wipe out at least some substantial portion of the AVG contingent at their forward operating location. The Japanese knew that the Americans would be expecting something “special” from them for the emperor’s birthday, but by attacking a day early, they hoped to catch the Flying Tigers off guard—and also to be able to present their success as a birthday gift to Hirohito.
Chennault had anticipated such a trick and cautiously ordered his men to beware of an attack the day before. As he recalled, “I thought a great deal about what kind of a birthday gift his air force in Burma would offer. From the knowledge gained from my previous experiences with the Emperor’s birthday celebrations, I reasoned that the Japs would expect me to be ready for them on April 29, and I suspected they might try to catch us a day early.”
The AVG contingent operated in three layers. The base of their aerial pyramid was comprised of ten Hell’s Angels P-40Bs commanded by Oley Olson. Hill led a top cover flight of four Pandas in P-40Es, while R. T. Smith and Paul Greene of the Hell’s Angels were higher still as “weavers,” weaving back and forth and keeping lookout. Much of the previous week had been clouded by dense overcast and heavy rain, and there were still towers of cumulus clouds in the area that could easily block the view of the various groups of aircraft on both sides.
They were patrolling south of Lei Yun toward Lashio when they first encountered the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force strike force. There were at least two dozen Mitsubishi Ki-21 heavy bombers escorted by about twenty Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusas.
R. T. Smith spotted the escort first. Having alerted Hill, he and Greene dove into the nearest Hayabusas, trading their higher altitude for speed. They opened fire, failed to connect, then pulled up while still well above the Japanese. As they made their second diving pass, they saw two of the Hayabusas starting to burn.
Hill, meanwhile, also led his men into a fast pass against the Japanese fighters. He picked his target, which attempted to use his superior maneuverability to sidestep the Texan. However, Hill stayed with him just long enough to pour a stream of tracers into the cockpit.
The engagement became a tumbling dogfight in which Hill soon found himself with the tables turned as he looked up at a Hayabusa hurtling down at him. Instead of dodging, he allowed a head-on pass. Both pilots opened fire, but fired low. Hill pulled back on the stick, risking a collision. As they passed one another, several of his .50-caliber rounds ripped into the Hayabusa’s belly. He banked, looked back, and saw the enemy fighter trailing fire and smoke.
At one point in the melee an enemy fighter nearly claimed Tex Hill, but fortunately Lew Bishop was in a position to help and successfully attacked the attacker.
The Flying Tigers scored heavily against the Japanese that day, with Smith mentioning thirteen enemy fighters shot down, and Hill estimating sixteen. However, in one sense, the IJAAF won the battle. By sacrificing themselves to the Flying Tigers, the Hayabusa pilots had distracted the Americans long enough for the heavy bombers to reach Lei Yun unmolested and lay waste to the field.
It could have been worse. The AVG fighters were out battling the Japanese fighters so were untouched by bombs, and the alert system forewarned the base of the incoming bombers, so several American transports that had just flown in from India en route to Kunming were able to get airborne and avoid being hit.
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Though no Americans were lost in the aerial battle, R. T. Smith almost became a statistic. He and Paul Greene had lost contact with the others during the battle and found themselves some distance northeast of Lei Yun and short of fuel because of having burned so much while on the weaving mission. They decided to make their way to the small auxiliary field at Mangshi (then called Meng Shih, and now the Dehong Mangshi Airport, one of China’s busiest).
With much of the terrain obscured by clouds, they tried to locate Mangshi village. Though they finally found a village, no runway was visible, so they contacted the controller at Mangshi to ask for directions. He replied that he could see two P-40s several miles away. As they prepared to land, they realized that they were in a valley parallel to the one containing Mangshi, and that the controller was watching two other P-40s.
“I knew there wasn’t enough fuel to climb back up and fly another twenty or thirty miles over the next mountain range, so I called Paul and told him I was going to try to land on a pasture-like area,” Smith recalled. “I was naive enough to think I could save the airplane, and that later it could be flown out.
“Paul circled as I landed; I set her down as slowly as possible and was rolling nicely, but then ahead appeared a swale and I was momentarily airborne again before smashing down on the other side. The gear was wiped out immediately, the plane began to spin around, and suddenly all my guns were firing; I’d forgotten to turn off the switches, and squeezed the trigger on the stick. Dust and rocks and pieces of airplane were flying all over, but finally we came to a stop. I was relatively unhurt, climbed out and waved at Paul, and he headed out toward Mangshi. I stumbled down to the road, hailed a Chinese army truck full of wounded soldiers headed north, and a couple of hours later arrived in Mangshi and joined the rest of the gang. Lucky? You know it, friends.”
