Consider this job supply:
A one-year contract to dwell and work in China, flying, repairing and making airplanes. Pay is as a lot as $16,725 a month with 30 days off a 12 months. Housing is included, and also you’ll get an additional $700 a month for meals. And there’s an additional $11,000 for each Japanese airplane you destroy – no restrict.
That’s the deal – in inflation-adjusted 2025 {dollars} – that a couple of hundred Americans took in 1941 to develop into the heroes, and a few would even say the saviors, of China.
Those American pilots, mechanics and assist personnel turned members of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), later often called the Flying Tigers.
The group’s warplanes featured the gaping, tooth-filled mouth of a shark on their nostril, a fearsome image nonetheless utilized by some US military plane to today.
The symbolic fierceness was backed up by AVG pilots in fight. The Flying Tigers are credited with destroying as many as 497 Japanese planes whereas dropping solely 73.
Today, regardless of US-China tensions, these American mercenaries are nonetheless revered in China.
“China always remembers the contribution and sacrifice made to it by the United States and the American people during the World War II,” says an entry on the Flying Tigers memorial page of China’s state-run newspaper People’s Daily Online.
The bond is such that the daughter and granddaughter of the Flying Tigers’ founder are among the many few Americans invited to Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing commemorating the top of World War II.
In the late Thirties, China had been invaded by the armies of Imperial Japan and was struggling to stand up to its higher geared up and unified foe. Japan was nearly unopposed in the air, in a position to bomb Chinese cities at will.
Leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had been in a position to loosely unite China’s warlords below a central authorities, later employed American Claire Chennault, a retired US Army captain, to type an air drive.
Chennault first spent a couple of years placing collectively an air raid warning community and constructing airbases throughout China, according to the Flying Tigers’ official website. In 1940, he was dispatched to the United States – nonetheless a impartial celebration – to discover pilots and planes that would defend China towards Japan.
With good contacts in the administration of US President Franklin Roosevelt and a price range that would pay Americans as a lot as thrice what they may earn in the US military, Chennault was in a position to get the fliers he wanted.
A deal was secured to get 100 Curtiss P-40B fighters constructed for Britain despatched to China as an alternative.
In his memoirs, Chennault wrote that the P-40s he acquired lacked a contemporary gun sight.
His pilots have been “aiming their guns through a crude, homemade, ring-and-post gun sight instead of the more accurate optical sights used by the Air Corps and the Royal Air Force,” he wrote.
What the P-40 lacked in capability, Chennault made up for in techniques, having the AVG pilots dive from a excessive place and unleash their heavy machine weapons on the structurally weaker however extra maneuverable Japanese planes.
In a low, twisting, turning dogfight, the P-40 would lose.
The pilots Chennault enrolled have been removed from the cream of the crop.
Ninety-nine fliers, together with assist personnel, made the journey to China in the autumn of 1941, according to the US Defense Department history.
Some have been contemporary out of flight faculty, others flew lumbering flying boats or have been ferry pilots for big bombers. They signed up for the Far East journey to make lots of cash or as a result of they have been merely bored.
Perhaps the perfect identified of the Flying Tigers, US Marine Greg Boyington – round whom the 1970’s TV present “Black Sheep Squadron” was primarily based – was in it for the cash.
“Having gone through a painful divorce and responsible for an ex-wife and several small children, he had ruined his credit and incurred substantial debt, and the Marine Corps had ordered him to submit a monthly report to his commander on how he accounted for his pay in settling those debts,” in accordance to a US Defense Department historical past of the group.
Chennault had to train his disparate group how to be fighter pilots – and to struggle as a gaggle – basically from scratch.
Training was rigorous and lethal. Three pilots have been killed early in accidents.
During one coaching day, which turned often called “Circus Day,” eight P-40s have been broken as pilots landed too arduous, or the bottom crew taxied too quick, inflicting collisions.
Chennault expressed his disappointment at his group’s first fight mission towards Japanese bombers attacking the AVG base in Kunming, China, on December 20, 1941. He thought the pilots misplaced their self-discipline.
“They tried near-impossible shots and agreed later that only luck had kept them from either colliding with each other or shooting each other down,” the Defense Department historical past says.
Still, they shot down three Japanese bombers, dropping just one fighter that ran out of gasoline and crash-landed.
The pilots shortly conquered their steep studying curve.
A couple of days after Kunming, they have been deployed to Rangoon, the capital of British colonial Burma and a significant port for the availability line that acquired allied struggle materiel to Chinese troops dealing with the Japanese military.
Japanese bombers got here on the metropolis in waves over 11 days in the course of the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. The Flying Tigers ripped holes by the Japanese formations and cemented their fame.
“The AVG had officially knocked 75 enemy aircraft out of the skies with an undetermined number of probable kills,” the group’s website says. “The AVG losses were two pilots and six aircraft.”
The Flying Tigers spent 10 weeks whole in Rangoon, by no means fielding greater than 25 P-40s.
“This tiny force met a total of a thousand-odd Japanese aircraft over Southern Burma and Thailand. In 31 encounters they destroyed 217 enemy planes and probably destroyed 43. Our losses in combat were four pilots killed in the air, one killed while strafing and one taken prisoner. Sixteen P-40’s were destroyed,” Chennault wrote in his memoir.
Despite the Flying Tigers’ heroics in the air, allied floor forces in Burma couldn’t maintain off the Japanese. Rangoon fell in March and the AVG retreated north into Burma’s inside.
But they’d purchased important time for the allied struggle effort, tying down Japanese planes that would have been used in India or elsewhere in China and the Pacific.
Though information didn’t journey shortly in 1941-42, the United States – nonetheless reeling from the devastating December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – was anticipating heroes. The Flying Tigers match the invoice.
Republic Pictures solid John Wayne in the main function of “Flying Tigers” in 1942. Movie posters confirmed a shark-toothed P-40 diving in assault mode.
Meanwhile, the AVG’s sponsors in Washington requested the Walt Disney firm to make a emblem.
Disney artists got here up with “a winged Bengal Tiger jumping through a stylized ‘V for Victory’ symbol,” the US historical past says.
The emblem didn’t embody the long-lasting shark mouth featured on the Flying Tigers’ plane.
Chennault wrote that the shark mouth didn’t originate together with his group, however was copied from British P-40 fighters in North Africa, which in flip could have copied them from Germany’s Luftwaffe.
“How the term Flying Tigers was derived from the shark-nosed P-40’s I never will know,” he wrote.
When the US entered the struggle, US military leaders needed the Flying Tigers assimilated into the US Army Air Corps.
But the pilots themselves both needed to return to their unique companies – many got here from the Navy or Marine Corps – or needed to keep as civilian contractors of the Chinese authorities, the place the pay was significantly better.
Most informed Chennault they’d give up earlier than doing what Washington needed. When the Army threatened to draft them as privates in the event that they didn’t volunteer, those that’d thought of signing on opted out.
Chennault was made a brigadier basic in the US Army and agreed that the Flying Tigers would develop into a US military outfit on July 4, 1942.
Though the Flying Tigers continued to wreak havoc on the Japanese in the spring of 1942 – hanging floor targets and plane from China to Burma to Vietnam – it was clear the drive was getting into its waning days, in accordance to US military historical past.
The AVG flew its final mission on the day it will stop to exist, July 4.
Four Flying Tiger P-40s confronted off towards a dozen Japanese fighters over Hengyang, China. The Americans shot down six of the Japanese with no losses of their very own, in accordance to a US historical past.
Despite frosty relations with Washington in current years, the bond that American mercenaries made with China 80 years in the past stays untarnished.
There are not less than half a dozen museums devoted to or containing displays concerning the Flying Tigers in China, they usually’ve been the topic of up to date films and cartoons.
The Flying Tiger Heritage Park is on the positioning of an outdated airfield in Guilin the place Chennault as soon as had his command put up in a cave.
In the US, the web site for the Louisiana museum that bears Chennault’s title sums up what he hoped his legacy could be on the high of its mainpage, utilizing the final traces of the overall’s memoir:
“It is my fondest hope that the sign of the Flying Tiger will remain aloft just as long as it is needed and that it will always be remembered on both shores of the Pacific as the symbol of two great peoples working toward a common goal in war and peace.”