THE FLYING TIGERS: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War against Japan

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Nonfiction

First to fight

THE FLYING TIGERS:

The Untold Story of the American Pilots
Who Waged a Secret War against Japan

By Sam Kleiner

239 pp. Viking

Reviewed by Diane Diekman

Three years before the United States entered World War II, American pilots were already flying in a covert operation to defend China against Japan. Retired U.S. Army pilot Claire Chennault organized and led the group officially designated the American Volunteer Group (AVG)—better known as the Flying Tigers.

The Flying Tigers is an excellent portrayal of this short-lived unit. It also provides a biography of Chennault, concluding with his death in 1958. Author Sam Kleiner has done a masterful job of research and storytelling. Now an attorney in New York City, he grew up in a family that nurtured his love of history; his grandfather regaled him with stories of navigating a B-25 in the Pacific during World War II.

The book opens with a scene in which the news of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor is announced in New York City. The author builds on the turmoil by quoting a TIME magazine article that describes the nation’s horrified reaction. He then adds, “But that edition of TIME included another story, one that would capture the imaginations and raise the hopes of Americans in the dark days after Pearl Harbor. In China, a group of U.S. volunteers was battling the Imperial Japanese air force, whose planes had been bombing Chinese cities and killing civilians for the past four years. They were known as the Flying Tigers.”

Military pilots had been secretly recruited to work as mercenaries. Traveling with false identities across the Pacific Ocean for training in Burma, 300 individuals risked their lives to defend Chiang Kai-shek’s embattled China. These pilots in their shark-nosed Curtis Hawk P-40 fighters were the first Americans to directly meet the Japanese in combat. They and their exploits began to routinely make newspaper headlines, providing some hope that the United States could defeat Japan. The AVG was disbanded on July 4, 1942, when the U.S. Army took over the operation.

Kleiner pulls together details not previously published. In addition to in-depth historical research, he attended several Flying Tiger reunions while working on the book. His interviews with surviving members and their relatives, as well as the documents they shared, add greatly to the detail and quality of The Flying Tigers. His storytelling ability carries throughout the narrative.

Various AVG members are followed in the book, their lives and deaths intertwined. Chennault received the acclaim he longed for when John Wayne portrayed him in the 1943 movie, The Flying Tigers.

Paul Frillman, the unit’s chaplain, led a convoy out of Rangoon after the Japanese overran that city. “He had resisted heading the first convoy because he didn’t believe he could handle the task,” the author writes, “but he had done so and could take pride in having led his men to safety.”

Pilot John Petach met nurse Emma Foster on the ship to Burma in 1941. They fell in love and were married. As the AVG prepared to disband, Petach agreed to one last mission and was killed in action. When his widow returned to the United States with AVG pilots, the customs officers “treated the pilots like heroes,” Emma Petach recalled, but they “treated me like I was a camp follower or a prostitute, and that really hurt.”

Bill Reed was one of the pilots who left the AVG at the its end and returned to the United States in 1942 as a hero. He went back to China the following year. Shot down in 1944, he made his way through the wilderness and back to American lines. He lost his life when shot down again six months later.

Greg Boyington, described in the book mainly as a drunken aviator, later joined the Marine Corps. He gained fame after being shot down while commanding the fighter squadron known as the Black Sheep.

Historians, laymen, students of World War II, and the merely curious will find The Flying Tigers illuminating and fascinating.

--Diane Diekman is a retired U.S. Navy captain who grew up in South Dakota and currently lives in Sioux Falls. Her biographies are Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story and Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins.