Flying Tigers
The First American Volunteer Group of the Republic of China Air Force, nicknamed the Flying Tigers, was formed to help oppose the Japanese invasion of China. Operating in 1941–1942, it was composed of pilots from the United States Army Air Corps, Navy, and Marine Corps, and was commanded by Claire Lee Chennault. Their Curtiss P-40B Warhawk aircraft, marked with Chinese colors, flew under American control. Recruited under President Franklin Roosevelt's authority before Pearl Harbor, their mission was to bomb Japan and defend the Republic of China, but many delays meant the AVG first flew in combat after the United States and Japan declared war.
The group consisted of three fighter squadrons of around 30 aircraft each that trained in Burma before the American entry into World War II to defend the Republic of China against Japanese forces. The AVG were officially members of the Republic of China Air Force. The group had contracts with salaries ranging from $250 a month for a mechanic to $750 for a squadron commander, roughly three times what they had been making in the U.S. forces. While it accepted some civilian volunteers for its headquarters and ground crew, the AVG recruited most of its staff from the U.S. military.
The Flying Tigers began to arrive in China in April 1941. The group first saw combat on 20 December 1941, 12 days after Pearl Harbor. It demonstrated innovative tactical victories when the news in the U.S. was filled with little more than stories of defeat at the hands of the Japanese forces, and achieved such notable success during the lowest period of the war for both the U.S. and the Allied Forces as to give hope to America that it might eventually defeat Japan. AVG pilots earned official credit and received combat bonuses for destroying 296 enemy aircraft, while losing only 14 pilots in combat. The combat records of the AVG still exist and researchers have found them credible. On 4 July 1942 the AVG was disbanded and replaced by the 23rd Fighter Group of the United States Army Air Forces, which was later absorbed into the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force with General Chennault as commander. The 23rd FG went on to achieve similar combat success, while retaining the nose art on the left-over P-40s.
Origin
The American Volunteer Group was largely the creation of Claire L. Chennault, a retired U.S. Army Air Corps officer who had worked in China since August 1937, first as military aviation advisor to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in the early months of the Sino-Japanese War, then as director of a Chinese Air Force flight school centered in Kunming. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union supplied fighter and bomber squadrons to China, but these units were mostly withdrawn by the summer of 1940. Chiang then asked for American combat aircraft and pilots, sending Chennault to Washington as an adviser to China's ambassador and Chiang's brother-in-law, T. V. Soong.Chennault spent the winter of 1940–1941 in Washington, supervising the purchase of 100 Curtiss P-40 fighters and the recruiting of 100 pilots and some 200 ground crew and administrative personnel that would constitute the 1st AVG. He also laid the groundwork for a follow-on bomber group and a second fighter group, though these would be aborted after the Pearl Harbor attack.
Original American volunteer group
Of the pilots, 60 came from the Navy and Marine Corps and 40 from the Army Air Corps. The volunteers were discharged from the armed services, to be employed for "training and instruction" by a private military contractor, the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, which paid them $600 a month for pilot officers, $675 a month for flight leaders, $750 for squadron leaders, and about $250 for skilled ground crewmen. Some pilots were also orally promised a bounty of $500 for each enemy aircraft shot down, and this was later confirmed by Madame Chiang Kai-shek.The first batch, some 300 men, departed San Francisco on 10 July 1941 and arrived in Rangoon, Burma, on 28 July, on the Dutch ship Jaegersfontaine, operated by Java-Pacific Lijn. The second batch, some 30 pilots, departed on 24 September 1941 and arrived on 12 November on the Dutch ship Boschfontein. These volunteers used civilian passports on these trips. After arriving in Rangoon, they were initially based at a British airfield in Toungoo for training while their aircraft were assembled and test flown by CAMCO personnel at Mingaladon Airport outside Rangoon. Chennault set up a schoolhouse that was made necessary because many pilots had "lied about their flying experience, claiming pursuit experience when they had flown only bombers and sometimes much less powerful aeroplanes." They called Chennault "the Old Man" due to his much older age and leathery exterior obtained from years flying open cockpit pursuit aircraft in the Army Air Corps. Most believed that he had flown as a fighter pilot in China, although stories that he was a combat ace are probably apocryphal.
