THE WARBIRD'S FORUM

Shantih (peace) to David Harris, who died December 11 in his home town of Beulah, Michigan. Educated at Governor Dummer Academy and Amherst College in Massachusetts, he dropped out of college to join the Army Air Corps, and after graduating from flight school was recruited as one of a hundred pilots for the American Volunteer Group. After being introduced to the Curtiss P-40 in Burma, and seeing one of his friends die in a crash, he decided he wasn't cut out to be a fighter pilot, and went to work for the headquarters staff instead. After returning to the U.S. in 1942, he became a test pilot for Republic Aircraft and later for Grumman. Postwar, he worked for a time in Oregon but eventually returned to Michigan to work in the family business. His death leaves just seven men who served with the AVG in Burma and China.

After being out of print for most of the year, The Lady and the Tigers is available again, in a neat paperback from Createspace. $10.95 for the paperback, $3.99 for the digital edition.

When U.S. military personnel were recruited for the American Volunteer Group in 1941, each man had to resign his commission or apply for a special-order discharge. Here's Greg (Pappy) Boyington's resignation.

Bob Bergin, foreign service officer turned journalist, often writes about the Flying Tigers. His most recent contribution is a Kindle ebook, Tracking the Tigers: Flying Tiger, OSS and Free Thai Operations in World War II Thailand, most interesting for its treatment of two Flying Tigers shot down over Thailand, Jack Newkirk and Mac McGarry, lost in the Chiang Mai raid in March 1942.

Samuel Hui has uncovered a photo by R. T. Smith, showing six Chinese Air Force pilots posing with an AVG P-40 at Kunming's Wuchiaba airfield. He has so far been able to identify three of them.

Finally, two worthy books for 2012 reading: George Kennan: An American Life by the Yale historian John Gaddis, and What Is Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes, a Marine platoon leader in Vietnam and author of an admirable novel about that experience. Go here for more about these books. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford