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The Flying Tigers in Burma

[Leland Stowe covered the fall of Rangoon for the Chicago Daily News. Returning to the U.S. after a stint in Mowcow, he wrote They Shall Not Sleep, published by Knopf in 1944. The following is a slightly shortened version of Chapter Eight, "The Flying Tigers in Burma."]

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"What kind of bonuses do you war correspondents get?" asked the lanky pilot from Seattle [Bob Neale].

"Bonuses? Don't kid me."

I laughed and couldn't help it. In exactly twenty years of reporting I had never encountered such a thing as a bonus....

"You mean to say you don't get any bonus?" exclaimed the dark lynx-eyed flier from Spokane [Bob Little?]. "What in hell do you go to places like Burma and China for?"

"You fellows have got queer ideas. Listen. If you're a foreign correspondent it's your job. Well, if war comes, then it's more than ever your job. Sure I'd like a bonus. Anybody would. But you don't go to a war to get bonuses. I suppose some fellows have got them, but so far I never happen to have known a war correspondent who did - and I know quite a lot of them."

"Well, I'll be God-damned!" drawled the pilot from Seattle.

"You wouldn't catch me going to a war in China for a straight salary," said the slender dark one. "You don't have to. It sounds cockeyed to me."

"Maybe you go to cover a war in China or Greece--anywhere--because it's important that people at home should know something about it," I explained. "Or maybe you go to China to try to understand what's happening to the Chinese, and what's happening to us."

They didn't seem to get the idea, these two young Americans. They seemed to have the notion that shooting down Japs would be duck soup. But they didn't want to shoot Japs because Jap armies had been plundering, raping, drug-addicting, and murdering millions of helpless Chinese for years. You couldn't quite tell whether they even wanted to shoot down Jap planes for the adventure of it. Yes, they wanted to see China, but the thing that interested them most of all was being the world's highest-paid combat fliers. They were counting on that $500 for each Jap plane shot down. They were like the handful of French and American mercenaries who flew for the Loyalists in Spain. What had happened to the sense of adventure and the idealism of American youth? Twenty-five years ago you would never have had to scrape around to find one hundred American boys who would fight as genuine volunteers for China. These were attractive and lusty fellows, all right. But somehow they threw you off a bit. They didn't seem to realize that Hitler and the Nazis were out to conquer the world and had been blowing people to bits and exterminating them like rats for years now. They didn't seem to realize the same thing about Japan. Yet they did seem to be typical Americans--and that was what disturbed me and made me wonder when I first met a sampling of the AVG in Rangoon's Silver Grill. That was in September 1941.

These young Americans were the first military "tourists" the United States, unofficially and surreptitiously, had sent to the second World War. They had been smuggled out of the U. S. Army and Navy air forces and smuggled across the Pacific, so that the champions of America's anti-war--and anti-freedom--Neutrality Act wouldn't get upset. It had taken a great deal of careful connivance. Why the connivance? Because there were higher-ups in Washington who had intelligence enough to know that the Chinese, while fighting for themselves, were buying time for us. The United States was still woefully unarmed and weak in the Pacific. So China must be kept fighting. It was worth approximately $585,000,000 to us, our initial Lend-Lease appropriation, to try to keep China holding the dike. But these materials still might be too late. China's handful of obsolescent aircraft was almost gone. Against Japan's hundreds of planes the Chinese could not put up a single fighter squadron. They had no adequately trained and equipped pursuit pilots. That was why these American pilots and ground-crew men were now here in Burma, but very much incognito. On the Clipper, flying out from San Francisco, I had met William D. Pawley and from him had learned a good deal of the story of the original conception and formation of the A VG.

Bill Pawley, a trap-jawed and hustling American businessman, liked the Chinese and liked profits, too. Early in the Sino-Japanese War he had got some of the first planes to China; he had also built one or more airplane factories there and had lost them. As Bill told me the story, he and a former U. S. Navy commander, B. G. Leighton, first convinced the Chinese government of the necessity of getting American fliers with American planes into China. Colonel Claire Chennault, retired from the U. S. Army air force because (like Billy Mitchell) he had too many "unorthodox" ideas, for several years had held a nondescript Chinese air force together on a shoestring and a few outmoded kites. Chennault had been nursing the same hope as Pawley for a long time. Pawley went to Washington and found that some Roosevelt administration leaders and Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Knox could see beyond the end of their noses. So the vanguard of some four hundred Americans, less than one-fourth of them pilots, reached Rangoon on August 21, 1941. It had taken some very fat greenback inducements to get them there. For instance, pilots who had received $175 a month in our own armed services were being paid $600 a month or more by the Chinese. Radio specialists, mechanics, and all other ground-crew men had their incomes doubled or tripled. They were a part of the Chinese air force--in fact, they were almost all there was of China's air force. They were named the American Volunteer Group (the AVG), but none of these men were volunteers in a true sense. They were mercenaries. That was the only way China could get them, except for a very few idealists who had a genuine interest in China's cause. And that was the only way China could get them even six months before Pearl Harbor--and if any American can feel tremendously proud about that he probably won't have much company.

Bill Pawley gave me the general outline in strict confidence. I couldn't write about the AVG now, but some day there'd be real story there for America. In three or four months the AVG would go into action from Kunming, China, with their three squadrons. When they did they would be the first American-trained and American-manned fighter squadrons to match skills and courage with the Japs. If they met the test they might go far toward saving China. If they failed it would be a disastrous blow to the white man's prestige in the Orient. Such failure would probably even be interpreted by the Japs as an invitation to clean up the sissified Americans. When I first talked with these boys I saw no sign that they had begun to understand the far-reaching and incalculable responsibilities that rested on their shoulders. They were typical devil-may-care Americans, keen and energetic and rather too cocky, who had been toughened in our armed services but had chafed at the discipline and wanted to get away from it all--and lay up a fat bankroll in the process. There were a few notable exceptions, but most of them were like that.

A great deal of tommyrot has been written about the AVG, by members of the AVG. (The one notable exception that I have seen to date is Olga Greenlaw's book The Lady and the Tigers--an authoritative, gusty, and true-to-life story of the AVG.) Some members who never flew a plane in Burma posed as aces when they came home, and one or two of these made a killing in the magazines or around Hollywood. I've also seen at least one book advertised whose author, to my knowledge, was never in or near Burma although nine tenths of the AVG's fighting was done in Burma. It hardly seems surprising that so many fairy-tales about the AVG have found print, as this group of adventurers had a fair quota of amateur Baron Munchausens scattered through the ranks.

I never heard the American Volunteer Group called the "Flying Tigers." I never even heard that name until long left Burma. I suspect that some clever Chinese up in Kunming had that inspiration. Anyway it's a wonderful name and a natural, given the tiger shark's teeth which they had painted under the noses of their P-40 Tomahawks. But in Burma they were simply the AVG or "those AVG's" or "those Americans."

continued in part 2