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China Tiger: Claire Lee Chennault, 1893-1958 (part 2)

Tigers they proved to be, especially in Burma. Despite his flamboyant and sometimes abrasive manner, Chennault did not like to take risks: he played to win, whether at tennis, poker, or war. He wanted to concentrate all his squadrons in Kunming, but Chiang Kai-shek overruled him. Determined to keep American lend-lease supplies moving up the Burma Road, Chiang decided to loan the AVG 3rd Squadron to the British for the defense of Rangoon.

Eighteen planes, eighteen pilots. In two stupendous air battles -- December 23 and December 25 -- they proved that the victory in Yunnan had been no accident. The "Hell's Angels" lost two pilots and half a dozen Tomahawks, but the survivors shot down at least fourteen and probably seventeen of the enemy. Most of their victims were heavy bombers, meaning that the Japanese army lost 90 men in less than two hours of combat over Rangoon. The AVG also destroyed two retractable-gear fighters, identified at the time as Mitsubishi A6M Zeros. In fact, they were Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusas -- nimble monoplanes with a spectacular combat range, but undergunned compared to the American fighters, and without protection for their pilots and fuel tanks. They belonged to the Japanese army's 64th Sentai, famed for its exploits against Chinese and Soviet pilots. Christmas Day marked the first time the group had ever been bested in combat, and the first time a Hayabusa had been shot down.

These were portents of the battle to come. Chennault rotated his squadrons through Rangoon in a doomed attempt to conserve planes and pilots. At the same time, he fought a losing battle against his own government in the person of General Joseph Stilwell, a salty-tongued infantryman who detested Chiang Kai- shek and scoffed at the claims of "air boys" like Chennault. "It's the man in the trenches that will win the war," he would say, to which Chennault replied: "Goddammit, Stilwell, there aren't any trenches." Hoping to obtain reinforcements, Chennault agreed to return to active duty as a brigadier general, with the result that he put himself and the AVG under the command of this feisty but unimaginative officer.

The Japanese captured Rangoon in March and the rest of Burma in May. The muscular air power of the United States enabled war material to keep trickling into China, over "the Hump" of the Himalayas from a pierced-steel airstrip in India. The AVG fought on until July 1942, when China's mercenary fighter group was formally inducted into the U.S. Army. Only five Tigers followed Chennault into uniform; the rest went home or became transport pilots in Asia.

In six months of combat, Chennault's irregulars were credited with destroying 296 planes and 1,000 airmen, at a cost of 16 Americans killed or captured in combat operations. Japanese records show that the AVG victories were not nearly so great -- perhaps 115 planes and 300 airmen. Nevertheless, in five years of combat against Chinese, Soviet, French, British, Dutch, and American pilots, this marked the first time that a Japanese air force had come out second-best. The psychological value of the Flying Tigers' record was incalculable, as the United States geared up to drive the Japanese back to their homeland.

As commander of the U.S. Army's 14th Air Force, Chennault continued to work miracles of ingenuity and determination in China. Despite its imposing name, the 14th suffered a logistical poverty as great as that of the AVG. Its pilots were still celebrated in the American press as "Flying Tigers," and like the original Tigers they outfought the Japanese air units almost every time they met.

Meanwhile, Chennault continued to battle his own superiors -- Stilwell, chief of staff George Marshall, and air force commander H. H. Arnold. He lost, of course. He was promoted to major general, and he even forced Stilwell's recall. In the end, however, he accepted Hap Arnold's pointed suggestion that he "take advantage of the retirement privileges now available to physically disqualified officers." He understood that if he did not go, he would be reduced to his permanent rank of colonel, then forcibly sent into retirement.

He left China on August 1, 1945. In a tumultuous outpouring of love and admiration, hundreds of thousands of Chinese filled the streets of Chongqing, inspiring Chennault's driver to turn off the ignition and let the throng push the car to the airport.

Two weeks later, Japan surrendered, with 80 of her cities so devastated by air attack that they were not fit for human habitation.

Cold War

A visionary like Billy Mitchell, with the fighting instincts of a George Patton, who like T. E. Lawrence had linked his destiny to that of an alien people . . . Claire Chennault was a poor bet to rusticate in Waterproof, Louisiana. For the rest of 1945 he roamed restlessly about New Orleans, Washington, New York, and the lecture circuit. Then he returned to China. The permanence of the move was symbolized by his divorce from Nellie Chennault and his marriage to a young Chinese journalist named Anna Chan. Yet neither then nor earlier did Chennault trouble to learn the language of his adopted country.

