By May 1942, the future of the American Volunteer Group in the USAAF scheme of things, which had been fodder for the rumor mill early in the year, had been confirmed. It had been known since early March that the AVG would be dissolved and replaced by the USAAF 23rd Fighter Group as part of the new entity called the China Air Task Force (CATF), but there had been no timetable for this transition. At the Chongqing conference with Chiang Kai-shek at the beginning of April, Joe Stilwell and Clayton Bissell had lobbied for this to happen by the end of that month, but Claire Chennault successfully argued otherwise.
The Old Man realized—and Bissell should have known—that the 23rd was still just a shimmering mirage. It existed only on paper and could not possibly be ready to supersede the AVG in less than four weeks. Chennault had proposed, and the others reluctantly accepted, that the day the Old Man himself described as “Dissolve Day” should be July 4, a date that coincided with the terminations of the one-year employment contracts that the AVG personnel had signed in 1941.
The question of what would happen to those people when their contracts expired had long been a subject of conjecture, though nothing had been decided. The rumors included a scenario under which everyone would be shipped back to the States, and there was also the idea that the USAAF would simply induct everyone in place. There were numerous speculated possibilities in between.
On March 26, when he held the group meeting in Kunming on the eve of his going to Chongqing to learn of his own induction, Chennault had been asked whether the pilots could expect a regular commission if they were inducted in Kunming, but he replied that he honestly didn’t know. After a follow-up meeting on April 11, R. T. Smith wrote that Chennault “told us the deal on induction [was] we’ll be able to finish out contract [on July 4] and then go back to the States and into the Army there.”
Chennault now had sufficient additional information from the USAAF to be able to tell the men that they would receive their AVG paychecks through July 4. These would include compensation for accrued leave to that date, as well as a travel allowance of $500 because their CAMCO contracts stipulated a return trip to the United States. If inducted into the USAAF, they would receive a lump sum payment equal to the difference between their AVG pay grade and that of their rank in the USAAF.
As Chennault wrote in his memoirs, the men were “not enthusiastic about rejoining the services. All of them were reservists, and most of them joined the AVG as an escape from rigid discipline and discrimination by regulars against the reserve. . . . Most of the men were willing to serve out their contracts and accept induction terms if they were given a 30-day furlough before returning to combat. By the time their contracts expired in July, all of them would have served a year on foreign service and seven months of combat under the worst conditions.”
When Bissell asked Chennault to resist the idea of a thirty-day leave, he refused, telling Bissell that after what they’d been through, this was the least that should be offered to his men. Fixated upon the mirage that was the 23rd Fighter Group, Bissell didn’t care. He believed that he did not need the men and the aircraft of the only organized group of experienced American fighter pilots in the Far East.
—
The USAAF was running out of time to stand up the still nonexistent 23rd as a component of the planned CATF. Virtually nothing had been done. Of course, the USAAF was short of resources worldwide, and a full-strength fighter group in the most remote corner of its logistical network was not high on the list of priorities or capabilities. The USAAF, and indeed the entire American war machine, was far from ready to fight a global war. Aside from Doolittle’s audacious raid, there was little to celebrate. The great victory at Midway would not occur until the first week of June, and the realization of it as the milestone we now know it to be was many weeks away.
Finally, when the third week of May rolled around and the 23rd Fighter Group had yet to materialize, Clayton Bissell realized that he might need the men of the despised Flying Tigers for his new CATF after all.
“Desperate because he knew the Army could not provide replacements to meet the July fourth deadline, Bissell asked for permission to make a speech to the [AVG personnel] at Kunming,” Chennault recalled.
Chennault agreed, and a meeting was scheduled for the evening of May 21 in the auditorium of Yunnan University.
“I warned Bissell that he might get a rough reception, but he was confident,” Chennault wrote. “He outlined all the reasons why he thought the group should stay on in China.”
The men, who felt they had been jerked around by a distant and indifferent establishment, had reached the point where their overarching concern was their own futures. Charlie Bond wrote in his diary that Bissell “spoke pessimistically about our chances of getting a job in the States that would prevent us from being drafted back into the service. He painted a dark picture for us if we did not stay here and accept induction. All the fellows feel that Bissell is jamming the Army down our throats.”
When Buster Keeton asked about their chances for getting a regular commission, Bissell shrugged that this was beyond his power.
R. T. Smith wrote that Bissell had “all the charm of a cobra.” When his remarks required a soft touch, Bissell counterintuitively turned to intimidation. Indeed, when he most needed to coat his words with honey, he chose vinegar. Bissell threatened them that if they remained in China, they would be prevented from taking jobs with airlines such as Pan Am or CNAC, which had let it be known that they would readily hire AVG alumni at sizable salaries.
In his memoirs, Chennault noted that Bissell, growing more aggravated by the grumbling, spat out a menacing threat that would have been ridiculous if he had not been serious. “For any of you who don’t join the Army,” he threatened, “I can guarantee to have your draft boards waiting for you when you step down a gangplank onto United States soil.”
Jim Howard recalled this comment, adding that “the acerbity of Bissell’s message turned most of the men away from any mass voluntary induction. Bissell’s foot-in-mouth speech had achieved just the opposite from what he wanted and hurt Chennault even more.”
As Bissell flew off to Chongqing, and with Dissolve Day less than six weeks away, the 23rd Fighter Group and the CATF remained little more than a figment of his imagination.
—
By that time, with Bob Scott still in the Tenth Air Force chain of command, Chennault had one—and only one—uniformed member of the USAAF under his direct command. Captain Albert “Ajax” Baumler, the veteran of the Spanish Civil War who had attempted to join the American Volunteer Group nearly a year earlier, and whose second effort had been stymied at Wake Island on Pearl Harbor Day, had finally reached the end of his rainbow. He had flown into Kunming on a P-40E delivery flight from Takoradi by way of Karachi and had stayed on in Kunming.
Chennault, who had long complained of a lack of staff officers, put Baumler into a desk chair instead of a cockpit. It had been apparent to the Old Man that Baumler, like Greg Boyington, was an excellent, naturally skilled pilot who became a different person, erratic and violent, when he drank too much. This may have contributed to Chennault’s decision to keep him close to headquarters until he got to understand him. In his memoirs, Chennault said only that Baumler’s “notions of military discipline were vague, but in the air he was a cool combat pilot with rare ability in shepherding green pilots through their first fights.”
Sidelined by pushing paper, Baumler would not resume his combat career until the end of June.
Soon, other USAAF fighter pilots, men who were earmarked for the 23rd, finally started to arrive, though they trickled in two or three at a time, and many were not deemed fighter pilot material. As Claire Chennault recalled in his memoirs, “with few exceptions the first Army pilots to reach China matched the quality of the planes. They were ample proof that combat pilots can’t be turned out like quick-lunch hamburgers, no matter how urgent the emergency. Most of these pilots were graduates of war-shortened training programs. Many of them paid for this shoddy instruction with their lives. They had little air gunnery practice, no navigation experience, only a smattering of formation flying, and most of them had never flown a P-40. Five of the early arrivals frankly confessed they were afraid to fly combat and were sent back to the Air Transport Command.”
Though technically assigned to the 23rd, those who passed muster with the Old Man were gradually integrated into AVG operations, where they flew under the command and control of the three AVG squadrons.
—
Ironically, the first aircraft that would come directly from the USAAF to serve with the China Air Task Force would not be fighters, but bombers. The Old Man had been trying to get bombers under his command since he had gone to Washington with P. T. Mao back in the fall of 1940. Indeed, from the beginning, his original idea for operations in China had included using bases there to attack Tokyo. When the 1st American Volunteer Group had been given Roosevelt’s green light, Chennault had been promised a 2nd American Volunteer Group comprised of A-20 bombers—and if it had not been for Pearl Harbor, he might have gotten these by the end of 1941. Then, in early 1942, Lauchlin Currie had managed to secure a promise of obsolescent Lockheed A-29 Hudsons from the USAAF, but those Hudsons that were sent across the Atlantic were diverted to the Mediterranean Theater as soon as they reached North Africa.
If it had been up to the citizens of Chennault’s home state of Louisiana, he would have had his bombers—or at least a bomber. Earlier in 1942, the popular “Buy a Bomber for Chennault” campaign spearheaded by former governor James Albert Noe raised $15,109.36, but that was not nearly enough, and Noe gave the cash to Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s war orphan fund.
With the creation—at least on paper—of the CATF, the idea of bombers for Chennault, long a pipe dream, evolved into a commitment. Now a USAAF general, he had been promised the services of the USAAF 11th Bombardment Squadron. One of the first squadrons to see service in World War II, it had been dispatched to Australia with its B-17 heavy bombers in December 1941, and had experienced its baptism of fire in the Dutch East Indies earlier in 1942. It was among those that escaped to India with Lewis Brereton, but it had returned Stateside to refit and reorganize. Now the 11th was back, operating North American Aviation B-25s, the same type of aircraft used by Doolittle in his famous Tokyo raid in April. Classed by the USAAF as a “medium” bomber, the B-25 was actually in the same size and weight class as the Japanese Mitsubishi Ki-21 “heavy” bomber.
American bomber operations in China might have begun with Harry Halverson, had he not been waylaid by the Ninth Air Force, or with Caleb Haynes, if he had not been intercepted by the Tenth—but they finally did begin with the arrival in Dinjan on June 2 of the first six B-25s of the 11th Bombardment Group. Led by Major Gordon Leland, these six aircraft were to be foundation stones of the permanent USAAF operational presence in China.
However, this event, which might have been celebrated as a landmark accomplishment, was overshadowed by the type of bureaucratic inefficiency that Chennault despised in the standard operating procedures of the regular USAAF. As USAAF historian Herbert Weaver described, “it was planned that on [June 3] the flight would be completed to Kunming after a bombing of Lashio en route. . . . In the face of an unfavorable weather report and against the advice of Colonel Haynes, the six planes took off early the next morning. They unloaded their bombs on the Lashio airfield, but subsequently three planes—including that of Major Leland—crashed into a mountainside while flying through an overcast at 10,000 feet, and another plane was abandoned when it gave out of gas near Chanyi. Only two of the aircraft landed at Kunming, one with its radio operator who had been killed in a brush with enemy fighters.”
It was an exercise in planning that begged the question “What were they thinking?”
The diversion to Lashio was a naïve idea that apparently originated in Washington and didn’t even look good on paper. It added more than two hundred miles to the difficult crossing of the Hump, and the bombs added additional weight. Apparently the B-25 crews were not even given the frequencies of the AVG radios in Kunming.
“When Chennault heard the bad news, he hit the roof,” Jim Howard recalled. “Instead of just allowing the planes to be ferried and escorted by an experienced AVG pilot over the unfamiliar terrain, the generals had laid on a mission that ended in disaster. He complained that this sort of rash stubbornness was typical of the attitude of the newly arrived Army brass. They felt the AVG had nothing to teach them and wouldn’t stoop to ask for guidance and assistance from that awful organization of undisciplined mercenaries.”
Howard was at Kunming when the two bombers arrived, and spoke to the pilot of one of the surviving B-25s as he climbed out of his aircraft. Major William Bayse was a veteran of the difficult combat actions flown by the 11th Bomb Group in the Dutch East Indies.
“We approached Lashio from the northwest at three thousand feet,” he told Howard. “We could see Jap fighters taking off. We opened our bomb bay doors and made an excellent pass over the field and released our bombs simultaneously on an execution signal from the lead plane. The Japs must have had some advanced warning. Several [IJAAF Hayabusas] were climbing to meet us. We got out of there with full throttle. For protection against our pursuers, we entered some thick clouds and started climbing in tight formation. Our heading was on a direct course for Kunming. We were still climbing in the soup at eight thousand feet when I suddenly noticed below and out the window, bushes and trees rushing by. I hauled back on the yoke and as I did so, I saw blinding flashes and felt thundering reverberations. The rest of the formation must have all crashed into a mountain top.”
Weaver mentions that over the next two weeks, Bayse returned to India and led six more B-25s across the Hump without mishap. The official records of the 11th Bomb Squadron note that eight B-25s were in Kunming on June 10, though in his diary, R. T. Smith counted only seven after two arrived on June 16. The 11th was the first, and would remain for some time as the only operational component of the CATF.
—
In the meantime, as the USAAF was sending in B-25s, bombers new to the theater, Chennault had his eyes on a new type of fighter aircraft. Nearly two hundred of these new airplanes had been earmarked for the Chinese Air Force, and a few had actually reached India. Since the AVG was still part of the Chinese Air Force, Chennault decided to get his hands on some before they were requisitioned by the Tenth Air Force. The aircraft was the P-43 Lancer, developed by Republic Aviation as a private venture and loosely based on the company’s P-35. It was known to have some shortcomings, and the USAAF had been lukewarm about its capabilities, but Charlie Bond, who had flown one in Karachi when he was there in April to pick up a P-40E, wrote in his diary that it “climbs like a scared angel and easily outruns a P-40E, particularly at higher altitudes.”
The USAAF had decided to wait for the much more promising Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, which was evolving from the Lancer but only just beginning to enter production. For this reason, the USAAF decided to Lend-Lease most of their Lancers to China. Chennault felt that the AVG did not have the luxury of waiting. The Lancer now was better than the Thunderbolt later, and given his track record of getting things from the USAAF, there was no way of knowing if he would ever be offered Thunderbolts.
The P-40s could barely function above 20,000 feet and could not intercept Japanese high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, while the Lancers, with their turbosupercharged Pratt & Whitney R-1830 engines, could operate at 36,000 feet. In fact, a Lancer had been the aircraft that Bob Scott had used when he made his flight, that same month, two miles over the 29,029-foot peak of Mount Everest, an event memorialized in one of the most often-cited passages in his best-selling 1943 autobiography God Is My Co-Pilot.
On the same April ferry mission that Bond first flew the aircraft, Ed Goyette had flown a P-43 back to Kunming. When Chennault saw it, he knew he wanted more.
Tex Hill and Duke Hedman, along with ten Chinese pilots, took a CNAC flight west to Karachi to meet the Lancers. The idea was that they would all learn to fly the new birds and then fly back together. Given that none of the Chinese pilots could speak English, their week of familiarization flights was a comedy of errors, though none of the slapstick landings cost any lives or aircraft.
What was to be a very long return trip began on May 28, but ran into trouble east of their refueling stop at Jodhpur, when they were overtaken by a sandstorm. Hill, who was leading, decided to fly low because of the poor visibility and to use the old navigational trick of following the railroad to get them into Delhi. Here they made contact with Tenth Air Force headquarters.
While they waited for the weather to clear and for the sand to be cleaned out of the moving parts of the Lancers, they enjoyed the pleasures and distractions of the British colonial city that were a far cry from life at Lei Yun, or even reasonably comfortable Kunming.
They also crossed paths with Harvey and Olga Greenlaw, who had left Kunming for the last time on May 8, and who had arrived in Delhi a week later by way of Calcutta. The Greenlaws were staying in the best suite at the Cecil Hotel. When the clerk had told them it was always reserved for Bill Pawley, Olga had told him that Pawley would not mind, adding, “if he comes, we’ll let you put a cot in there for him.”
Pawley, who was in Bangalore at the Hindustan Aircraft facility, never showed up and probably never knew they were there, but when Hill and Hedman did, Olga called for cots to be brought in for them. The weather was unbearably hot, but the Cecil had a swimming pool, which was a welcome treat after many long months in the field.
“I saw a lot of Tex Hill,” Olga wrote in her memoirs. “When we were not out shopping or looking around town, we were at the swimming pool, surrounded by war correspondents talking about the war or playing bridge. . . . I had seen him once when he was very angry, lips turned into a thin line and his eyes narrow, blazing slits. But at the swimming pool he was smiling and his eyes were open wide and very blue.”
“I wish I had known you better in Kunming,” he said as they chatted, sharing stories about their lives back home.
“Your fault,” she said, flirting back. “Why didn’t you come around? All the others did.”
“I was waiting for an invitation,” he said with a smile. “You never asked me.”
“No, nor did I ever ask the others,” she replied. “But didn’t you once tell Moose Moss that I must be a cold-blooded woman?”
“Yes, I did,” he said, smiling. “But I didn’t know you then.”
“If and when we fold up, will you join the Tenth Air Force here?” Olga asked, changing the subject.
“There’s no reason why I shouldn’t,” he said after a long pause. “Our country is at war, and I have to fight, whether it is here, Australia, or Africa. It doesn’t make any difference. As long as I’m fighting, I’ll be doing my duty.”
“But don’t you want to go home and rest up a bit?”
“Hell no, I’m in stride now. Why stop? I might lose my technique.”
—
Tex Hill and the first of the Lancers departed Delhi on June 5, but were delayed in Dinjan because of the monsoons and did not reach Kunming until June 13, three days after the B-25s of the 11th Bomber Squadron. During the coming weeks, more and more P-43s reached Kunming, though many were lost over the Hump by Chinese pilots, who flew the majority of the ferry missions. There would never be enough Lancers available to make a difference, and operationally, the aircraft never lived up to expectations.
Because of the lack of armor for their cockpits, Chennault decided not to use them for air-to-air combat, though Caleb Haynes reportedly commandeered a couple in Dinjan to use as fighter escorts for the transports flying the Hump.
As summer arrived in China, it was business as usual for the American Volunteer Group, with operations still dependent upon the tried and tested P-40s, and with the 23rd Fighter Group still little more than a figment of Clayton Bissell’s imagination.