Even when the AVG as an active organization was officially gone in July 1942, the AVG as a cultural archetype lived on, kept alive and robust in the hearts and minds of a press and public that would not let it go. It had been, and it would continue to be, chronicled in countless feature stories in the American and global media. Within a year, more than a half dozen books about it—including the memoirs of Olga Greenlaw and Bob Scott—had been published. The name “Flying Tigers” resonated in popular culture then, and it is still remembered today.
The Flying Tigers fought about fifty major aerial battles against hugely lopsided odds and never lost one of those contests. During their seven-month “undefeated season,” from mid-December 1941 through mid-July 1942, the AVG, by Chennault’s reckoning, had destroyed 299 Japanese aircraft, with another 153 probables. Including all aircraft destroyed on the ground, many estimates put the number much higher. By the records of the bonuses paid by the Chinese government under the CAMCO contracts for Japanese aircraft shot down, the number was 296. Frank Olynyk, who undertook a meticulous review of AVG records that was published in 1986, noted that the Flying Tigers had downed 229 Japanese aircraft in aerial combat alone. Considering the number of pilots and their length of service, the record of the American Volunteer Group ranks was comparable to those of the best fighter groups in the USAAF during World War II.
Of the men who flew against such odds with the AVG, sixty-seven were paid bonuses for having destroyed enemy aircraft, and of these, there were nineteen aces, meaning men who shot down five or more. Bob Neale was the highest-scoring AVG ace, credited with 15.55, the fraction being computed on the basis of victories shared with other pilots who contributed to the destruction of a specific aircraft. Frank Olynyk lists thirteen of Neale’s victories as having been in aerial combat.
In second place, Tex Hill is credited with 11.25 or 10.25 by the bonus count and by Olynyk, respectively. Close behind Hill, five Flying Tigers survived the war with scores on the bonus chart between ten and eleven, including their shared victories: George Burgard, Ken Jernstedt, Mac McGarry, Chuck Older, and Bill Reed. Two others with scores in that range, Bob Little and Jack Newkirk, had been killed in action. They were two of only ten men lost in combat. Just seven were killed in accidents. Of the three who were captured, McGarry and Lew Bishop survived. Only Arnold Shamblin never came back from captivity.
Based on the unit’s effectiveness from the Japanese perspective, Radio Tokyo estimated that AVG combat strength was about three hundred aircraft. In fact, the average rarely exceeded three dozen available, or a dozen in the air at any given moment. The Japanese knew that they substantially outnumbered the AVG, but they just could not comprehend that they outnumbered them by such a wide margin. A good laugh was had by the men when they tuned in to Radio Tokyo’s English-language broadcasts.
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Though often overlooked in the history books, the actions of the Flying Tigers at the Salween Gorge in May 1942 may well have altered the course of Chinese history by halting a Japanese offensive that could not otherwise have been stopped. As Winston Churchill said of the Battle of El Alamein, that British triumph in the North African desert half a year later, the Salween Gorge was not the beginning of the end of the great Japanese offensive through Burma to China’s back door, but it was “perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
The total cost to the Chinese government in 1942 dollars was about $5 million for aircraft and $3 million for salaries and personnel expenses. When Chennault admitted to T. V. Soong that this had exceeded his original estimates, the Chinese foreign minister reminded him that with less than a third of its combat strength, the AVG had saved China from final collapse on the Salween Gorge and freed Chongqing and the cities of eastern China from the fear of air attack. Soong scolded Chennault, telling him crisply, “the AVG was the soundest investment China ever made. I am ashamed that you should even consider the cost.”
In the early years after Chiang Kai-shek lost the Chinese civil war in 1949, the Communist government spurned the memory of the Flying Tigers because of their association with Chiang. In recent decades, however, their role in having helped to save China was recognized, and it is now celebrated across China.
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The “passing into history” of the men of the American Volunteer Group, which Claire Chennault marked in his recollections of July 4 and July 19, 1942, did not happen that month. Rather it unfolded gradually over time, as those men who were the Flying Tigers moved on to future careers and future acts of heroism.
Bill Reed and R. T. Smith both rejoined the USAAF and went their separate ways, promising to reconnect after the war. As fate would have it, they crossed paths in Southeast Asia at about the end of 1943, much sooner than expected. Reed had gone back to China, once again to serve under Chennault, and Smith was assigned to the 1st Air Commando Group, an organization created for special operations over Burma. Coincidentally, it was commanded by Johnny Alison, who had concluded his tour of duty with Chennault, had gone home, and had come back overseas.
While he was based at Hailakandit in Assam, about 260 miles southwest of the transport hub at Dinjan, Smith was visited by both Reed and their old Hell’s Angels squadronmate George “Mac” McMillan. In January 1944, not long after their reunions with Smith, both Reed and McMillan were killed, a few days apart, near Hengyang. After the war, Smith had a long and varied career as a pilot with TWA, as a Hollywood scriptwriter, and as an executive with Lockheed.
Charlie Bond rejoined the USAAF as a lieutenant in October 1942, and was promoted to major within three weeks. A year later, after Hap Arnold personally selected him to serve as the pilot for Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Bond logged a great deal of flight time over Russia. As he had with Tex Hill, Ed Rector, and Bill Reed, Chennault requested that Bond be sent back to China, but Arnold emphatically refused to send him. He did not want to see another former Flying Tiger killed in action or taken prisoner. After the war, Bond remained with the US Air Force in a variety of roles, including as deputy commander of the Thirteenth Air Force during the Vietnam War, and later as commander of the Twelfth Air Force. He retired in 1968 as a major general.
When he returned home, Jim Howard received invitations from both the USAAF and the US Navy to enlist as an officer. He first went back to NAS North Island in San Diego, where he had served as a naval aviator before the war. He still had his old pass, so he was waved through the front gate. When he went to call on the station commandant, the heavyset captain grew red-faced and threatened to have the AVG ace with six Japanese aircraft to his credit arrested for illegal entry. Howard joined the USAAF.
He went overseas again, this time to serve with the 354th Fighter Group, flying P-51 Mustangs with the Eighth Air Force, based in England. On January 11, 1944, he single-handedly engaged about thirty Luftwaffe fighters that were attacking American bombers over snow-covered Germany. Using tricks learned over the steamy Far East, he downed three enemy aircraft that day, and continued to distract the Germans even after running out of ammunition.
Howard soon became a media star and was later awarded the Medal of Honor for this action. In February, now a colonel, he was named commander of the 354th, which ended the war as the highest-scoring USAAF fighter group in Europe. Jim Howard added a total of six victories against the Luftwaffe to the 6.33 for which he had been paid bonuses as a Flying Tiger. He left the US Air Force as a brigadier general in 1949.
Not everyone who left combat flying for the airlines left their familiar stomping grounds in China. Some, including Bob Prescott, went back overseas to fly with CNAC. An ace credited with 5.29 aerial victories, Prescott added to his résumé with more than three hundred flights across the Hump as a transport pilot.
Back in Los Angeles after the war, Prescott’s résumé brought him to the attention of a group of well-heeled investors who were interested in backing an all-freight airline—and National Skyway Freight Corporation was born in June 1945. In turn, as pilots, Prescott hired a bunch of former Flying Tigers, including Bill Bartling, Cliff Groh, Link Laughlin, Thomas Haywood, Duke Hedman, Bus Loane, Catfish Raine, Joe Rosbert, and Dick Rossi. In 1947, Prescott also appropriated the obvious name, renaming the airline as the Flying Tiger Line. Prescott remained at the helm until his death in 1978, and a decade later Flying Tiger was acquired by Federal Express.
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Of the Flying Tigers, the man who would likely have been voted “least likely to succeed,” defied the odds, becoming a Medal of Honor recipient and later a best-selling autobiographer. Disgruntled and determined, Greg Boyington walked out on the AVG in April 1942 after a week-long drinking jag and an acrimonious quarrel over his claim to have shot down six Japanese planes when the AVG credited him with only 3.5. He caught a CNAC flight to Calcutta and a British Imperial Airways flight to Karachi. He was hoping to fly all the way home, but spent six weeks rounding the Cape of Good Hope and plying the Atlantic aboard the SS Brazil in the company of a large number of would-be Chinese pilots being sent to the United States for training. At home, Boyington applied to rejoin the US Marine Corps. Finding himself broke, he spent two months working in a Seattle parking garage while he waited to hear back from the service.
In January 1943, Major Greg Boyington was once again at sea, this time heading across the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, which he had crossed in 1941, this time bound for the South Pacific and an assignment to the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing. After a series of staff assignments, during which he was “going mentally crazier by the day” trying to get into an active squadron, he became commander of Marine Fighter Squadron 214 (VMF-214) in September 1943. Because the unit had been cobbled together from a collection of pilots lacking squadron assignments, they called themselves “Boyington’s Bastards,” a name later softened for media consumption as the “Black Sheep Squadron.” Boyington, because he was thirty-one, a decade older than most of his men, was nicknamed “Grandpappy,” a name soon abridged to “Pappy.”
Flying Vought F4U Corsairs against IJNAF Mitsubishi A6M Zeros, VMF-214 soon found itself in the thick of an intense air combat environment that ranged over numerous Pacific islands from the Russells to Bougainville to New Britain. On September 16, the first day of combat for the Black Sheep, Pappy Boyington fought a series of duels with Japanese aircraft, shooting down five and initiating a narrative that would make him an unlikely legend.
On October 17, two dozen Black Sheep engaged five dozen Japanese aircraft and shot down twenty. In the space of thirty-two days, Boyington himself had claimed fourteen, and he increased his score to twenty-five by the end of 1943. On January 3, 1944, he downed another Japanese aircraft to match the score of twenty-six achieved by World War I “ace of aces” Eddie Rickenbacker, but on that same day, he was shot down himself. Declared missing in action and presumed dead, Pappy Boyington became a tragic hero on the home front and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
However, unknown to anyone at home, Boyington had survived, was taken prisoner, and spent the remainder of the war as a POW. When he was repatriated at the end of the war, the Marine Corps promoted him to lieutenant colonel and sent their returning hero on a nationwide publicity tour. On the last night of the tour, he appeared in public very drunk, very incorrigible, and very much an embarrassment to the service.
Soon discharged, Boyington spent most of the next decade battling alcoholism and drifting from job to job—which included being a draft beer salesman and a referee for wrestling matches. His life turned around by the late 1950s, when he began flying for a charter airline out of Burbank, California. He also completed his best-selling 1957 autobiography Baa Baa, Black Sheep, which was adapted for a television series of the same name that aired in the 1970s. The book became a classic, but the series was not well received by former squadronmates and other Marine Corps pilots who derided it for its inaccuracies. The bad boy whose real life never measured up to the legend that surrounded him left a mixed legacy. A hero in popular culture, he remained a black sheep in the minds and memories of most of those, from the Flying Tigers to the Marines, with whom he had served.
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Unlike Boyington, neither of the two Flying Tigers who had survived being captured early in 1942 were still POWs when the war ended. Instead, both came home with amazing stories. Lew Bishop, who had been picked up by the Vichy French, was eventually turned over to the Japanese. His daughter, Sheila Bishop Irwin, who was born in November 1941 and who had not yet met her father when he was shot down, much later wrote in a blog for the Museum of the American Military Family that in December 1943, her mother received a letter from Lew dated November 5, 1942, that proved he had survived being shot down and this gave the family some hope.
Amazingly, Bishop later escaped from a prison train headed from Shanghai to Manchuria one night in early 1945. He was in an open-topped cattle car and had managed to work himself free of his leg restraints in the dark without anyone noticing. At an appropriate time, in open country between stations, he just stood up, hopped the side of the car, and jumped. As he rolled into a gully, shots were fired but the train did not stop. Bishop eventually made contact with an English-speaking Chinese man who was connected to the underground resistance and was smuggled back to Kunming.
Captured by the Thai police after the March 24 raid on Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, Mac McGarry was handed over to the Japanese for interrogation, but when they were finished with him, they handed him back. Thai authorities then jailed him in Bangkok. According to Myrna Oliver, who wrote his 1990 obituary in the Los Angeles Times, his family learned in October 1942 that he was still alive.
