Ray Whitehead of the Chinese Air Force

Then I discovered that Whitehead was a native of New Zealand, which made a certain kind of sense, since after he was discharged from the AVG he supposedly worked for British miitary intelligence in China. The best account of his life is in The Flyers: The Untold Story of British and Commonwealth Airmen in the Spanish Civil War and Other Air Wars from 1919 to 1940, written and published by Brian Bridgeman in Britain in 1989.

Raymond Galbraith Whitehead was born in Wellington NZ on Oct. 29, 1910. He went by the name of Ron, graduating from a college preparatory school in 1926 and attending the University of New Zealand for a year before dropping out to work for the Dominion newspaper. In 1929 he went to Britain and won a "short service" commission in the Royal Air Force. That's him in the center of the photo at right, about 1933. Is he the same man shown above? Possibly, though it's certainly not a slam dunk.

After a spell of flying light bombers, he flew Bristol Bulldog fighters for 32 Squadron at Biggin Hill outside London. He completed his service in March 1933 and returned to New Zealand, thence to Australia, where he spent £400 ($2000 at the time, or roughly $40,000 in contemporary greenbacks) to buy a secondhand de Havilland D.H. 80A Puss Moth. He decided to fly it home, more than a thousand miles over the Tasman Sea from New South Wales to New Zealand:

'... a battered old Puss Moth took off from Gerringong Beach, NSW, on the most hazardous tran-Tasman flight attempted. On board were two daring young pilots, Raymond G. (Ron) Whitehead, a 24 years old New Zealander and [Australian] Rex Nicholl, two years older than Whitehead. Their plane, the first Puss Moth ever brought to Australia, was still powered by its original engine. To make the 1300 mile flight to New Zealand it had been converted into a heavily overloaded `flying petrol tank'. The plane was not fitted with radio, its compass was 20 degrees out and there was little room that one member of the crew had to sit on the other's knees through out the flight.' (Sydney Sunday Mirror, 26.10.1958)

Here's the Puss Moth, on a New Zealand beach, during a barnstorming tour:

For the next several years, Whitehead flew as an airline pilot and barnstormer in New Zealand, then as bush pilot in New Guinea. In 1937, he went to China to join the 14th Volunteer Bombardment Squadron, which Claire Chennault was tasked with organizing with foreign pilots and Chinese gunners and bombardiers to counter the Japanese invasion that began in September that year. He was flight checked by Julius Barr and made some flights in the Vultee V-11. The photo at top may show him at Nanchang or Hankou, where Claire Chennault was trying to straighten out the 14th Squadron in December 1937. Whitehead was detached from the squadron until it became operational, and instead he and some of the French pilots were assigned to the 5th Pursuit Group to fly Curtiss Hawk III fighters. During combat over Hankou on December 14, he was shot severely wounded and forced to bail out. Chennault wrote in his diary that evening:

'Poivre and Whitehead arrived 11:00 AM. Combat with Japs about 12:30. Poivre killed fighting three Dewoitines [Mitsubishi A5M 'Claude' open-cockpit fighters], Whitehead shot down. Two Ch[inese] pilots killed. Damn the luck. Russians sought safety in flight.'

Whitehead spent three months recovering from his wounds in the hospital, and by the time he returned to rejoin the 14th Squadron, it had been disbanded and its foreign personnel assigned to train Chinese pilots at various airfields. Whitehead was posted to the 41st Pursuit Squadron at Kunming with two French veterans of the 14th, first flying the Dewoitine D510C monoplane fighter, then the old standby, the Curtiss Hawk III. When one of the pilots was discovered to be reporting back to French intelligence, all three were fired in March 1939. Whitehead went to work for Texaco, transporting fuel from Hanoi to Chonging, only to have his trucks impounded when the Japanese seized northern Vietnam in September 1940. The following year, after a bout with smallpox, he signed on with Chennault's American Volunteer Group as transportation officer, later assistant operations officer.

He hoped to return to flying, but in March 1942 Dr Gentry found him unfit due to faulty depth perception and "hyperphoria" (one eye higher than the other, which probably affected his depth perception). He was discharged from the AVG at the end of May, 1942, and attempted to return to the RAF, to no avail. Instead, he once again ran a transport business in China, meanwhile performing odd jobs for British intelligence. Then the war ended, and the trail divides. According to The Flyers, he ran an export-import business in Hong Kong, then returned to journalism. (I found his name as a member of the Hong Kong press club, identifying him as a correspondent for International News Service, in the 1950s.) He worked as a free-lance journalist until he died in May 1980.

But ah! there was also a Raymond G. Whitehead in Bethlehem, Georgia, who likewise had served with the CAF and the AVG, and who left behind that photograph of the long-nosed gent in a fifty-mission cap with Chinese insignia. (His middle name, however, was Glen and not Galbraith.) I find two Raymond Whiteheads from Georgia in the Social Security death register, with the most likely candidate born in 1909 and died in 1983. Obviously the man in Hong Kong and the one in Georgia weren't the same, but how was it that they claimed the same personal history and had the photographs to back it up?

Update: I've had email from David Mursch, who encountered Ray Whitehead (the Georgian, not the Kiwi) as an instructor in weather forecasting at Chanute AFB in Illinois in 1970. He remembers Whitehead as a warrant officer who--yes!--told stories about the Flying Tigers.