Flying Tigers? Flying Sharks is more like it for wartime heroes
Ever wonder how WWII’s American Volunteer Group got its nickname “The Flying Tigers” when the noses of their P-40 Tomahawk fighters were decorated to look like ferocious sharks at full snarl?
It took more than 50 years for the Pentagon to fess up to the actual truth about the 100 American pilots and mechanics who flew under the radar to form the storied fighting group that helped China shoot Japanese bombers out of the skies over Kunming, Yunnan province, in the months before Pearl Harbor and after.
Namely, that it was a covert operation, approved at the highest levels of the White House by executive order, in flagrant violation of US neutrality and hidden from Congress.
And for 75 years, the most detailed accounts of the Flying Tigers’ exploits — pilots’ diaries, letters and combat reports — lay moldering in the dank basement of a nondescript brick building in Georgetown, Washington.
Now author Sam Kleiner has done us the admirable service of digging through those records and not only bringing the story to life, but doing it in a way that reads like a thriller.
The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan is a gripping account of intrigue, espionage and heroism, and full of fascinating historical tidbits.
The story begins, as it should, with Claire Chennault, who founded the group, growing up in the backwoods of Louisianan the son of a cotton farmer, learning how to shoot and trap and live off the land. His favorite book was Huckleberry Finn and he wanted to be a teacher.
Until he went to the State Fair in Shreveport in November 1910 and saw a demonstration of an early biplane. That changed everything.
Determined to fly, Chennault missed the opportunity to train in the Great War but persisted and eventually became an ace for the Army, heading a trio of aerialist performers called the Three Men on the Flying Trapeze.
When they performed at the Miami Air Races of 1935 — the largest gathering of airplanes ever at the time — the audience included the British and Nazi air force attaches from Washington and a delegation of Chinese military officers shopping for new planes.
The Chinese group was being squired around by US businessman and adventurer William Pawley (described by his biographer as “a cross between Indiana Jones and Donald Trump”).
Pawley had been making a fortune selling Curtiss-Wright planes to the Chinese and had, in fact, just opened an assembly factory in Hangchow (Hangzhou). He invited Chennault’s trio to join him on his yacht. There they were invited to China to help train its fledgling air force.
And the rest, as they, is history. Chennault explained his decision to accept the Chinese offer in a letter to his brother. “It is even possible that my ‘feeble’ efforts may influence history for some few hundreds of years.”
The book’s aerial dog fights are right out of Hollywood (move over, Luke), only more immediate with all of the wonderful firsthand accounts in the pilots’ own words. As Michael Punke, author of The Revenant, said of this book: “This is a movie waiting to be made.”
As for the origin of the shark nose designs on the P-40s, the AVG pilots were drinking gin one evening in the Burma jungle in 1941 when one of them picked up a copy of Illustrated Weekly of India. It had a photo of an Australian P-40 on the cover, with the shark jaws design.
He showed it to Chennault. Not only did the boss like it, he ordered the design painted on every airplane in the fleet.
The “tigers” nickname came in a Dec 29, 1941 Time magazine article titled “Blood for the Tigers”, describing how “the Flying Tigers swooped, let the Japanese have it” in the skies over Kunming.
In a flourish of purple prose, the writer made it up. “Chennault later claimed he had no knowledge of the origin of the name ‘Flying Tigers’ and was ‘astonished’ to see it in the press,” Kleiner wrote.