When the sun had come up on July 19, 1942, the morning after the delayed Dissolve Day, most of the Flying Tigers had already quietly slipped away from the country to which they had pledged their support for a year and two weeks. They had already sold all the accumulated personal possessions that couldn’t be crammed into their duffel bags, and were at airfields from Chongqing to Kunming hoping and waiting to catch a ride on a USAAF C-47 or CNAC DC-3 across the Hump to Dinjan and home.
Bob Neale and Charlie Bond were among the last to leave. As they were waiting for a flight out of Chongqing on July 18, Skip Adair, Chennault’s longtime assistant and the man who had recruited much of the AVG back in 1941, took them aside. Pete Petach’s pregnant widow, nurse Emma Jane “Red” Foster Petach, was also headed home, and Adair asked if they would not mind traveling with her as her escort. They readily agreed.
Two days later, the three travelers were at the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, which was filled with AVG vets waiting around for passports and visas, documents to be supplied, respectively, by the American consulate and the British at the Calcutta police department. Mired in red tape, this process proved much more complicated than expected.
Chennault had conveyed a War Department promise that those who had signed up for the two-week contract extension would be able to travel all the way home by air. However, when they contacted Tenth Air Force headquarters, the retired Flying Tigers learned that traveling by air west of Karachi was virtually impossible given the high demand that was being put on available air transport capacity. The trip from there back to the United States would have to be by sea, around the Cape of Good Hope, and through the U-boat-infested Atlantic.
“Red is down in the dumps and I can understand it,” Bond wrote in his diary as they looked forward to several weeks on two oceans. “She doesn’t relish the idea of going home by boat. She is pregnant but doesn’t know that Skip told us. . . . We ran into one of the crew chiefs of the AVG who had come in from Karachi. The boat situation there is not good. I made up my mind to go to New Delhi and at least try to get Red air transportation home. I learned that a USAAF gooney bird at Dumdum Airport was leaving tomorrow for New Delhi, so I started checking on the crew. Luckily the pilot was an old buddy of mine from MacDill Air Base.”
Through this connection, Bond managed to work his way up the chains of command, and ultimately to an audience in New Delhi with General Earl Naiden, commander of the Tenth Air Force, who remembered Bond from Langley Field before the war. When he learned their story, the AVG refugees—especially the young widow—were treated like heroes. Bond proposed that they wire Air Transport Command in Washington, but Naiden countered with a suggestion that they send their telegram to Hap Arnold directly. The reply, finally received on July 28, was “Request approved. Grant all three highest priority.”
On August 7, the threesome landed in Miami aboard a Pan American Clipper. Bob Neale never returned to combat flying, later joining George Burgard, Jim Cross, and Buster Keeton among the AVG alums who went on to careers as pilots with Pan American. Eventually Neale retired to the Pacific Northwest and was running a fishing camp on Puget Sound when he passed away in 1994.
When Red and Pete’s daughter was born early in 1943, Red named her Joan Claire Petach, with the middle name being a homage to Chennault. Red returned to her alma mater, and taught at the Yale School of Nursing before going on to a distinguished career as executive director of the Pennsylvania Health Council and as president of the Maryland Public Health Association. She raised her daughter alone, and did not remarry until Joan had left home. In 1964, Red married Fletcher Hanks, who had flown with CNAC in China during the war, making 347 round-trip flights across the Hump.
Hap Arnold never allowed the friction between him and Chennault to shade his opinion of, nor his actions toward, Chennault’s men. On August 14, 1942, as the discharged AVG pilots started reaching the United States, he wrote to Chennault that “as a concrete example of the world-wide effect of your superior performance of most difficult duty I want you to know that I am personally directing an intense effort to enroll in the Army Air Forces all of your ex-American Volunteer Group combat personnel who are now in the States. We are after these lads in order that their skill, experience and ability which you have instilled into them shall not be lost to the Army Air Forces.”
He made good on this promise. The pilots who rejoined the USAAF did so as lieutenants, but were majors within a month or less.
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Jim Howard flew out of China at about the same time as Bond, Neale, and Red Petach. For Howard, who was born in Guangzhou twenty-nine years earlier, it was his second “final” exit. He made it as far as Bombay before he learned that he would have to make the trip home by sea aboard the former Matson liner SS Mariposa, en route to New York. As he came aboard, he was greeted by more than eighty AVG men, including Parker Dupouy, Tom Haywood, Bill Reed, and R. T. Smith.
Also aboard the Mariposa when it cast off from the dock at Bombay on August 6 were Harvey and Olga Greenlaw, who had been living in Bill Pawley’s suite at the Cecil in Delhi since the middle of May. When they finally reached the United States, they settled in Southern California, but were divorced soon afterward. Olga did succeed in finding a publisher for her memoirs, which were published in 1943.
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Early in January 1943, Robert Lee Scott, by now the most famous American fighter pilot in Asia, was summoned home by Hap Arnold to make a public relations tour. Every step that Scott took seemed guided by unfathomable luck.
While in Buffalo, New York, to speak at the Curtiss-Wright headquarters, where the P-40s flown by the AVG had been built, he met Episcopal bishop Dean Perdue, who introduced him to New York publisher Charles Scribner, who in turn asked the “D’Artagnan of the air” how soon he could write a book about his experiences. According to Scott, he dictated his tales onto about a hundred wax cylinders in record time, and turned them over to Scribner. The title, God Is My Co-Pilot, came from a vision he said he’d had looking into the darkness of a Chinese cave.
Shortly after being posted to Luke Field in Arizona, a routine flight to Southern California led to a chance meeting with Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, and a deal for the film adaptation of the book, a project that the USAAF embraced because of its public relations value. The book became a best seller in 1943, and the film was a successful release in 1945.
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For those who had remained in China, and those newly arrived, the sense of desert island abandonment of which the Old Man had complained since 1941 still prevailed—and the Japanese knew it. The air bridge across the Hump had saved China from total collapse and it kept Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force viable, but it could not support theaterwide offensive operations. The Japanese knew this.
Often overlooked in general histories of World War II is that Japan never lost the land war in China, and ultimately this sent Joe Stilwell home without a victory. By April 1944, Allied armies throughout the world were gradually moving into an offensive posture, but in China, that “stepchild” of theaters, the situation was exactly the opposite. The Imperial Japanese Army launched Operation Ichi-Go (Number One), their biggest series of major campaigns across eastern China since 1937. As had been the case then, the Chinese were no match for such a major offensive, and they began to crumble, despite the heroic efforts of the Fourteenth Air Force to strike their supply and troop concentrations.
As the Japanese advanced in the east, Joe Stilwell, the nominal American theater commander in China, was distracted on two opposite fronts—his long-festering obsession with reversing his 1942 loss of Burma, and his increasingly bitter feud with Chiang Kai-shek. In the face of the cataclysm of Chinese defeats, he called Chiang a “crazy little bastard [with] idiotic tactical and strategic conceptions.”
Stilwell insisted, in memos to Franklin Roosevelt and to anyone else who would listen, that only he could meet the challenge of Ichi-Go. If the supreme command of the Chinese armies was transferred from Chiang to him, the quarter million troops then being used against Mao Zedong’s Communist insurgency could be thrown into the war against the Japanese, and things would be different.
With the collapse of the front in southeastern China, Roosevelt admitted that he was finally willing to have a frank talk with Chiang Kai-shek about letting Stilwell take over. However, instead of finessing a diplomatically complicated situation to his benefit, Stilwell used this moment to rub Chiang’s nose in Roosevelt’s impatience. On September 21, 1944, Stilwell gleefully turned to verse. “I’ve waited long for vengeance; At last I’ve had my chance,” Stilwell wrote in a private letter that was reproduced in his published diaries. “I’ve looked the Peanut in the eye; And kicked him in the pants. . . . His face turned green and quivered. As he struggled not to screech. For all my weary battles, For all my hours of woe, At last I’ve had my innings, And laid the Peanut low.”
