Consider this job offer: a one -year contract to live and work in China, to fly, repair and manufacture aircraft. The salary reaches 14 311 euros per month, with 30 days of vacation per year. Housing is included and also receives a 599 euros supplement monthly for food. What’s more, a bonus of 9 405 euros for each Japanese plane destroyed – no limit.
This was the agreement – in values adjusted to 2025 inflation – which some hundreds of Americans accepted in 1941 to become heroes and some would even say, Saviors of China.
These American mechanics, mechanics, and personnel have become members of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), later known as the Flying Tigers.
The group’s war planes displayed the nose open and tooth -filled with a shark, a fearsome symbol still used today in some US military aircraft.
The symbolic ferocity was supported by AVG pilots in Combate. Flying tigers is credited to the destruction of up to 497 Japanese planes, having lost only 73.
Today, despite tensions between the US and China, these American mercenaries remain venerated in China.
“China always recalls the contribution and sacrifice made by the United States and the American people during World War II,” reads on the Memorial Page of the Flying Tigers of People’s Daily Online, Chinese state newspaper.
The bond is such that the daughter and granddaughter of the founder of flying tigers are among the few Americans invited to the military parade earlier this month in Beijing, commemorating the end of World War II.
The formation of flying tigers
In the late 1930s, China had been invaded by the armies of Japan Imperial and struggled to resist a better equipped and unified enemy. Japan pretty much dominated the skies and could bombard Chinese cities at ease.
Leader Chiang Kai-Shek, who had vaguely able to unite the Chinese war lords under a central government, later hired American Claire Chennault, a retired US Army captain to form an air force.
A Chinese soldier holds a line of P-40 American flying tigers on a vein somewhere in China. US National Archives
According to the official website of the Flying Tigers, Chennault first spent a few years setting up an alert network against air attacks and building bases throughout China. In 1940, he was sent to the United States – still neutral – to recruit pilots and planes that could defend China against Japan.
With good contacts in the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt and a budget that could afford Americans up to three times more than they would receive in the Armed Forces, Chennault got the pilots he needed.
An agreement has ensured that 100 Curtiss P-40B fighters, built for the UK, be sent instead to China.
In his memories, Chennault wrote that the P-40 he received had no modern sight.
Its pilots were “pointing the weapons through a rudimentary, ring and rod, instead of the most accurate optical sights used by the air body and the Royal Air Force,” he wrote.
What the P-40 did not have in capacity, Chennault pays off on tactics: AVG riders attacked dive from a high position and fired their heavy machine guns on the structurally weaker but more maneuverable Japanese aircraft.
In a low-altitude-renowned air duel, the P-40 would lose.
A makeshift group of pilots
The riders recruited by Chennault were far from the elite.
Ninety -nine pilots, along with support personnel, made the trip to China in the fall of 1941, according to the official history of the US Department of Defense.
Some had just left the aviation school, others piloted heavy hydroaavions, or were transported drivers of large bombers. They signed up for the Far East adventure to make a lot of money or simply for annoyance.
Perhaps the best known of flying tigers, Marine Greg Boyington-around the 1970s television series “Black Sheep Squadron”-joined the money.
“Having undergone a painful divorce and being responsible for a former wife and several small children, he had ruined his credit and accumulated substantial debts, and the Marine Corps had ordered him to submit a report on how he used the salary to pay these debts,” the department of Defense’s official history.
Veterans of the US World War II, including old flying tigers, pose for photographs with a track while a multitude of them aclama at Chongqing Jiangbei Airport on 18 August 2005. China Photos/Getty Images
Chennault had to teach his heterogeneous group to be hunting riders – and to fight as a team – essentially from scratch.
The training was strict and deadly. Three pilots died in early accidents.
On a training day, which became known as “Circus Day”, eight P-40 were damaged: some riders land with too much strength and members of the Earth team maneuvered the planes too quickly, causing collisions.
Chennault was disappointed by the group’s first combat mission, against Japanese bombers who attacked the AVG base in Kunming, China, on December 20, 1941. He thought the pilots lost the discipline.
“They risked almost impossible shots and later agreed that only luck prevented them from colliding with each other or falling to each other,” says the history of the Defense Department.