What happened next was as improbable as it is cinematic. The global reach of the covert hand of the rapidly expanding US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the fabled precursor to the CIA, had extended into Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. Acting on a request from Chennault to recover his pilot, the OSS enlisted the aid of a man on the inside with the Bangkok police, who forged a death certificate so that McGarry could be successfully spirited out of the prison and out of the country in a coffin. After the war, McGarry became an attorney, practicing in Southern California.
Fate had given Ajax Baumler three chances to fly with the Flying Tigers, and he had begged Tex Hill for a second chance to stay on when the 23rd Fighter Group was activated. He had promised Hill that he would curb his drinking and straighten out his life. Apparently he did. After Frank Schiel was killed in December 1942, Chennault went so far as to name him to succeed Schiel as commander of the 74th Fighter Squadron. This is illustrative either of his renewed confidence in a man whom he had warned Tex Hill about, or of how few experienced pilots were available to assume command responsibilities—even as late as December 1942. The former may be indicated by Baumler’s being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal. Bob Scott later described him as “the best operations officer I ever saw.”
Baumler remained at the head of the 74th until February 18, 1943, when he was sent Stateside to recover from malaria. When he did, he was utilized by the USAAF public affairs apparatus at war bond rallies and he served as a test pilot for the Air Matériel Command at Wright Field in Ohio. However, his drinking problem reemerged and a promising career unraveled. Because of this, and for his having flown under Soviet command in Spain, he was denied a regular commission after the war when the Soviets became objects of distrust, and was taken off flying duty. There were no more second chances. As a sergeant, he remained in the US Air Force until 1965, working as a ground controller during the Korean War and in a series of lower-level jobs. Though he was never again on flying duty, he continued to wear his wings.
Hap Arnold sent Robert Lee Scott back to China in 1944 as part of a project to evaluate the use of high-velocity aerial rockets against ground targets, incurring his boss’s displeasure for flying live combat missions against Arnold’s explicit orders. After the war, he returned home to his wife, Catharine “Kitty” Rix Scott. He remained in the US Air Force as it became independent of the US Army in 1947, and served in a variety of roles, including as commander of the 36th Fighter Bomber Wing in West Germany, and retired in 1957 as a brigadier general. In the 1970s, he resumed his project to retrace the route of Marco Polo across Asia that he had abandoned in 1932. Traveling by bus, train, and even by camel, he crossed much of China. He hiked the Great Wall to Beijing and visited the Marco Polo Bridge, where the great war between Japan and China had begun in 1937. In 1996, a decade before his death, the tenacious Scott carried the torch ahead of the Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.
When he turned the 23rd Fighter Group over to Ed Rector in the fall of 1944, Tex Hill went home to an assignment with the 412th Fighter Group, which had been designated to be the first group to receive the earliest USAAF jet fighters. These had included the Bell P-59 Airacomet, and by the time Hill arrived, the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star. In September 1945 he took over command of the 412th, where he remained until early 1946, when he finally left the USAAF to go home to his Texas ranch. Within the year, though, Texas governor Coke Stevenson coaxed him back into uniform as a wing commander in the Texas Air National Guard. Remaining on reserve status with the US Air Force, he finally retired as a brigadier general in 1968.
Ed Rector stayed on in China as a US Air Force officer in the postwar American Military Assistance Advisory Group. After Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist government abandoned mainland China to the Communists in 1949, Rector followed Chiang and company to Taiwan, continuing as an adviser to the Republic of China Air Force. He retired from the US Air Force in 1962, but remained involved in commercial air freight operations in the Far East.
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Vinegar Joe Stilwell finally got the field army command for which George Marshall had always felt he was destined, but it was short-lived. When General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the US Tenth Army, was killed in action toward the end of the Okinawa campaign in June 1945, Stilwell was appointed to succeed him. However, operations were already winding down, and Japan surrendered before the planned use of the Tenth in the ground invasion of Japan that had been scheduled for later in 1945.
After the war, Stilwell was given command of the Stateside Sixth Army at the Presidio of San Francisco, which is where he died in 1946 after surgery for stomach cancer.
