Such was not, at this time, the temper of China. Many Chinese, including among their number a preponderance of wealthy and influential citizens, simply refused to accept Japan as the common enemy. Their own interests appeared to dictate otherwise, and concerted action had long been sabotaged by the nature of expediency that constituted much of the Chinese government. Powerful Chinese were quick to point fingers of accusation for military unrest not at the Japanese (who thoroughly exploited this internal division of interests), but at neighboring warlords.
The leaders of local provinces ruled their own areas with iron hands. Subordinate to none, their influence limited only by their own strength, they were loath to accept a common government which could only have diluted their own powers. Disdainful of central government politics, secure within their own spheres, they supported their local, absolute dictatorships with powerful military forces, forming, as it were, a group of bristling fortresses within the vast Chinese land.
The warlords were quick to work with any outside interest as long as their own desires were uncompromised and they judged the cooperation would benefit them. Thus they were willing, even eager, to work with the Japanese, rather than to resist the spreading influence of Japan within China. They were willing to work with any nation that would pay their price in goods including anything from raw materials to spices to young virgins. This exploitation of China and its masses beggars belief, and it should be stated as a matter of record that the plundering of the land owed as much, if not more, to internal greed than to foreign avarice.
The one authority that the separate warlords refused to recognize—unless their own interests were first met— was the central Chinese government. Chiang Kai-shek watched in helpless fury as the Japanese government, with great cunning, exploited the almost frantic desire of the divided Chinese factions to gain power. The Japanese spared no effort in providing economic, political, and even extensive military assistance to these satraps, fully aware that the growth of their localized power would inevitably prevent a national strength from arising.
In due time the various warlords built up strong military forces loyal only to the individual Chinese leader of the particular province. Anxious to sustain this division of Chinese strength, the Japanese in the early and midthirties trained Chinese soldiers; fitted them out with personal arms, mortars, and machine guns; supplied ammunition; and then, for the final blow to unity among the Chinese, supplied individual warlords with their own air forces! This included aircraft, fuel, weapons, ammunition, supplies, and even training for the pilots, crews, and mechanics.
The governor of Kwangsi Province, for example, ruled with a stern hand that brooked no nonsense from anyone. Absolute master of his area, he sustained his position with a crack army and a substantial air force of fighters and bombers. Attempts of the central Chinese government to overcome these islands of military might were frustrated by the very strength of the warlords. The situation in Kwangsi was repeated in Kwangtung, Yunnan, and several other major provinces.
Against this disheartening background, Chiang Kai-shek accomplished what American observers on the scene regarded as one of the greatest personal and political miracles of the century; slowly but with increasing effectiveness he began to wean the warlords away from a political life dedicated solely to their own interests, and to entice them with the picture of a China united in its political and military strength against the Japanese invader. In his struggle to accomplish this goal, Chiang Kai-shek wisely emphasized the realities of life rather than basing his appeal on open patriotism. The warlords worshiped personal power, Chiang realized. But they were not stupid men; each had risen to his position of prominence through daring, cunning, and a no-nonsense appraisal of the situation about him.
And not even the most secure of the rulers of the different provinces could ignore reality. The assistance of the Japanese to the separate warlords receiving Japanese aid was a bubble that could burst—with devastating effect, and virtually at any time that the Japanese so dictated. When it suited the convenience of the Emperor of Japan and his agents, any one warlord could be toppled from his position. Each warlord involved with the Japanese existed largely on Japanese assistance; the inflow of military strength could be halted at once, and Japanese military power in China was sufficient to isolate any one province and raze it to the ground.
On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops and military forces of the central China government clashed in a minor skirmish, at the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking. The action touched off the savage and bloody conflict to which the Japanese government applied the euphemistic name “Sino-Japanese Incident,” but which the rest of a shocked world knew as the Sino-Japanese War. Its outbreak was the turning point, the fulcrum on which history was to pivot. From this moment on, the tide of events could not be halted or even diverted. War between the vast but loosely organized land of China and the armed forces of Japan was about to erupt into full-scale military operations involving a major part of the national industrial and economic strength of each combatant.
The sudden alliance of China from within—a meeting of intent upon the part of the many different and opposing factions—came as a surprise even to Chiang Kai-shek. It was as though this vast nation, bleeding slowly in so many places, had simply had enough. Provocation had aroused the dragon. In a moment all too rare in the history of China, the warlords appeared to accept the slogan of the students being chanted in the streets: “It is better to be broken jade than whole tile!"
Loyalty was sworn to the great land of China. Solidarity was the cement of the Chinese political structure, and never in all that country’s history had there existed so tangible and meaningful a marshaling of forces to strike back against a common foe.
This rare and precious feeling was not to be sustained. The house of China, as had been its misfortune for decades, was again to suffer its weaknesses from within. It had required nothing less than a massive and unprecedented internal upheaval to bring together so many of the dissident factors of Chinese military and economic strength into a united front against the Japanese. But the Chinese Communists, now firmly established in Shensi and Shansi Provinces, dominated northwestern China, and their armies operated in guerrilla fashion as far east as Hopeh and Shantung.
