Along with the smashing victories in the air, and the astonishingly low casualties suffered at the hands of the Japanese, went the sorrowful and inevitable accidents that claimed both planes and lives. Late in December two Tomahawks were lost when the pilots ran out of fuel in a thick overcast, and had to leave their planes. Then one P-40 ran wild on landing, careened out of control and smashed into a car. The crash demolished the airplane and wrecked the car . . . and killed an AVG pilot who had been asleep in the vehicle.
Through it all the aces were coming into being. Charley Older was one of the first to get five Japanese flags painted on the flanks of his shark-nosed fighter. Duke Hedman, in a day to be remembered, sent five enemy aircraft tumbling and flaming from the skies to achieve his coveted ace status in a rush.
The pilots had listened carefully to Chennault’s admonitions to fight and run away and live to fight another day—and it showed in the astounding number of kills the pilots continued to mark up on the AVG scoreboard. Frank Lawlor recalled what happened to him on the 18th of January:
“At ten in the morning Rossi and I escorted six Blenheims on a mission from Mingaladon to Tavoy. We flew across the Gulf of Martaban to the opposite shore and turned south until we reached Tavoy. Rossi got lost, so I found myself the only escort of the Blenheims. The Blenheims were going over to evacuate people. Before taking off I was told that if a white cross was on the field, Tavoy was still in British hands. If not, the Japs had it. I looked down and saw no white cross. I looked up and saw six Jap fighters. No sight of the Blenheims. Evidently the Japs didn’t see any Blenheims, either, so they concentrated on chasing me all over the sky. I shot one down and then proceeded to prove the theory that he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.”
By January 24th, 35 days after their initial bloodletting, the Tigers had hurt their Japanese enemy where it counted most—in destroyed airplanes and the loss of irreplaceable aircrews. The Tomahawks shot down 62 (confirmed) enemy planes in aerial combat, and added to this toll by destroying another 11 fighters and bombers on the ground in strafing attacks. In this same period the Flying Tigers lost three men killed in battle and another two men due to accidents. In the air, the combat ratio was already better than 20 to one.
Sometimes their Chinese allies acted in a manner that drove the Tigers to distraction. A formation of Tomahawks escorted 18 Russian SB-3 bombers with Chinese crews on a mission to strike Japanese airfields, and during that mission went wild trying to maintain some protection for the Chinese. As AVG headquarters recorded the events of the day in the war diary of the group, the Chinese refused to fly the single large formation that would have aided the Tigers in providing top cover. Instead, the Chinese pilots split up into two formations of nine bombers each, with the first formation leading the stragglers by a distance of a mile. The Tigers didn’t know which formation to protect and were torn between covering one formation thoroughly and leaving the other open to a diving attack.
Tomahawks of the AVG escort Chinese crews flying Russian SB-3 bombers on a mission against enemy airfields.
After dropping their bombs (through clouds where the Chinese judged the enemy field should be), the leader of the first Chinese formation swung around in a tight turn and rammed his throttles forward. Immediately his plane pulled away from the rest of his formation. The other pilots, trying to stay with their leader, soon were scattered haphazardly over the China landscape. The Tigers, running low on fuel, had to run for their own base, leaving the Chinese to fend for themselves.
A second escort mission several days after the first exhibition didn’t help matters any; it was a repetition flight. (Later the Chinese did work out coordinated maneuvers, and on one particular raid destroyed 30 Japanese bombers caught on the ground.)
The action in Burma continued apace. Newkirk replaced Olson in the Rangoon campaign; one of his messages to Chennault read:
“CHENNAULT: RAID ON 1030 SEVEN HEAVY BOMBERS AND TWENTY-FIVE FIGHTERS STOP SEVEN AVG AND TWO HURRICANES AND FOUR BUFFALOES TOOK OFF STOP ENEMY INTERCEPTED STOP ALL ENEMY BOMBERS SHOT DOWN IN FLAMES AT LEAST TEN FIGHTERS SHOT DOWN STOP OUR LOSSES ALLIED OO* STOP HAVE TEN PLANES IN COMMISSION TEN SUFFERING FROM LEAD POISONING STOP END NEWKIRK.”
