Flying Tigers: Bill Yenne

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When Tigers Ruled the Sky
By Bill Yenne
(Berkley Caliber, 359 pages, $27)

(In much-reduced form, this review appeared in the Wall Street Journal on July 16, 2016.)

Toward the end of the Second World War, I came under the spell of the Flying Tigers. Heroes of Burma and China, in their shark-faced fighter planes! Soldiers of fortune, paid a bounty of $500 for each enemy aircraft they destroyed! That was serious money in the war years, when I could take the streetcar to Boston, buy a hot dog at Joe & Nemo’s, watch a double feature, and ride home again, all for 25 cents.

As a boy, I didn’t understand that the movies I saw downtown and the books I borrowed from our branch library, were myths concocted to make us feel good about a war that in its opening months the U.S. had come close to losing. Curiously, that continues to be true of most accounts of the 1st American Volunteer Group, as the Flying Tigers were formally known.

In this latest telling of the myth, Bill Yenne starts out very brightly, sketching the troubled history of China and the equally conflicted history of Claire Chennault, the AVG’s founder, whose one constant was that he was adored by the men and women who worked for him and detested by his superiors. Chennault was, more or less, drummed out of the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1937 because he vociferously disagreed with the prevailing wisdom that “the bomber will always get through.” So he went to China to lend his expertise to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

The Japanese easily routed Chiang’s haphazard air force. In the fall of 1940, Chiang dispatched Chennault to Washington to buy American warplanes, and to hire American servicemen to fly and maintain them. President Roosevelt authorized the formation of a fighter group in the summer of 1941, a bomber group that fall, and another fighter group early in 1942. As events transpired, only the first of these reached their training base in Burma, consisting of 99 fighter planes and 99 pilots. These were the highly paid volunteers whom Mr. Yenne in his sub-title calls “outlaws.”

They were no such thing, having been released from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines in a venture—informal but hardly illegal—organized and run by the White House. He introduces them in a chapter entitled “Young Tigers,” with charming sketches of six lads who will grow up to join the 1st American Volunteer Group. Strangely, the very first is Robert Scott, who never did join the group. (He would eventually command its successor, the U.S. Army 23rd Fighter Group.) Yet in this and subsequent chapters, Mr. Yenne devotes 19 pages to quoting or paraphrasing Scott, who gets more lines in the index than any actual member of the 1st AVG.

Another favorite source is Claire Chennault’s ghost-written autobiography, Way of a Fighter, published in 1949. Chennault had just been run out of China, along with his paramilitary airline, Chiang Kai-shek, and the remnants of the Nationalist government and military, having lost a civil war with Mao Zedong and the People’s Liberation Army. Chennault can be forgiven for lapses in memory, and even for exaggerating his own life story, but shouldn’t some nod be made toward what we’ve learned in the 67 years between then and now?

For example: In March 1942, Chennault sent a handful of pilots to attack a Japanese airfield in Thailand. This was a revenge mission, to retaliate for a devastating raid on Magwe, an Allied outpost in central Burma. Using Chennault’s words, Mr. Yenne tells us that six Flying Tigers “destroyed the effective strength of an entire air regiment” at Chiang Mai on the morning of March 24, 1942. So awful was the destruction that the survivors had to be “withdrawn and returned to Japan for replacement of personnel and aircraft.”

In western usage, a regiment is a military force of three thousand or so troops, but the target that day was the Japanese army’s 64th Sentai, with perhaps 30 planes—smaller than the AVG, in other words. Far from being destroyed, it was back in action the same afternoon. Exiled on Taiwan and working with a collaborator in New York City, Chennault couldn’t have known that, though surely Mr. Yenne does. He then compounds the deception by saying (again quoting Chennault) that the raid provided a crucial respite for the Allied airmen in Burma, allowing them to “resume the evacuation of British and Indian nationals . . . from the field.” In fact, they had already abandoned their bomb-blasted outpost—a rout that Mr. Yenne himself has just described, eight pages before.

There are similar dangers in uncritically quoting books written long after the event. In June 1942, the U.S. Army tried to reinforce Chennault with some twin-engine bombers from India. Alas, en route to China, the squadron leader flew into a cloud-covered mountain, as did two of the pilots following him. The exception was “Texas Tornado,” flown by Robert Klemann (who by a wonderful coincidence had earlier joined the 2nd AVG, only to be returned to U.S. service following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor). Flying blind, Lieutenant Klemann heard and felt what he thought was thunder; seconds later, he broke out of the clouds and saw “trees and shrubs going by the wing tip.” The thunder had been his companions exploding against the mountain, which he escaped by a matter of feet.

Recalling this incident in 1991, an AVG veteran attributed Klemann’s harrowing flight to another officer, who arrived uneventfully a few days later. That was an honest mistake; by repeating it, Mr. Yenne has started yet another myth.

What a shame! He writes so well, but he gets things wrong on almost every page, just as those wartime books and films did, and for the same reason: he’s in a hurry, and he wants to make our jaws drop with wonder. On page 134 we’re told that “high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft,” based in Thailand, had scouted Burma’s defenses “for months” before the war began, when there were no such bases until the second week of December 1941. (The scouts came all the way from Hanoi, a feat inconceivable to American and British airmen at the time.) On the next page, Mr. Yenne says that “five dozen” Mitsubishi heavy bombers attacked Rangoon’s airport on Dec. 23, when the number was 15. (The others bombed the city, the docks, and the mountain of Lend-Lease material bound for China.)

The exploits of the Flying Tigers in Burma and China were truly amazing. They outmatched the Japanese Army Air Force in almost every encounter, though seldom resupplied and almost always outnumbered. For seven months, these civilians in Chinese service gave heart to an America that had just suffered its worst losses since the Civil War. They fought the hardest sort of battle—a retreat—and in the process may have prevented a Japanese invasion of India. Most of all, they bought time for U.S. Army fighter pilots to be trained, equipped, and sent to China to replace them. (It was then that Colonel Scott entered the fray.) Sprinkling their story with macho dust does no favor to the memory of these brave men.

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