Meanwhile, Chennault’s old nemesis Clayton Bissell had been recalled to Washington in August 1943, mainly because of his ongoing feud with Chennault. He spent the remainder of the war serving mainly as a staff intelligence officer. In this role, he was the recipient of an account by Lieutenant Colonel John Van Vliet, who, as a POW, had visited the site of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which the Soviet secret police executed approximately six thousand Polish prisoners of war and fourteen thousand Polish civilians. Bissell classified the report as Top Secret and allowed it to disappear. When this came to light during a congressional investigation in 1952, Bissell, then retired, claimed that he had not wanted to embarrass the Soviet Union. Instead, he had embarrassed himself, and added a black mark to his own legacy. It was not until 1990, after the end of the Cold War and eighteen years after Bissell’s death, when the Russians opened their files and apologized, that the world became cognizant of the staggering extent of the atrocities that Bissell had deliberately covered up.
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In October 1945, eight years into his second career in the US armed forces, Claire Chennault retired for the last time. Within a year, as he had in 1937, he had left Louisiana to go back to China as a civilian to run air operations. This time it was a cargo airline called Civil Air Transport, but better known by its acronym, CAT. After passenger services were added to CAT’s repertoire, advertising materials typically included pictures, not of tigers, but of cats.
In the meantime, Chennault had divorced his wife, Nell, whom he had married in 1911, when he was eighteen. In 1947, he married journalist Chen Xianmei, known as Anna Chan, who was three decades younger than he. They had first met during the war in Kunming, where her sister worked at the AVG headquarters.
As the Chinese Civil War ensued, and as the Communist warlords gradually took over more and more of China, CAT was often an aerial lifeline to surrounded Nationalist enclaves. Meanwhile, despite inquiries from hundreds of “volunteers,” Chennault dodged reports that he was planning to create a new “Flying Tigers” to help save Chiang from Mao Zedong’s armies. He had helped to save China from the Japanese at a critical moment during World War II, but at this juncture in history, the aging general chose not to enlist in the fight to save China from the Chinese.
When the Communists won in 1949 and Chiang Kai-shek fled with his Kuomintang government to reestablish as the Republic of China in Taiwan, CAT fled with him. In a bizarre twist of fate, when Communist China sued CAT in civil court in Hong Kong to get hold of aircraft stranded in the British colony, Chennault lost. He won on appeal.
During the coming years, CAT became involved as a contract cargo airline in numerous covert operations for the American CIA and other clandestine entities. In 1957 it became Air America and part of a network of CIA-owned air carriers that operated in Southeast Asia through the Vietnam War.
Chennault and his young wife returned to the United States early in 1958 so that he could seek treatment for the lung cancer that had developed after a lifetime of heavy smoking. He died in New Orleans on July 27, two weeks after receiving a final visit from Madame Chiang. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Anna Chennault continued to be active as a journalist, and later as a spokesperson for various political and philanthropic causes in the United States.
Tex Hill and Ed Rector were among the Flying Tigers who attended Chennault’s funeral. Bob Scott was a pallbearer. So too were a cast of US Air Force generals, including current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Nathan Twining, former Air Force chief of staff Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, former Fifth Air Force commander George Kenney, and the then-current Strategic Air Command boss Curtis LeMay.
Reflecting on this turning out of top brass for a man once treated suspiciously as an outsider and an eccentric, Scott wrote “to me it meant that Chennault, a fighting nonconformer to the bitter end, was by this tribute being recognized, after all, as having been right in his originality. I thought that this last honor might well be the judgment of his peers that he had been the greatest airman of them all.”
As it is written in Hexagram Gui Mei of the I Ching, “the superior man understands the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end.” With the passing of the Old Man, the book could finally be closed and a story left for posterity, a story written in .50-caliber lead and with the blood of a unique and incomparable cadre of young Americans.
There are perhaps no more appropriate final words, nor better tribute to Chennault and the men of the Flying Tigers, than a rhetorical question posed by R. T. Smith, who asked, “What might have happened in Burma and China if the AVG had not been there?”