Far from being laid low, Chiang Kai-shek wrote to Roosevelt, insisting that Stilwell must go. On October 19, as Guilin was falling to the Japanese onslaught, General Vinegar Joe Stilwell, sadly more engrossed in Chongqing palace intrigues than in the war, was relieved of duty and ordered back to the United States and a desk at the Pentagon. As often noted in the I Ching, “perseverance brings good fortune,” but Chinese literature is so often filled with warnings to be alert for hidden danger. In American literature, they say that he who laughs last, laughs best, but aside from outlasting Stilwell, Chiang had little about which to chuckle. Just as often, the I Ching, that book of changes, reminds us that “perseverance brings misfortune.”
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On October 15, 1944, four days before Stilwell was summoned homeward, Tex Hill departed from China and from the 23rd Fighter Group. For him and for the 23rd, Ichi-Go came as a disaster at a time when USAAF fighter groups from Germany to the Pacific were beginning to savor the sweet taste of victories. On June 20, Hill had to abandon the once-secure base complex at Hengyang, and by September, the headquarters of the 23rd had moved back to Liuzhou (then Liuchow), 260 miles southwest of Hengyang and nearly 100 miles from Guilin.
Hill turned the reins of the 23rd Fighter Group over to his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Loofbourrow, who would run the show until Ed Rector returned to China to take over the group. Headed west, Hill crossed paths with an eastbound Rector as they both passed through Cairo.
Having recovered from the infection that nearly killed him, Rector had served for a time at Eglin Field, but Chennault wanted another Flying Tiger to take over the 23rd. Rector would serve as commander of the group through the end of World War II. He scored his last aerial victory on April 2, 1945, over Shanghai.
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Claire Lee Chennault remained in command of the Fourteenth Air Force until a week before World War II came to an end. When he requested on July 8, 1945, that he be relieved of duty, he did not know that nuclear weapons would be dropped on Japan a month later, nor that Emperor Hirohito would order his armies to stand down on August 15. Like most strategic planners, he believed that the final battles to subdue the Japanese homeland would last well into 1946 and that they would soak up American blood and treasure on an unprecedented level.
What he did know was that with the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, there was a declining willingness within the US government to continue to support the China that he had come to know and love. He saw “Free China”—as he called that part of the country ruled by Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang—as a state on the verge of becoming a failed state, crowded between an increasingly active Communist insurgency and a Japanese occupation, neither of which could be defeated by a gradually declining Nationalist Chinese Army, one that had never recovered from Operation Ichi-Go a year earlier.
He did know that Stilwell, now in Washington, wanted him out of China and was pulling strings to make this happen. As Stilwell had seen his CBI command subordinated to the British-led SEAC two years earlier, Stilwell now wished to do the same for Chennault. He supported the consolidation of the Fourteenth Air Force with the Tenth under General George Stratemeyer’s Eastern Air Command inside SEAC. This provided the final catalyst for Chennault’s decision to ask to leave China.
On one point, though, Stilwell and Chennault agreed. China was strangling in corruption. Stilwell blamed Chiang Kai-shek, while Chennault blamed the American failure to vigorously support the American-educated modernists in Chiang’s circle, including the Soong sisters, their surviving husbands, and their brother, T. V. Soong, whom he believed represented a solid and Western-leaning Chinese future. At home, public opinion sympathized with Chennault. The New York Times editorial page concurred, asserting that “no American is better qualified . . . to raise his voice for China.”
When the news of Chennault’s departure broke in China, it was greeted with alarm and sadness. The influential daily Ta Kung Pao lamented the news, calling Chennault China’s “best bosom friend.” When Claire Chennault, no longer of the Fourteenth Air Force, flew out of Kunming on August 8, 1945, hundreds of Chinese civilians and military personnel were on hand to see him off. At home, two weeks later, when he was introduced in the stands at a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, the New York Times called the applause “thunderous.” When he returned home to Monroe, Louisiana, shortly after the surrender of Japan, thousands turned out to greet him.