Revised and updated May 2023
WARBIRD HOME > FLYING TIGERS > JACK MA'S STORY
CHENNAULT'S CODE-MAN
By John T Ma
My school, National Central University, was located outside the city of Chongqing. But it was also a target of Japanese bombing. One day about 27 Japanese bombers bombed my university and the surrounding areas. An incendiary bomb fell on my dormitory and burned my mosquito net. There were so many mosquitoes on the campus. You could not sleep without a mosquito net.
Then China realized that she must have airplanes for air defense. So she obtained from the U.S. government a loan to purchase 100 fighter planes, and to hire 100 pilots and a few supporting staff members. The pilots were selected from U.S. Army and Navy Air Forces. As their badge was a tiger with wings, they were nicknamed Flying Tigers.... The official name of the Flying Tigers is American Volunteers Group (AVG). I joined AVG in 1941.
AVG was created with a loan that the Chinese government got from the U.S. government. It was part of the Chinese air force, not American air force. Since the U.S. was not at war with Japan then, she could not send her air force to China to fight against the Japanese. That is why those pilots, although they came from the U.S. Army and Navy Air Forces, were called volunteers.
In addition to 100 fighter pilots and Colonel Claire Lee Chennault, Chief of AVG, the [headquarters] staff of AVG included some mechanics, radiomen, intelligence officers, a physician, a nurse, a secretary and a deputy chief. They were all Americans and needed interpreters. The Chinese Air Force did not have that many interpreters. There were many English-speaking people in China, who could be qualified as interpreters for AVG, but for fear that some Japanese spies could get into AVG, the Chinese Air Force dared not recruit interpreters by advertising publicly.
So the Chinese government issued an order to ask students of the English Departments of five leading universities to volunteer to serve as interpreters for AVG for one year. After one year they could return school to the same class as before. So I volunteered....
Before we joined AVG as interpreters, we received a three-month training. We learned air force terminology. We learned U.S.-China relations. We learned the difference between the English and American languages. And we learned some American slangs. But there was one word that we never learned but the Americans, especially the radiomen, used in almost every sentence. That is the four-letter word, f--k. Later, when I worked in AVG headquarters and the radioman called to tell me that there was a message for Colonel Chennault, I had difficulty in understanding him because he used so many f--ks in his speech.
Having completed the training, I was assigned to work as the interpreter-code-man in Colonel Chennault's office. There were eight code-men divided into four two-man teams. Each team worked six hours a day. And the code room opened 24 hours a day. We coded and decoded all incoming and outgoing messages. The code was rather simple. Each alphabetic letter was represented by two figures. For example, 45216876345698245532 means "Japs coming", because 45 represents J, 21 a, 68 p, 76 s, 34 c, 56 o, 98 m, 24 i, 55 n, 32 g. We changed the code book every three months. I do not think the Japanese had ever intercepted our messages and made sense of them.
The headquarters of AVG was a small building in the airfield of Kunming. It had only four rooms. In Colonel Chennault's room were Chennault himself, his English secretary [Doreen Reynolds] and his Chinese secretary Colonel Shu Boyan. Colonel Shu also served as Chief of Interpreters and therefore was my immediate superior. Next to Chennault's room was the code room where the code-men worked. Facing Chennault's room was the room of Deputy Chief of AVG, Captain Green [Harvey Greenlaw]. Next to his room was the sitting room where we received guests.
Chennault parked his car outside the building. His Chinese driver sat in the car all day long. When a code-man had to go to a radio station to pick up a message, the transportation department would send a car or a jeep with a driver to the headquarters for the code-man to use....
When we interpreters were being trained in 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The U.S. declared war against Japan. Then the Chinese government asked the U.S. to send her own air force to replace AVG. Later the U.S. 14th Army Air Force came to China. Then the Chinese and American pilots joined force to establish the U.S.-China United Air Force [CATF, later the 14th Air Force]. As Chennault assumed leadership of all those forces, members of those forces also called themselves "Flying Tigers." But they did not have the flying tiger badges as I have.
Later the headquarters of AVG was moved from Kunming to Chongqing, the wartime capital of China. My one-year volunteer service to the air force expired. I could choose either staying in the air force or returning to school. I decided to return to school and continue my education....
Many years later, when I was working as the Curator-Librarian of the East Asia Collection of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Colonel Shu Boyan, my former boss at AVG, came to San Francisco, CA. Chennault had passed away in 1958. I asked Shu whether or not he knew Madame Chennault. He said yes. As a matter of fact, when she came to interview Chennault as a newspaper reporter, the interview was held in Chennault's office where Colonel Shu sat and would help if necessary.
I asked Colonel Shu to [write] to Madame Chennault and asking her to give the Hoover Institution her husband's personal archives.... First, I was Chennault's code-man. A lot of his incoming and outgoing messages were decoded and coded by me. So his archive is also my archive. I will take very good care of it. Secondly, the purpose of preserving archives is to make them available to scholars and researchers so that they could write a good book or complete an important research project....
The third reason is the most important. Chennault's political rival was ... General Joseph Warren Stilwell. Stilwell's archive is in the Hoover Institution [and was the basis for Theodore White's The Stilwell Papers]. In that book Chennault's image is not very favorable.... I told [Mrs Chennault] that, if she gave Chennault's archive to me, I would put it right next to Stilwell's archive. Then scholars and researchers would be able to see the viewpoints of both men. Vinegar Joe's viewpoint would be modified and Chennault's standing would become known and understood.
After a few days I received a phone call from Madame Chennault. She said that she would personally bring her husband's archive to me on a certain date by a certain airline flight number. She asked me to pick her up at the airport of San Francisco. A few days later the Hoover Institution held a press conference, announcing the arrival of Chennault's archive.
Since then, every year the first one who sent me a Christmas card was Madame Chennault....
[Reprinted by the kind permission of Carol Ma, the author's daughter, from the Chinese edition of My Autobiography by John T. Ma, published by the Foreign Language and Research Press, Beijing, in 2017. Anna Chennault died in 2018. Mr Ma died in 2021 at the age of 101. There's a copy of Stanford's Chennault Papers on microfilm at the Library of Congress, and I used it regularly when writing Flying Tigers. Thank you, Mr Ma!]
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Posted May 2023. This page © 2023 by Carol Ma and Daniel Ford; all rights reserved. This site sets no cookies, but Mailchimp and Amazon do, if you click through to their services. I never see those cookies.