*That is no British or American losses
Not even the spectacular successes of the Flying Tigers could completely overcome the growing dissatisfaction of several pilots; they soured on the primitive living conditions and they chafed under grievances both real and imagined. Whatever rubbed them, it was certainly none too good for the AVG. Olga Greenlaw describes what were perhaps the rarest of the men in the AVG—those pilots whom the majority were quite willing to see leave. Her remarks refer specifically to events of February 5, 1942:
“Wyke came into my office to show me a special order. It was a dishonorable discharge for Larry Moore and Ken Sanger. They couldn’t take it. Sanger had been nervous ever since he came back from Rangoon with Ole’s squadron, and afraid he would be sent back there. Ole told me he couldn’t get Sanger to stay on the field or out of the trenches. Sanger then was sent to Lotze — one of the stations of the Net—but remained there only a week. When he returned he told Harvey [Greenlaw] he had promised Moore’s mother he would take good care of him. Harvey talked to the Colonel [Chennault] about it The Colonel shrugged his shoulders and said that it was a problem, all right, and that it was better to get rid of them. When the two boys put in their resignations, they were gladly accepted, but they got dishonorable discharges just the same. Everyone said: ‘Good riddance. We don’t want that kind of guys here with us.’
“However, their dishonorable discharges didn’t seem to do them any particular harm. They hastened back to the States and sold a few hair-raising stories about their exploits with the ferocious Flying Tigers and then penned a slightly fantastic but still very successful motion picture.”
The war went on. The day following the incident of the “dishonorable discharges” the fighter pilots of the AVG shot down their 100th Japanese plane in the defense of Rangoon. .. .
There were occasions when members of the AVG were “treated” to spectacles that left them wondering about the attitude of the Chinese toward human life—and the inevitable comparison of how the Chinese and the Japanese sometimes treated those they considered to be their enemies. One such occasion came about when several Chinese were caught stealing telephone wire from AVG buildings, and were sentenced to death by torture.
After announcement of the sentence, a shrieking, cackling mob surged into the “death courtyard” to be witness to the spectacle. It was a scene straight out of a madhouse, and with all the sound effects that one might have dredged from a nightmare. There were the toothless of both sexes, the cripples of all ages with their gnarled limbs and open, running sores; there were the inevitable children in rags with their lips and chins matted with mucus; there were beggars, whores, pimps, thieves, and, intermixed with the crowd, lepers with parts of their faces and bodies eaten away, all come to shout encouragement to the executioners and imprecations upon those about to be mauled to their deaths.
The guards lashed together the wrists of the hapless prisoners. Their arms were then pulled over their heads; a stout rope was wound around their wrist bindings, and at a signal other guards hauled the men off their feet until they dangled well above the ground. The position was extremely painful, but only preparation for the next step. Huge boulders were dragged to the scene to the accompaniment of clapping and shouts from the crowd. The boulders were tied to the feet of the prisoners, and then the men were hoisted up even higher so that the boulders stretched their bodies. Loud snapping pops testified to bones being pulled from their sockets; the prisoners screamed in agony, setting off a reaction of shrieks and cries from the onlookers.
Four guards appeared with leather and steel whips; the sight of the torture instruments inflamed the crowd, which howled with laughter, shrieked obscene comments, and danced little jigs at the scene before them. Guards ripped the trousers
from the hanging men until they were fully exposed. Then, methodically and slowly, with just the right amount of pressure to allow the torture to last as long as possible, the guards commenced to whip the prisoners to death.
They were artists at their work as the whips slashed flesh and sprayed blood in crimson showers through the air. They had done their tasks before; this much was evident as the whips curled around the bodies to slice pieces of flesh from the genitalia of the prisoners. After a while white bone was revealed through the gore.
The prisoners remained alive for more than an hour, until the slow dripping of blood into the dust beneath their feet marked the only signs of activity in the courtyard. That, and the vile curses and the sounds of the Chinese spitting on the corpses . . .