Free of the internal dissension that had for so long hampered Chiang’s struggle to build up central power, the Communists steadily increased their military strength and expanded their area of military operations within China proper. Behind their powerful moves lay massive Russian assistance, given freely and in vast quantities. Once again, alien interests were slashing the strength of the land. Russian assistance came with specific goals in mind: (1) consolidating the Communist grip on China from within, and (2) creating additional military problems and logistic nightmares for the Japanese, who were knifing deeply into the cities and strategic centers of China. Even as the central government and the Communists professedly put aside their long-standing mutual enmity to concentrate on fighting the Japanese, deep distrust soured their relationships and the specter of renewed civil war on a wider scale than ever darkened the future of China. The nation hoped finally to triumph in the war against Japan, which was to rage for several years prior to the entry of the United States into the conflict. But already there were omens, evident only to the discerning, of the distant future of China as a Communist land. Disaster lay in the soil, the air, and the politics of the great and unhappy land.
It was against this background that the airpower crucibles for the war across all Asia and the Pacific were being formed.. ..
Following the invasion by the Japanese of Manchuria in 1932, Chiang had made his first major attempts to build up Chinese airpower. His overtures for the establishment of a British mission to advise and build a Chinese air force had been rebuffed because of Japanese pressure against the British. Chiang was more successful, however, in negotiations with the American government, which in 1932 permitted an “unofficial mission” to journey to China.
Recently retired from the Air Corps as a Colonel, John H. Jouett was considered a pioneer in air tactics, and was also regarded as one of the stronger disciples of General Billy Mitchell. Among the group of Army pilots who arrived with Jouett in China was Harvey Greenlaw, who would in succeeding years become second-incommand of the American Volunteer Group (the Flying Tigers).
Jouett patterned the fledgling Chinese Air Force after the flight schools and organization of the U.S. Army Air Corps. He adopted the Army’s schools, training methods, and programs, and tried to adapt American tactics to Chinese needs. Under Jouett, running the show for the unofficial mission, was a team of twenty Army reserve officers, including, as well as Greenlaw, the influential Roy Holbrook.
The initial use of this newly created airpower was not— as might be expected—against the Japanese, but against dissident Chinese who had refused to accept central authority. A sudden rebellion in Fukien Province prompted a powerful government reaction. Pioneering in aerial warfare within the country, a Chinese air general led a formation of seven ancient biplanes against the massive walls of the ramparts protecting the forces of the rebels. Flying at minimum speed, the ramshackle biplanes managed to hurl their bombs directly into the thick old walls of the insurgents’ fortress. With the walls breached, troops of Chiang Kai-shek poured into the fortress and carried out a wholesale massacre of the occupants.
Ironically, Jouett and Holbrook, despite the success of the attack, where thrown by this episode into great disfavor with the Chinese government. Hired as advisors, rather than as mercenaries, they had refused Chiang’s demands to utilize their military knowledge by actually leading the attack against the rebels. With a sensational and swift victory in his grasp, Chiang cursed the Americans for refusing their help in the battle, and condemned them for accepting money from China without providing their unrestricted support. Overnight, from a position of great favor with the ruling Chinese, the Americans came to be regarded with suspicion and hostility. The Japanese government also brought pressure to bear on Chiang against Jouett and his team. They were disbanded and left China in December, 1934.
During the three years from 1934 to 1937, the leadership of Chinese airpower rose and fell on the particular personal talents and idiosyncrasies of different foreign advisors to China. The ping-pong effect of advisors with American, Russian, Italian, British, and French backgrounds and convictions wrecked China’s ability to sustain itself in the air, and threatened to keep the skies of China a playground for swarms of Japanese fighters and bombers.
Chiang Kaishek’s intensive search for a single, dominant leader to rescue the sagging remnants of Chinese airpower—a search that was carried out on an international scale—led the Chinese leader to Claire L. Chennault, an ex-captain of the United States Army Air Corps, who had retired from his career as a fighter pilot and tactician, a retirement directed to some extent by partial deafness resulting from years of exposure to thundering engines and the windblast of open-cockpit fighters.
The need for a single airpower leader in the spring of 1937 was more critical than ever before. Japanese forces had dug into their positions in Manchuria, and their strength within China proper was mounting with alarming speed. It was not excessive to state that Chinese airpower, in terms of men, machines, logistics, and organization, was on the verge of absolute collapse.
Chennault, living in retirement in the small town of Waterproof, Louisiana, seemed to be a perfect selection. A leather-faced veteran of the cockpit, he was also well known for his revolutionary ideas in the classroom, where he had railed against accepted theories of air combat. In addition to his blunt words to his superiors, which endeared him little to those gentlemen in a peacetime air force, he had carried his ideas one step further to the publishing of a book that caused a furor among airpower disciples; The Role of Pursuit Aviation had as its dominant theme Chennault’s conviction that fighter planes used effectively could smash any attacking bomber force. To Chiang, whose cities lay naked before Japanese bombs, Chennault appeared as the most likely prospect to re-create Chinese airpower.