His new assignment was to build an airline to carry relief supplies and refugees around a continent-sized nation whose transportation system -- medieval to begin with -- had been ravaged by eight years of war. The task was not made easier by the rebellion waged by Mao Tse-tung, armed by Japanese weapons that the Russians had captured in Manchuria. To Chennault and many other Americans, this was clear evidence that the Soviet Union meant to conquer all of Asia, using local revolutionaries as its proxies.

From the beginning, Chennault's airline had links to the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime agency that had conducted espionage and guerrilla operations for the United States. The connection was formalized in 1949. By then, the OSS had become the Central Intelligence Agency, and Mao Tse-tung had occupied most of China. Chennault's pilots -- many of them veterans of the AVG and the 14th Air Force -- moved Chiang's troops, supplies, and government assets from one imperiled city to another, and finally to a last fortress on the island of Taiwan. The CIA loaned money to keep the airline in business, and eventually it bought out Chennault's company.

Indeed, Asia seemed engulfed by a red tide. No sooner did Mao Tse-tung take control of China than communist tanks drove across the 38th parallel in Korea, involving the United States in a war that became one of the most costly in its history. Meanwhile, a French colonial army waged an underfunded and essentially hopeless battle against communist guerrillas in Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Chennault's transport planes flew 15,000 missions on contract for the U.S. Air Force in Korea. In Indochina, flying C-119 "Boxcars" with the U.S. Air Force insignia painted out, his pilots dropped supplies to French garrisons, culminating with the siege of Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954.

Chennault by this time had become a figurehead in his own airline. Like the War Department in 1945, the CIA bureaucrats worried that his affection for China might compromise his loyalty to his own country. When they planned covert operations that might not meet with the approval of Chiang Kai-shek, they tried to schedule them for times when Chennault was in the United States on business.

Increasingly, Chennault's preoccupation was to warn Americans about the dangers of communism, and to suggest ways to turn back the tide. He urged the U.S. to support clandestine operations in the People's Republic of China: "Assuming an outside source of supply, the airplane, the cargo parachute, and the portable radio, twentieth-century guerrilla warfare can assume maddening dimensions." The guerrillas should be Chinese, however. Almost alone in the 1950s, Chennault understood that American troops must not be used to subdue revolutions, whether in Asia or in Europe: "If the people and the governments in those areas do not wish to fight Communism, we should let them be communized."

A clandestine air force, however, was another matter. Chennault had urged the creation a new AVG to fight Mao's Red Army in 1949. Now he now wanted to form an International Volunteer Group -- latter-day Flying Tigers -- to put out communist brush fires in Asia, and especially in Vietnam. The Eisenhower administration actually sketched the outlines of such a unit: three squadrons of F-84 Thunderjet fighter-bombers, with the pilots cross-trained in B-29 Superfortresses in case it became necessary to use heavy bombardment. The idea was abandoned. For the next generation, clandestine air operations would be carried out by unarmed transports and light planes, most of them painted the featureless gray of Air America, the corporate descendant of Chennault's airline.

Chennault died of lung cancer on July 27, 1958. As if to symbolize his dual loyalty, his grave is the only one at Arlington National Cemetery to bear a Chinese inscription, and the bust of him in Taipei is the only statue of a westerner to grace the Taiwanese capital.

Thrown out of his own air force in 1937, for all practical purposes, he became one of the best-known and most- admired commanders of World War II -- then was thrown out again. He was a useful tool in the Cold War that followed, but historians did not thank him for it. More recently, however, his star has risen again. An air force base in Louisiana was named in his honor; in 1987, he became the subject of two full-length biographies; and on September 6, 1990, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp bearing his jut-jawed likeness. (A companion stamp was issued by the Republic of China on Taiwan.)

Appropriately, for this argumentative and controversial man, one biography gave his birth year as 1890, the other as 1893. The stamp was meant to be issued on Chennault's centenary, but in the end the postal service wisely omitted any reference to his birth year. Instead, the Chennault stamp -- valued at forty cents, a suitably maverick sum -- pays tribute to the "Flying Tigers, 1940s," thus ducking the still-lively debate about whether to extend that title to every U.S. airman who served in China during World War II, or to reserve it for Chennault's irregulars of 1941-1942.