This Week in China's History: The First Battle of the Flying Tigers

December 20, 1941

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On the morning of December 20, 1941, 10 Japanese bombers approached Kunming, in Southwest China. Bombing raids on Kunming and other Chinese cities had been common for several years. Typically, the raids — including one just two days earlier, which had killed some 400 people on the ground — met little resistance. With fine weather and no reports of enemy movements, the Japanese pilots expected nothing different on this particular morning. Anticipating little opposition, the bombers flew without fighter escorts.

But this day would be very different.

While the Japanese pilots scanned the ground below, evaluating their targets, they fell suddenly under attack from above. Curtis P-40 fighters, each one painted with a now-familiar sharks-tooth pattern on the nose, screamed down from above, guns blazing. John T. Correll, writing for Air and Space Forces Magazine, described the encounter “The bombers were circling around to strike the city from the far side when they were intercepted by four P-40s. The Japanese jettisoned their bombs and fled. They did not get far before they were caught by more of the fighters, which ripped through the formation and shot down three bombers. The others broke away, but one of them was trailing smoke. It exploded before reaching the Indochina border.”

The attack had been the first action of the 1st American Volunteer Group, but of course, the planes are better known by their nickname: “Flying Tigers”

This column has written several times about the Second Sino-Japanese War, which began in either 1931 or 1937 and lasted until the summer of 1945. The name implies that it involved two countries, but of course, by its end, it was a theater of the Second World War, a conflict engulfing nearly the entire northern hemisphere and a good portion of the southern as well. Given its global implications, it is not surprising that even before the United States and Europe joined the fight, foreign governments were taking an interest in the war in East Asia.

As Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government struggled to defend its territory against Japan, it sought aid from the United States. The U.S. was not yet involved in the war, but that did not stop Chiang from hiring Claire Lee Chennault, a retired American aviator, as a consultant. Chennault had left the Army Air Force as a young man because of chronic concerns — with both his health and the military bureaucracy — but was soon hired as a consultant for the Chinese Air Force, assessing the force’s readiness to defend itself against Japanese aggression.

In short, it was not good.

Writing for NPR, James Doubek quotes Chennault’s granddaughter (and director of the Chennault Military and Aviation Museum in Louisiana): that Chiang Kai-shek thought he had 500 airplanes to fight with. “You have 500,” Chennault agreed, “but you only have 91 that fly.” And although he was clear-eyed about the state of Chinese aviation, he was passionate about the importance of air power and believed that military aviation would be a crucial element in China’s fight against Japan. And he thought the United States could help.

U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt was eager to oblige, but Congress and public sentiment opposed American involvement in wars overseas, and certainly one on the opposite side of the globe. Chennault worked secretly with China’s Finance Minister TV Soong, to acquire planes. The Chinese air force purchased 100 planes — Curtis P-40s — in the spring of 1941, months before the attack on Pearl Harbor would bring America into the Pacific War. Using his connections in the military, Chennault also persuaded the Navy, Marines, and Army Air Corps (the Air Force would not come into being until 1947) to permit pilots and crew to resign their commissions in the United States forces, after which they could “volunteer” to serve in China, with salaries and benefits far exceeding what they received in the United States. This “American Volunteer Group” began arriving in Rangoon, Burma, in April 1941.

The Department of Defense’s official history — The Flying Tigers — records that 99 pilots and twice that number of support crew made their way to East Asia in the summer and fall of 1941. The planes themselves (minus one that was dropped in the ocean en route) arrived around this same time.

It’s important to keep in mind that although the Flying Tigers was an American unit, support from the Chinese was an essential part of the corps’ success: an airfield had to be built by hand in Kunming, all of which was performed by Chinese labor. While the direct support staff for the planes and pilots came from the United States, much of the unit’s extended infrastructure was Chinese. In addition, when American pilots were shot down over Chinese territory, locals were instrumental in rescuing and protecting the downed aviators (in an effort to identify the pilots as friendly despite a language barrier, a Republic of China flag was sewn onto the pilots’ flight jacket — a feature that echoed and rankled after mainland censors objected to a Taiwanese flag on Tom Cruise’s flight jacket in the Top Gun sequel).

It’s also important to remember that these Chinese put themselves at grave risk by helping these American flyers. As illustrated by the fate of those who protected the Doolittle Raiders in 1942, Japanese forces punished harshly any Chinese who sheltered the pilots.

In the meantime, the Flying Tigers trained in Burma, following Chennault’s brand of fighter tactics, many designed to take advantage of the specific features of the P-40 that could give tactical advantages against the Japanese.

In the days after Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, one squadron of the Flying Tigers was moved to Kunming. (The origins of the name, which was in use from the very first days of the group, are unclear, though a Disney-designed logo popularized it.) With America now at war with Japan, American pilots were even more eager to engage with their enemy.

They got their opportunity on December 20.

Chennault described his feelings as he deployed the AVG in its first action in his memoir, Way of a Fighter “This was the decisive moment I had been awaiting for more than four years — American pilots in American fighter planes aided by a Chinese ground warning net about to tackle a formation of the Imperial Japanese Air Force, which was then sweeping the Pacific skies victorious everywhere.”

The success of the day was all but total (though Chennault would complain to his pilots “ not good enough — next time get ‘em all”), and the results were immediate: “Japanese airmen never again tried to bomb Kunming while the A.V.G. defended it,” Chennault wrote in his memoir. “For many months afterward they sniffed about the edges of the Yunnan warning net and dropped a few bombs near the border but never ventured near Kunming. Our border patrols shot down a half dozen of these half-hearted raiders, and by the spring of 1942 we were on the offensive carrying the war deep into Indo-China with dive-bombing and strafing missions.”

Sources disagree as to the precise number, but the Flying Tigers shot down close to 300 enemy aircraft and severely damaged a hundred more, while losing two dozen pilots (ten in action).

The AVG was absorbed into the US Army Air Force in the Spring of 1942, and Chennault was commissioned as a colonel. He maintained a good relationship with Chiang Kai-shek, but his with Joseph Stilwell, the American general who worked closely with the Nationalist government during the war, was combustible, as the two frequently differed over the relative importance of air and ground forces.

The Flying Tigers remain one of the most recognizable of military forces, and a keen reminder of the U.S.-China relationship.