A Book Review on Two New Books on Flying Tigers

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Gregory Crouch, Tigers over a Rising Sun’ For seven months after Pearl Harbor the volunteer pilots scourged the enemy and put their lives on the line. Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2018
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the ... sing-sun-1532050383
(book review on two books: Sam Kleiner, The Flying Tigers. Viking. 2018 and Euginie Buchan, A Few Planes for China. ForeEdge, 2018)

Quote:

"Of all the iconic images to emerge out of World War II, one of the most menacing has to be the shark’s teeth painted across the noses of the P-40 fighter planes flown by the Flying Tigers, that small band of volunteer American pilots who fought the Japanese in the skies of China and Southeast Asia. From their first dogfights in December 1941 until their contracts expired in July 1942 * * *

"By the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941, China had been staving off its Japanese invaders for 4 1/2 long years. Throughout that period, Britain and the US wanted to keep China fighting -- without provoking their own wars with Japan. Western leaders were also growing increasingly concerned that Chinese resistance would falter. Among China's weaknesses, a lack of air power.  To bolster China's defense at a time of official American neutrality, in early 1941 the US government allowed approximately 100 American pilots and about twice that number of ground crewmen to resign from the military and join the American Volunteer Group (AVG). From then until the attack pm {ear; Harbor, the AVG organized, shipped out and trained in British Burma. Today we would describe them as civilian military contractors.

"Contrary to popular belief, the AVG didn't see action until after Pearl Harbor. The group joined the fight in the ensuing weeks as members of Chinese air force, under Chinese command in the person of Claire Lee Chennault, a former US Army Air Corps officer who had been a paid advisor to the Chinese air force since 1937. The group soon became famous as the Flying Tigers.

"Given the group's modest size and brief history, nothing from World War II rivals the output on the Flying Tigers in terms of the number of books and articles published per plane. The phalanx of the chronicles, memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, comic strips and novels that recount the AVG story thus makes the subtitle of Sam Kleiner's 'The Flying Tigers; The untold story of the American pilots who waged a secret war against Japan' seems a bit of a stretch.

"Mr Kleiner passes off at face value many of the AVG's overblown claims. To name but two: that with a few bombs and strafing runs the Tigers turned back a Japanese invasion of the Chinese province of Yunnan; and that the Tigers destroyed nearly 300 enemy aircraft. Modern research in Japanese archives suggests that Japan in fact lost approximately 115 planes and 400 airmen to the Flying Tigers, against the AVG's combat and accident losses pf 86 planes and 26 pilots -0 more than 30% of its original mampower. (The AVG had gone to war with only 82 pilots and 72 planes.) In the AVG's defense, that record is itself remarkable.

"The author [Mr Kleiner] failed to explain why the [US] Army Air Corps couldn't tolerate the AVG's continued existence. [That is because US] Army operations in China would soon dwarf the AVG, and well-compensated [AVG's] civilian pilots with the independence to refuse missions flying alongside military pilots [who were] required to follow orders for a fraction of the pay would have had a catastrophic effect on Army morale.

"Euginie Buchan * * * makes a strong case that the fighter group ]AVG] would have never flown without British encouragement, an important contribution underappreciated by other histories [I think it's a typo: should be 'historians']. * * * She focuses especially on William Pawley and Bruce Leighton, respectively the president and vice president of both International Corp and the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Co. Those two private American companies helped the Chinese develop aviation assets and earned large sum of money through the AVG's successful creation.  (Leighton also happens to be Ms Buchan's grandfather.) * * * But one of Ms Buchan's great contributions to the history of the Flying Tigers is to debunk the self-promoting story that Chennault peddled in his postwar memoir, 'Way of a Fighter' (1949), which saw him arriving in Washington from China at the end of 1941 and,as if by magic single-handedly creating the AVG over the course the next few months. Historians and writers, including this reviewer, have largely cleaved to that story ever since. Ms Buchan presents a corrective account that is more complicated, provocative and interesting -- and probably more accurate.

Note:
(a) This report is locked behind paywall.
(b) There is no need to read the rest.