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Throughout April, with and without AVG morale missions, the Imperial Japanese Army tightened the noose on the British and the Chinese armies in Burma. They made steady progress, pushing north toward Mandalay, Burma’s second-largest city. They moved against the British up the valley of the Irrawaddy River, and against the Chinese on a parallel track up the valley of the Sittang River. From the beginning of April, the Allied objective had been to organize the defense of central Burma with the hope of stopping the Japanese south of the city of Mandalay in the center of the country. It seemed for a time that with the support of the Chinese, the British might have the critical mass to finally thwart the unstoppable momentum of Shojiro Iida’s Fifteenth Army.
Like Chennault, Stilwell felt abandoned. No wonder he had asked for the AVG morale flights. In her biography of him, Barbara Tuchman wrote that Stilwell had concluded that “no one really cared about Burma. It was the end of the line. The main effort of London and Washington was directed elsewhere [against the Germans]. With no reinforcements or help coming in, there was a sense of isolation in CBI.”
As all sides knew, abandonment was not just a feeling, but a reality for Stilwell and the Allied effort in Burma. If the Burma Road was severed, the strategic importance of Burma in the eyes of Allied leadership in London and Washington was greatly diminished.
When the British retreated from Prome in the Irrawaddy Valley, exposing the Chinese flank, Stilwell felt abandoned by his allies. When the Chinese commanders—who reported to him—went around him to Chiang, refused to obey his orders, and withdrew from Toungoo, Stilwell felt abandoned by the Chinese armies of which he was the nominal commander.
“Through stupidity, fear, and the defensive attitude we have lost a grand chance to slap the Japs back at Toungoo,” Stilwell confided in his diary. “The basic reason is Chiang Kai-shek’s meddling. Had he let me concentrate at Pyinmana [north of Toungoo], we would have been set to attack. Had he not stopped the 22nd Division when I ordered it in, we would have had plenty of force to cut off the Japs when they first went around Toungoo. Had he not gone behind my back to Tu [Li-ming, commanding the Chinese Fifth Army] and Lin Wei [of the Chinese general staff], they might have obeyed my orders. He can’t keep his hands off: 1,600 miles from the front, he writes endless instructions to do this and that, based on fragmentary information and a cockeyed conception of tactics. He thinks he knows psychology; in fact, he thinks he knows everything, and he wobbles this way and that, changing his mind at every change in the action.”
Stilwell was outspoken in his disdain for the Generalissimo. Stilwell wrote in his diary that “Chiang Kai-shek has been boss so long and has so many yes-men around him that he has the idea he is infallible on any subject. . . . He is not mentally stable, and he will say many things to your face that he doesn’t mean fully or exactly. My only concern is to tell him the truth and go about my business. If I can’t get by that way, the hell with it: it is patently impossible for me to compete with the swarms of parasites and sycophants that surround him.”
When writing about him in his diary and elsewhere, Stilwell routinely referred to Chiang by his code name, the unflattering term “Peanut.” Under the American system of code names, Stilwell was “Quarterback,” while Madame Chiang was “Snow White.” Various Chinese generals were named for Snow White’s dwarfs.
Of Snow White herself, Stilwell wrote that she was “a clever, brainy woman . . . she can appreciate the mental reactions of a foreigner to the twisting, indirect, and undercover methods of Chinese politics and warmaking. . . . No concessions to the Western viewpoint in all China’s foreign relations. The Chinese were always right: the foreigners were always wrong. . . . Can turn on charm at will. And knows it.”
Her having intervened to overrule Stilwell and curtail the AVG morale flights may have been her siding with Chennault, for whom she had a great deal of fondness, or it was because the Chiangs had simply given up on Burma.
On April 28, the same day that the AVG was intercepting Hayabusas over Lei Yun, Chiang Kai-shek had sent a message demanding that Stilwell hold Mandalay. The following morning, as heavy rains lashed central Burma, he amended the order, telling the Quarterback that he need not hold Mandalay after all.
Stilwell decided that he would take General Luo Zhuoying (Lo Cho-ying), the overall commander of the 1st Route Expeditionary Forces and Stilwell’s nominal executive officer, and withdraw toward Lei Yun by way of Lashio, the “Milepost One” of the Burma Road.
However, on the first of May, Stilwell awoke at his headquarters on a tea plantation near Shwebo, 50 miles north of Mandalay, to learn that the Japanese had reached Mandalay and had captured Lashio—and that Luo had stolen an entire train, loaded it with his troops, and was racing toward Myitkyina, 250 miles north of Mandalay.
“Lo’s train collided last night with another,” Stilwell wrote in his diary. “Unfortunately, he was not killed.”
Stilwell phoned the AVG at Lei Yun, but there was no one to answer the telephone. The Old Man had issued orders on April 30 for everyone to abandon the base. P. T. Mao had sent a convoy of trucks to haul out whatever could be moved, and Chennault ordered Harvey Greenlaw to destroy twenty-two P-40s that were undergoing repair work and could not be evacuated. The last shark departed for Kunming at 2:00 p.m. the following day. The unanswered phone was probably ringing in the operations shack even as the Allison engines were winding up on the flight line.