Still, they slaughtered three Japanese bombers, losing only one fighter fuel and landed.
Legend
Pilots quickly exceeded their steep learning curve.
A few days after kunming, they were highlighted to Ranguum, the capital of the British colonial Burma and a vital port to the supply line that brought war material coupled with the Chinese troops facing the Japanese army.
The Japanese bombers attacked the city in successive vacancies for 11 days, on Christmas and New Year holidays. Flying tigers opened gaps in Japanese formations and cemented their fame.
“AVG had officially deducted 75 enemy aircraft, with an indefinite number of probable victories,” says the group’s official website. “AVG’s losses were two pilots and six planes.”
Flying tigers spent a total of 10 weeks in Ranguum, never having more than 25 p-40.
American Volunteer Group planes in a tight flight during World War II. Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
“This small force faced a total of about a thousand Japanese aircraft in southern Burma and Thailand. In 31 clashes, 217 enemy aircraft destroyed and probably 43. Our combat losses were four pilots killed in the air, one dead flight and a prisoner.
Despite the flying tigers’ exploits in the air, the allied land forces in Burma failed to contain the Japanese. Rangum fell in March and AVG removed into the Burma.
But they had gained vital time to the coupled war effort, arresting Japanese planes that could have been used in India or other fronts in China and Pacific.
Claim fame
Although news did not quickly circulate in 1941-42, the United States-still recovering from the devastating Japanese attack to Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941-longed for heroes. Flying tigers fit perfectly.
Republic Pictures chose John Wayne for the lead role of the movie “Flying Tigers” in 1942. The posters showed a P-40 with a shark mouth in attack dive.
However, AVG sponsors in Washington asked Walt Disney to create a logo.
Disney artists conceived “a winged-winged tiger to jump through a stylized ‘V of Victory’ symbol,” says the official American history.
A P-40 Warhawk from the World War II era, painted with the colors of the American Volunteer Group, on display in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 2007. Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images/File)
The logo did not include the iconic shark mouth that was figuring in the flying tigers planes.
Chennault wrote that Tubarão’s mouth did not originate from his group, but was copied from the British P-40 in North Africa, which in turn may have copied it from the German Luftwaffe.
“Since the term Flying Tigers derived from the P-40 with a shark nose, I will never know,” he wrote.
Why Country Fight
When the US entered the war, US military leaders wanted to integrate flying tigers into the US air army.
But the pilots themselves preferred or returned to their origin forces – many came from the Navy or the Marine Corps – or remain as civilian government contractors, where the payment was far superior.
Most told Chennault that they would fire before accepting what Washington demanded. When the army threatened to recruit them as simple shallow soldiers if they did not volunteer, those who had thought signed gave up.
Chennault was promoted to US Army General and agreed that flying tigers would become a US military unit on July 4, 1942.
Although flying tigers continued to cause damage to the Japanese in the spring of 1942-attacking land and airplanes from China to Burma and Vietnam-it was clear that the force approached the end, according to US military history.
AVG performed its last mission on the same day it ceased to exist: July 4th.
Four P-40 of the flying tigers faced a dozen Japanese fighters on Hengyang, China. The Americans slaughtered six of the Japanese without undergoing low, according to US history.
A US Air Force A-10 in Iraq in 2004. The iconic flying tiger nose art lives in the A-10 fleet. Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo/Digital/US Air Force
A contribution never forgotten
Despite tense relations with Washington in recent years, the bond that US mercenaries have created with China 80 years ago has been intact.
There are at least half a dozen museums dedicated to flying tigers or with exhibitions about them in China, and have been the subject of contemporary movies and cartoons.
A visitor goes through images and old flying tigers uniforms at the Japan Resistance War Museum in Dayi County, Sichuan Province in 2005. Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images
The Park of the Flying Tigers is at the site of an old Guilin aerodrome, where Chennault had his command post in a cave.
In the US, the Louisiana Museum website that is named Chennault summarizes what he expected to be his legacy at the top of the main page, citing the last lines of his memories:
“It is my deepest hope that the symbol of flying tiger remains in the air while necessary and is always remembered on both banks of the Pacific as the symbol of two great peoples to work for a common goal, in war and in peace.”