This, too, was China.
In the air, the Flying Tigers fought as few other men have fought. As the weeks and months passed, even the rugged Tomahawks began to fail under their constant use and the lack of spare parts and adequate maintenance facilities. Despite these problems, and an increasing number of missions against Japanese ground forces, with the attending heavy ground fire, the Tigers continued to reap their fearsome toll among the Japanese in the air.
With increasing maintenance problems, with the feeling that to a great extent they were the forgotten stepchildren of the United States, condemned to fight with only a trickle of resupplies, the Tigers found their tempers wearing thin. Several men fell out badly among themselves.
Bob Neale (who became the leading ace of the AVG) apparently rubbed Gregory Boyington pretty raw. The “explosion” came when Neale accused Boyington of reporting for night alert duty while he was drunk. Boyington quietly left, drove to the adjutant’s office, and immediately turned in his resignation. Greg Boyington thus went on the AVG record books as receiving a dishonorable discharge from the AVG.
Yet this is the same Greg Boyington who had already shot six Japanese planes out of the air, and who was looked upon as a spectacular pilot and a killer in aerial combat. Boyington left the AVG to return to the Marines, where he went on to shoot down another 22 Japanese planes, running his score to 28 confirmed kills—and in the process receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor.
There was also a “little insurrection” among the pilots, which Olga Greenlaw records as being precipitated by orders from Chennault to fly an escort mission for RAF Blenheim bombers which were to attack a Japanese airfield. The AVG pilots balked; they declared they were being sent on a suicide mission. The Blenheims were slow, and often they never showed up on the missions to which the AVG pilots were assigned.
Five pilots from the AVG volunteered for the mission which Chennault had ordered—but 27 of the Flying Tigers said to hell with it, and submitted their resignations en masse, all their signatures penned to a single sheet of paper.
Chennault’s reaction was: “If you want to show the white feather, you can all quit!”
His men were enraged at this remark. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and there was a meeting of the opposing forces (or the American Volunteer Group might have ended right then and there).
The five volunteers flew the mission—and the British bombers never showed up!
Some time afterward, the condition of the Tomahawk fighters had so deteriorated that even Bob Neale stopped short and refused to fly “suicide missions.” He drew the heated anger of Chennault by flatly refusing to take the beaten-up and worn-out Tomahawks on missions of strafing and bombing Japanese troops in the face of murderous antiaircraft fire. Many Chinese commanders insisted upon AVG missions being flown over their areas to bolster the morale of the Chinese soldiers; but, as one AVG pilot remarked acidly, they hadn’t come to China— and you didn’t win wars—by flying for morale purposes.
Bob Neale stuck fast to his decision, and his men backed him up. They would fly all the defensive—interception—missions that came up, but they would not go out on the “suicidal” ground attack sorties.
As long as he was able to do so, Claire Chennault set up rotating assignments for his men. Kunming, by comparison, was an assignment where a man could catch his breath and shake off the bone-weariness that hugged the pilots flying in Burma; there the men existed under crude and primitive conditions, and their combat missions were frequent and exhausting. Lack of proper food, and junglelike living quarters, did little to help keep the pilots in the kind of physical and mental shape needed to fight the Japanese fighter pilot in close aerial combat.
The system of rotating assignments also enabled the AVG to work with the Royal Air Force for as long as it was possible to sustain such liaison. In this manner Chennault could help to defend Rangoon (and, in fact, he provided the greater part of its effective aerial strength); he could keep his planes patrolling over a part of the Burma Road, and along the Salween River he could provide a measure of support to the hard-pressed Chinese ground forces.
Through the pilots of the American Volunteer Group, Chennault was able to establish beyond any question the solid validity of his tactics, and to sweep aside the last of the carpers and Doubting Thomases who had been so quick to dismiss Chennault as a man with no real grasp of tactical air situations. Chennault concentrated on the two-fighter element in hit-and-run tactics against the Japanese, and he made his rules for fighting the most effective of their kind in the world.