Particularly appealing to the Chinese leader was the fact that Chennault supported his claims in print with outstanding performance in the air. He was famed among military pilots as a superb aerobatic artist, and at one time, on tour throughout the United States along with two other Army fliers, had been regarded as a nine days’ wonder. The three men, billing themselves as “Three Men on a Flying Trapeze,” flew their three biplane fighters in whirling aerobatics—while all three were tied together with short lengths of rope!
Chennault was 47 years of age at his retirement, and to him the demands of China, and her needs in the sky, were a heaven-sent opportunity. He left almost at once for Asia and the employ of Chiang Kai-shek—and was on the road to lasting fame as one of the greatest airpower tacticians and strategists of all time.
Angered with Jouett, Chiang Kai-shek had turned to Italy for assistance in building up his air force. Delighted at the prospect of legal plunder in the disorganized land of China, the Italian government responded with a large mission led by a superbly attired, bombastic, and luxury-seeking General Scaroni. The good general brought with him from Italy no fewer than 150 pilots, mechanics, and engineers, all or most of whom wasted no time in turning their stay in China into a veritable junket. Their quarters were the finest, the food unexcelled, their hours of their own liking, and young virgins available of any age to suit the particular tastes of each man.
General Scaroni dearly loved public displays, and his long black limousine was often seen by the populace scurrying to escape its thundering passage as it roared through the narrow streets with complete disregard for Chinese lives and limbs.
In addition to the pursuit of the good things in life, the Italians managed to carry out every possible activity that would bring smiles to the governmental auditors back home. Under the orders of the Italian mission, Chinese laborers erected assembly and factory buildings. Charged “fantastic prices” for these structures, the Chinese learned also that they were to be used for the assembly and servicing of Italian Fiat fighters, lauded by the Italians but held in disrepute by fighter pilots of other nationalities.
There were loud hoots and cries of derision from the Italians when Chiang Kai-shek refused to renew the contract of Jouett and the “unofficial mission” to China. The Italians laughed at the sight of the departing Americans, and found it convenient to ignore the few Americans remaining in China, who were under contract as instructors at the Hangchow flight school. Through some oversight on the part of the Italians, perhaps, this school had escaped coming under the control of the Italian mission, and remained a separate entity of the Chinese government.
During his aerial survey of Chinese airpower facilities, Claire Chennault could not avoid, of course, running headlong into the debris strewn by the Italians through the Chinese Air Force. On his return he submitted a scathing condemnation of the Italians to the Generalissimo. Chennault pointed out that the graduates of Italian flight schools were killing themselves in a brutal progression. They were wrecking millions of dollars’ worth of airplanes, and tearing down the structure of Chinese military airpower before it had much of an opportunity to take shape. The worst of it all was that the Italians graduated every Chinese student in their midst. Surviving a minimum number of weeks in training was tantamount to completion of the Italian course. The Italians turned pilots loose to man fighter planes when they were scarcely fit to fly trainers.
Chiang did not easily accept Chennault’s report. No matter how convincing the credentials of this man, there had still been—to the Chinese leader—the distasteful episode of Americans refusing their services in a time of Chinese need. But Chennault was not asking Chiang to take his word on a mere matter of opinion. There were statistics, and these would not lie, nor could they be dismissed by Italian bombast. The long and short of it was that the Generalissimo had been told, and he believed, that he had 500 combat-ready warplanes ready to fight for him
. The Italians had simply neglected to remove from the roster of service aircraft any machine that crashed. Thus the total number of 500 planes included all those—an aggregate—that had ever gone into service.
In actual fact, China had exactly 91 combat aircraft ready for service—less than a fifth of the number which Chiang Kai-shek had counted upon to support his bid for a central military authority for the country. And though these 91 combat aircraft were serviceable, they were by no means fitted by performance to meet the opposition now looming on the horizon.
This, then, was the sordid state of affairs when, on July 7, 1937, Japanese troops struck near Peking, precipitating the storm that had long darkened the sky. The incident at the Marco Polo Bridge was a deliberate Japanese military operation that presaged catastrophe for China.
Grateful for Chennault’s honesty, and deeply impressed by the American officer, Chiang Kai-shek asked Chennault if he would take over direct command of the Chinese Air Force. The ex-captain agreed to the request, but with the proviso that a selected group of close friends and associates (Smith, Williamson, Folmer, Watson and several others), in whom he had absolute confidence, be made members of his immediate staff. Chiang agreed. And with authority vested in Chennault, the Generalissimo turned to other matters.
The overwhelming task faced by Chennault was to extricate the Chinese Air Force from the tangled mess into which it had been snarled by the Italians. At the same time, he had to operate on a crash basis to build a semblance of combat strength into the remains. Both were tasks considered impossible in the limited time available, but Chennault had always looked upon the impossible as a problem to be eliminated by intense labor.
Among his requirements—and he considered this critical—was the need for new fighter aircraft. Most of the 90-odd combat planes on the service list were Italian Fiats, and the American observers had immediately condemned these as firetraps for the Chinese pilots.
The Ragged, Rugged Warriors Page 4