Of the 300 original members of the CAMCO personnel, nine were Chinese-Americans recruited from America's Chinatowns. All nine were trained at Allison Engineworks in Indianapolis, Indiana: all were P-40 mechanics. Upon arrival in Kunming, two other Chinese-Americans were hired, a Ford Motor truck specialist and a doctor, raising the total to 11. Prior to 4 July 1942, three of the P-40 mechanics resigned. The official AVG roster lists the original eight.
The AVG was created by an executive order of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. He did not speak English, however, and Chennault never learned to speak Chinese. As a result, all communications between the two men were routed through Soong Mei-ling, "Madame Chiang" as she was known to Americans, and she was designated the group's "honorary commander."
Chennault fighter doctrine
Chennault preached a radically different approach to air combat based on his study of Japanese tactics and equipment, his observation of the tactics used by Soviet pilots in China during the undeclared Soviet–Japanese border conflicts in 1939, and his judgment of the strengths and weaknesses of his own aircraft and pilots. When Japanese aircraft attacked, Chennault's doctrine called for pilots to take on enemy aircraft in teams from an altitude advantage, since their aircraft were not as maneuverable or as numerous as the Japanese fighters they would encounter. He prohibited his pilots from entering into a turning fight with the nimble Japanese fighters, telling them to execute a diving or slashing attack and to dive away to set up for another attack. This "dive-and-zoom" technique was used successfully by Soviet units serving with the Chinese Air Force, although it was contrary to what the AVG pilots had learned in U.S. service as well as what the Royal Air Force pilots in Burma had been taught.To take full advantage of "dive-and-zoom" tactics, Chennault created an early warning network of spotters that would give his P-40 fighters time to take off and climb to a superior altitude before engaging the Japanese. Chennault and the Flying Tigers benefited from the country's warning network, called "the best air-raid warning system in existence":
The actual average strength of the AVG was never more than 62 combat-ready pilots and fighters. Chennault faced serious obstacles since many AVG pilots were inexperienced and a few quit at the first opportunity. However, he made a virtue out of these disadvantages, shifting unsuitable pilots to staff jobs and always ensuring that he had a squadron or two in reserve.
Curtiss P-40
AVG fighter aircraft came from a Curtiss assembly line which had just started producing Tomahawk IIB models for the Royal Air Force in North Africa. The Tomahawk IIB was similar to the U.S. Army's P-40C, but there is some evidence that Curtiss actually used leftover components when building the fighters intended for China, making them closer to the older P-40B/Tomahawk IIA specification - for instance the AVG aircraft had fuel tanks with external self-sealing coatings, rather than the more effective internal membranes as fitted to the P-40C/Tomahawk IIB, and the aircraft built for China lacked the later Tomahawk's fittings to carry a drop tank and the addition of an armor plate in front of the pilot. The fighters were purchased without "government-furnished equipment" such as reflector gunsights, radios and wing guns; the lack of these items caused continual difficulties for the AVG in Burma and China.The 100 P-40 aircraft were crated and sent to Burma on third country freighters during spring 1941. At Rangoon, they were unloaded, assembled and test flown by personnel of Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company before being delivered to the AVG training unit at Toungoo. One crate was dropped into the water and a wing assembly was ruined by salt water immersion, so CAMCO was able to deliver only 99 Tomahawks before war broke out. The 100th fuselage was trucked to a CAMCO plant in Loiwing, China, and later made whole with parts from damaged aircraft. Shortages in equipment, with spare parts almost impossible to obtain in Burma, were continual impediments, although the AVG did receive 50 replacement P-40E fighters from USAAF stocks toward the end of its combat tour.
AVG fighter aircraft were painted with a large shark face on the front of the aircraft. This was done after pilots saw a photograph of a P-40 of No. 112 Squadron RAF in North Africa, which in turn had adopted the shark face from German pilots of the Luftwaffe's ZG 76 heavy fighter wing, flying Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters in Crete. About the same time, the AVG was dubbed "The Flying Tigers" by its Washington support group, called China Defense Supplies.
The P-40's good qualities included pilot armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, sturdy construction, heavy armament, and a higher diving speed than most Japanese aircraft – qualities that Chennault's combat tactics were devised to exploit. To gain full advantage, Chennault created an early warning network of spotters that would give his fighters time to take off and climb to a superior altitude before engaging the Japanese.