China-Burma-India WWII

Lieutenant General Claire Lee Chennault led the Flying Tigers (also known officially as the American Volunteer Group, or AVG) during the early part of World War II in China, before the United States entered the war. The Flying Tigers was a group of primarily American, volunteer pilots who flew combat and transport aircraft for the Chinese armed forces in the early part of China's Anti-Japanese War.

Claire Lee Chennault was born in Commerce, Texas, on September 6, 1890. He grew up in Franklin Parish, Louisiana, where his father was a cotton farmer and locally elected sheriff. Chennault attended Louisiana State University and Louisiana State Normal School, from which he graduated with a teaching degree. After graduation from college, Chennault taught high school in his hometown, later accepted a teaching position at a business college in New Orleans, and also taught physical education in Ohio. He married the former Nellie Thompson, a Louisiana native, with whom he had four children.

Chennault entered the U.S. Army near the end of World War I and underwent officer training at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. He was initially commissioned as a reserve officer, a second lieutenant of infantry but later transferred to the Signal Corps. Chennault was trained as an army aviator and became a rated military pilot on April 7, 1919. With the end of World War I and the ensuring drawdown in the size of the military, Chennault was discharged from the army on April 9, 1920, only a year after finishing his pilot training. After his discharge from the army, Chennault attempted to farm cotton in Louisiana but quickly applied for a commission as an active-duty army officer in the newly organized Army Air Service, in which he was commissioned a regular officer on September 14, 1920.

During the years between the two wars, Chennault served in a variety of flying assignments, including on the Mexican border in support of patrolling U.S. Army infantry units. He also excelled in aerobatics and was a highly successful pilot of pursuit aircraft. After promotion to captain, on April 12, 1929, he was assigned primarily as a pursuit instructor. Chennault served the remainder of his active-duty army career as a flight instructor at Maxwell Field (now Maxwell Air Force Base), Montgomery, Alabama, until his retirement from the Army Air Corps in 1937.

Because Chennault had made a name for himself in aviation circles as an expert in aerobatics and air combat tactics, he was sought after by U.S. aviation companies after his retirement. The Soviet air force also tried to hire him as an adviser; however, he refused that employment. Chennault accepted an offer in summer 1937, after the Japanese armed forces attacked China, to become an aviation adviser to the Chinese armed forces, then under the leadership of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. When Chennault arrived in China, the Chinese air force comprised about 600 aircraft, some from the United States; some from Germany, which had provided considerable aid to the Nationalist government; and some from Italy. In fact, Italian aviation firms were the strongest competition for U.S. industry for aircraft sales to China.

For a number of years prior to Chennault's arrival in China, dating to early 1932, an unofficial U.S. air mission had functioned in that country. The Chinese had already been under attack by the Japanese in Manchuria since the Mukden Incident (Nine One Eight (918) Incident) of September 18, 1931, and were working to develop their armed forces. A former American Army Air Corps colonel, John H. Lovett, had established an aviation training school in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, which helped to develop China as the world's largest export market for American aviation equipment at that time. Before Colonel Lovett's return to the United States at the expiration of his own contract in 1935, exports of U.S. aircraft and equipment to China had reached over $9 million.

After his arrival in China in 1937, General Chennault developed a close and carefully cultivated relationship with Chiang Kai-shek's wife, American-educated Soong Mei-ling, and her brother, T. V. Soong, who functioned as an emissary to the United States for Generalissimo Chiang during World War II. During the period before the war when he served as an adviser to the Chinese air force, Chennault concentrated on refining fighter aircraft tactics for the Chinese pilots. He also coordinated a number of notable, although not tactically effective, bombing raids against the Japanese armed forces, which were already at war with China. The most spectacular of these raids was a May 1938 propaganda leaflet drop on the Japanese ports of Sasebo and Fukuoka (the raid was originally intended for Tokyo, but the aircraft were diverted).

In May 1941, the United States began to deliver Lend-Lease supplies to China over the Burma Road. Lend-Lease aid had been extended to China in March 1941, and the aerial defense of the Burma Road, as China's remaining supply line from the west, became critically important to the war effort. Chennault organized the "American Volunteer Group," or Flying Tigers, with the tacit assent of the U.S. government. From offices in the United States, he recruited pilots to fly against the Japanese. From October 1941 to July 5, 1942, Chennault led the American Volunteer Group against the Japanese air force. He held the rank of colonel in the Chinese air force at that time. After the United States formally entered the war, and the mission of General Joseph Stilwell was sent to China, Chennault turned into one of the strongest adversaries of Stilwell, clashing with him over the primacy of the air war against Japan versus the vigorous prosecution of the ground war. Chennault's strong relationship with Chiang Kai-shek's wife, Soong Mei-ling, and brother-in-law, T. V. Soong, as well as Stilwell's vocal distaste for Chiang as a leader, combined to eventually undermine Stilwell's own effectiveness in China.

On June 28, 1942, Chennault was given command of the China Air Task Force (CATF). This task force was subordinate to the 10th U.S. Air Force, based in India under the command of Major General Clayton Bissell. By the end of World War II, Chennault was a U.S. Army Air Forces major general, with command of the 14th U.S. Air Force in China. Major General Chennault returned to the United States after the surrender of Japan, arriving on August 24, 1945. He soon returned to China in a private capacity to organize the China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (CNRAA) Air Transport Service (known as CAT), with 20 C-46 transport aircraft and two C-47s. CAT went on to ferry Nationalist troops into Manchuria to fight the Communist forces, to evacuate the Nationalist Army out of Manchuria when it was taken over by Communist forces, and to assist in the evacuation of the Nationalist government to Taiwan in 1949. It eventually became a U.S. proxy contract air service. Under Chennault's direction, CAT also flew supplies for Far Eastern air forces in the Korean War under contract for the U.S. government and also flew supplies into Dien Bien Phu in support of French forces in Indochina. Chennault returned to the United States in July 1958 and died of throat cancer.

REFERENCES Martha Byrd, Chennault: Giving Wings to the Tiger (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987); Anna Chennault, Chennault and the Flying Tigers (New York: P. S. Eriksson, 1963); Claire Lee Chennault, Way of a Fighter: The Memoirs of Claire Lee Chennault (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1949); Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland, The United States Army in World War Two. The China-Burma-India Theater: Stilwell's Mission to China (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1953); Roland Sperry, China through the Eyes of a Tiger (New York: Pocket Books, 1990.)