The P-40B Tomahawk had good speed in level fight. At low altitude it could run with the Zero, although it suffered a performance loss as it climbed (the Allison engines lacked superchargers). Since many of the Japanese fighters encountered by the Flying Tigers were the fixed-gear Claudes and Nates of both the Japanese Navy and Army, the Tomahawks on many occasions proved to be greatly superior in level-light speed compared to the opposition.
But even against the Zero fighter the Tomahawk was spectacular in a dive. It was this diving speed, and the ruggedness of the P-40B, that enabled Chennault so effectively to utilize his hit-and-run tactics. Many times AVG pilots returned to their home fields with their airplanes shot to ribbons (but still flying), and it took only one glance at a pilot’s armor plate, studded with Japanese bullets, to make him swear by his airplane. For without that rugged construction, without the heavy armor, many of the AVG pilots would never have survived their encounters with the agile Japanese fighters.
In maneuverability and in rate of climb, the Japanese fighters took a back seat to no one, and to get into a swirling dogfight with any of the Japanese fighter planes was to beg for disaster—which was invariably delivered.
Thus Chennault hammered into his men over and over again the admonition not to fight on Japanese terms; if they used the best advantages of their P-40B fighters by adapting them to specific tactics, they could—and they did—whip the Japanese in the air.
These tactics might not have proven effective on other types of missions—on long-range escort, it is obvious that you cannot whip an attacking enemy by diving out of the battle. But for the situation confronted by Chennault, against the overwhelming odds his men had to face, his tactics were brilliantly vindicated. Chennault’s mission was to stop the Japanese—to break up their attacks by slicing into the enemy formations. For this purpose the attack in which a plane struck and dove away, and possibly climbed overhead for a second attack, was effective. His was a defensive mission. On other types of combat—such as long-range escort—the need of the escorting fighter was to stay with the bombers, to be able to maneuver with the enemy and slug it out. The fighter that dove away from an escort mission left the bombers unprotected. This, essentially, was not Chennault’s concern.
For a while after the introduction of the AVG to battle, the Japanese made a determined effort specifically to wipe out the American force. And not even the lopsided victories of the AVG in the air could long stem the Japanese steam roller on the ground. Despite the AVG’s kill superiority, which The Army Air Forces in World War II lists as an “almost incredible number,”2 the tide of war clearly remained in favor of the Japanese.
By the end of
February, Rangoon had become a nightmare of internal disintegration. Early in March the AVG was forced to abandon the city, and the men withdrew to Magwe. The Japanese lost no time in smashing at Magwe, and the AVG retreated once again, this time across the Chinese border to Loiwing. Less than seven weeks later the Burma campaign was almost concluded in terms of Japanese aims and requirements. As Japanese soldiers through the familiar routine of packing up and leaving, poured into and through their opposition, the AVG went Finally they were forced to make the move to Kunming, where the group at last fought—albeit with weary airplanes and wearier pilots—as a single entity. The Burma Road by then was useless, and the AVG turned its attentions and its operations to Hengyang and Kweilin.
“The AVG for all practical purposes,” states The Army Air Forces in World War II, “had long since become a part of the armed forces of the United States, and plans had been made for its incorporation into the AAF. But the AVG was a volunteer group in fact as well as name. . . .”3 The AAF historical archives state further that “the induction of the AVG, from the first a perplexing problem, proved disappointing in its results... .”4
The pilots were weary of combat, they were tired of overseas duty, and those who were ready to return to uniform wanted, at the least, a brief visit home before embarking on long combat tours with the AAF, the Navy, or the Marines. Many of the men were angered by the offhand manner with which they were treated by the AAF officers, and it was this action as much as any other that soured their ideas of joining up with the AAF. Other pilots wanted to return to their prior branches of service. Some of the men failed to pass the physical examinations to become pilots with the AAF! And some “preferred to take remunerative positions with the China National Airways and Hindustan Aircraft companies... .”5
The Ragged, Rugged Warriors Page 20