World War II › Special Units › Marco Polo Bridge
Special Units · China and Burma, 1941–1942
The American Volunteer Group
American pilots and ground crews on civilian contracts flew Curtiss P-40 fighters for China from 20 December 1941, defending Kunming and Rangoon and the road between them, until the group was disbanded on 4 July 1942.
- Volunteers in Chinese service
- Burma and southwest China
- December 1941 – July 1942
Four years after the bridge
The Flying Tigers joined a war already four years old. Fighting near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beiping in July 1937 opened the full-scale war between China and Japan, and by 1941 Chinese soldiers, airmen and civilians had endured Shanghai, Nanjing and the bombing of Chongqing. The American Volunteer Group did not fight at the bridge, and it did not create China’s air war. It added another source of help to people who were already fighting (Flying Tigers feature).
Its organizer was Claire Lee Chennault, a retired Army Air Corps officer who had come to China in 1937 as an aviation adviser. The relationship depended on Chinese initiative as much as on American expertise; Soong Mei-ling, known to Americans as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, helped make it possible. American aviators had flown for China before; Arthur Chin, an American-born pilot badly burned after bailing out in 1939, is one of them. When the presidential adviser Lauchlin Currie visited in March 1941 he watched Chinese pilots practice formation flying and mock combat and reported Soviet aircraft deliveries. A month later he argued that stronger Chinese resistance would keep Japanese aircraft and troops tied down in China and away from Singapore. Aid to China was strategy before the United States was at war (Currie reports, FRUS 1941).
Contracts, crates and Kyedaw
The group was formally the First American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force. William Pawley’s Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, CAMCO, contracted with T. V. Soong to equip, supply and operate it, and Chennault directed it; American departments helped recruiting and released men from service (Romanus and Sunderland, Stilwell’s Mission to China, ch. I). The recruits came from the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. One surviving document shows how it worked: a letter of 8 August 1941 requesting Gregory Boyington’s resignation from the Marine Corps so that he could accept CAMCO employment.
The legend began with crates. On 14 July 1941 the American consul at Rangoon, Austin Brady, reported volunteers on the way and 68 P-40s in the port, only ten of them assembled. That is one dated snapshot, not the group’s final strength, but it shows the distance between delivering aircraft and fielding a fighter squadron. Through the summer and autumn the volunteers trained under Chennault at Kyedaw airfield near Toungoo while mechanics assembled and equipped the fighters. Men used to Army, Navy and Marine procedures became three squadrons: the 1st, the Adam & Eves; the 2nd, the Panda Bears; and the 3rd, the Hell’s Angels.
The aircraft were early-model Curtiss P-40s, later joined by P-40Es. The problem Chennault set his pilots was how to fight more agile Japanese fighters in a sturdy, heavily armed machine: use speed and height, attack from a favorable position and do not follow the enemy through every turn. That depended on warning, and the group relied on a Chinese network of observers who reported aircraft by telephone and radio so the fighters could get up in time (U.S. Air Force, “Chennault on Agile Combat Employment,” 2022). The pilots also painted shark mouths on the noses of their P-40s, a marking generally said to have been copied from photographs of RAF Tomahawks in North Africa. It became the group’s signature.
Kunming and Rangoon
Pearl Harbor changed the group’s position overnight. Its recruitment and training had come before the American declaration of war; all of its combat came after. The official Army Air Forces history records that one squadron, the 3rd, went to Mingaladon airfield outside Rangoon on 12 December 1941 after a British appeal, while the other two moved to Kunming (Craven and Cate, vol. I, ch. 14). Rangoon was the port through which supplies reached the Burma Road into China; Kunming stood at the Chinese end of that road.
On 20 December 1941 AVG fighters intercepted Japanese bombers threatening Kunming, the group’s first combat. Three days later the Rangoon detachment fought its first battle alongside the small Royal Air Force contingent defending the city. Through the winter the volunteers divided a small force among a port, a road, cities and the Chinese and British troops on the ground. Rangoon fell in March 1942, and the retreat through Burma made the supply problem worse. On 7 and 8 May 1942 Tex Hill led P-40Es in bombing and strafing attacks west of the Salween River during the Japanese advance into Yunnan. The Army’s official history credits Chinese troops with wrecking the bridge that halted the advance at the river and notes that postwar Japanese evidence does not support every later claim about a planned invasion of Yunnan (Stilwell’s Mission to China, ch. IV). The air attacks were one part of a Chinese defense.
How many Japanese aircraft the group destroyed is a harder question than the legend suggests. Published victory totals use different categories and different kinds of evidence, and this collection does not combine them into a scoreboard. What the record supports without argument is that a small, improvised force fought for six months over Burma and China at the end of a supply line that was being cut behind it.
The team on the ground
A list of aces tells only part of this story. Frank Losonsky joined in May 1941 and spent his war as a crew chief keeping P-40s flying; the Air Force marked his death in 2020 as that of the last of the original Flying Tigers. Henry L. Olson appears in the Museum of Flight’s archive as a 3rd Squadron crew chief, and little else about him is known. Emma Jane Foster served the group in China as a civilian nurse. Their work explains why a count of aircraft on hand was never the same as a count of fighters ready to fly.
Chinese participation ran through all of it: the air-warning observers, the soldiers who guarded the fields, the laborers who built and repaired them and the civilians who sheltered airmen who came down. The group’s pilots carried a printed rescue notice, often called a blood chit, asking Chinese soldiers and civilians to help the bearer. Many of the people who answered it are not named in any surviving record.
The name outlived the volunteers
The AVG was disbanded on 4 July 1942. The China Air Task Force and the 23rd Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces took over its mission, and only some of the volunteers joined them. Tex Hill and Ed Rector, a North Carolinian from Marshall who had attended Catawba College, stayed and each later commanded the 23rd Fighter Group. Robert Neale, the group’s leading ace, helped with the transition and went home. Boyington returned to the Marine Corps, commanded VMF-214, the Black Sheep, in the South Pacific and received the Medal of Honor for that later service.
On 10 March 1943 the Fourteenth Air Force was activated under Chennault. Its war included B-25 and B-24 bombers, the airlift over the Hump from India and, later, the Chinese-American Composite Wing. The Flying Tigers name carried into all of it. The original group was a fighter organization in Chinese service; a proposed Second American Volunteer Group of bombers was recruited in 1941 but never became an operational force in China. Keeping those organizations apart is the only way to read the photographs and biographies correctly, and it takes nothing away from the volunteers of 1941 and 1942.
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. The group’s best-known emblem, a winged tiger leaping through a V for victory, was designed at the Walt Disney studio in 1942; it is not reproduced here. The AVG’s aircraft flew in Chinese national markings.
Timeline
- Claire Chennault, retired from the Army Air Corps, arrives to assess China’s air force.
- Fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge opens the full-scale war between China and Japan.
- The U.S. consul at Rangoon reports volunteers on the way and 68 P-40s in port, ten assembled.
- The volunteers train under Chennault at Kyedaw, near Toungoo, Burma.
- The 3rd Squadron moves to Mingaladon, outside Rangoon; the others go to Kunming.
- First combat: AVG fighters intercept Japanese bombers threatening Kunming.
- The Rangoon detachment fights alongside the RAF in the defense of the city.
- Tex Hill leads P-40E attacks west of the Salween as Chinese troops hold the river.
- The AVG is disbanded; the China Air Task Force and 23rd Fighter Group take over.
- The Fourteenth Air Force is activated under Chennault.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- The Flying Tigers: the full feature, with atlas, people and archival gallery
- Fighters, bombers and the Hump: which aircraft belonged to which story
- Chapter 8: America and the World, 1937–1941
- The Marco Polo Bridge collection and atlas
By the numbers
The Flying Tigers by the numbers
What the AVG lost in men
Members killed or captured, Dec 1941 – Jul 1942, as tallied in the group’s own summary; later historians’ figures differ slightly
Source: Flying Tigers Association, “AVG History” (the group’s own 1942 summary)
Where the P-40s were lost
AVG fighters destroyed, by cause, per the group’s summary. Most were lost on the ground, not in the air
Source: Flying Tigers Association, “AVG History” (the group’s own 1942 summary)
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
The Flying Tiger decal, Kunming
John “Pete” Petach under the tiger
Charles Older's P-40B at Kunming
No. 112 Squadron RAF: the original shark mouth
23rd Fighter Group patch, Fourteenth Air Force
Fourteenth Air Force: the Flying Tigers' heirs
Help China! China Is Helping Us — United China Relief
China — First to Fight!
Sources
- W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. I, ch. 14, “Commitments to China,” and vol. VII, ch. 5, “Airline to China.”
- Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland, Stilwell’s Mission to China, United States Army in World War II (1953), chs. I, III and IV.
- U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941: Currie reports of 15 March and 25 April 1941; Brady’s Rangoon dispatch of 14 July 1941; the Chinese aircraft program of 19 July 1941.
- National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, “14th Air Force in China: From Volunteers to Regulars” and “China Operations”; U.S. Air Force, “Last of the legendary World War II Flying Tigers dies” (12 February 2020) and “Chennault on Agile Combat Employment” (2022).
- The Museum of Flight Archives, American Volunteer Group, Henry L. Olson and Robert H. Neale records; Penn State All-Sports Museum and Yale University Archives on Emma Jane Foster.
- Further reading: Braxton Eisel, The Flying Tigers: Chennault’s American Volunteer Group in China (Air Force History and Museums Program, 2009).