Consider this job offer:
A one-year contract to live and work in China, flying, repairing and making airplanes. Pay is as much as $16,725 a month with 30 days off a year. Housing is included, and you’ll get an extra $700 a month for food. And there’s an extra $11,000 for every Japanese airplane you destroy – no limit.
That’s the deal – in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars – that a few hundred Americans took in 1941 to become the heroes, and some would even say the saviors, of China.
Those American pilots, mechanics and support personnel became members of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), later known as the Flying Tigers.
The group’s warplanes featured the gaping, tooth-filled mouth of a shark on their nose, a fearsome symbol still used by some US military aircraft to this day.
The symbolic fierceness was backed up by AVG pilots in combat. The Flying Tigers are credited with destroying as many as 497 Japanese planes while losing only 73.
Today, despite US-China tensions, those American mercenaries are still revered in China.
“China always remembers the contribution and sacrifice made to it by the United States and the American people during the World War II,” says an entry on the Flying Tigers memorial page of China’s state-run newspaper People’s Daily Online.
The bond is such that the daughter and granddaughter of the Flying Tigers’ founder are among the few Americans invited to Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing commemorating the end of World War II.
In the late 1930s, China had been invaded by the armies of Imperial Japan and was struggling to withstand its better equipped and unified foe. Japan was virtually unopposed in the air, able to bomb Chinese cities at will.
Leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had been able to loosely unite China’s warlords under a central government, later hired American Claire Chennault, a retired US Army captain, to form an air force.
Chennault first spent a few years putting together an air raid warning network and building airbases across China, according to the Flying Tigers’ official website. In 1940, he was dispatched to the United States – still a neutral party – to find pilots and planes that could defend China against Japan.
With good contacts in the administration of US President Franklin Roosevelt and a budget that could pay Americans as much as three times what they could earn in the US military, Chennault was able to get the fliers he needed.
A deal was secured to get 100 Curtiss P-40B fighters built for Britain sent to China instead.
In his memoirs, Chennault wrote that the P-40s he got lacked a modern gun sight.
His pilots were “aiming their guns through a crude, homemade, ring-and-post gun sight instead of the more accurate optical sights used by the Air Corps and the Royal Air Force,” he wrote.
What the P-40 lacked in ability, Chennault made up for in tactics, having the AVG pilots dive from a high position and unleash their heavy machine guns on the structurally weaker but more maneuverable Japanese planes.
In a low, twisting, turning dogfight, the P-40 would lose.
The pilots Chennault enrolled were far from the cream of the crop.
Ninety-nine fliers, along with support personnel, made the trip to China in the fall of 1941, according to the US Defense Department history.
Some were fresh out of flight school, others flew lumbering flying boats or were ferry pilots for large bombers. They signed up for the Far East adventure to make a lot of money or because they were simply bored.
Perhaps the best known of the Flying Tigers, US Marine Greg Boyington – around whom the 1970’s TV show “Black Sheep Squadron” was based – was in it for the money.
“Having gone through a painful divorce and responsible for an ex-wife and several small children, he had ruined his credit and incurred substantial debt, and the Marine Corps had ordered him to submit a monthly report to his commander on how he accounted for his pay in settling those debts,” according to a US Defense Department history of the group.
Chennault had to teach his disparate group how to be fighter pilots – and to fight as a group – essentially from scratch.
Training was rigorous and deadly. Three pilots were killed early in accidents.
During one training day, which became known as “Circus Day,” eight P-40s were damaged as pilots landed too hard, or the ground crew taxied too fast, causing collisions.
Chennault expressed his disappointment at his group’s first combat mission against Japanese bombers attacking the AVG base in Kunming, China, on December 20, 1941. He thought the pilots lost their discipline.
“They tried near-impossible shots and agreed later that only luck had kept them from either colliding with each other or shooting each other down,” the Defense Department history says.
Still, they shot down three Japanese bombers, losing only one fighter that ran out of fuel and crash-landed.
The pilots quickly conquered their steep learning curve.
A few days after Kunming, they were deployed to Rangoon, the capital of British colonial Burma and a vital port for the supply line that got allied war materiel to Chinese troops facing the Japanese army.
Japanese bombers came at the city in waves over 11 days during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. The Flying Tigers ripped holes through the Japanese formations and cemented their fame.
“The AVG had officially knocked 75 enemy aircraft out of the skies with an undetermined number of probable kills,” the group’s website says. “The AVG losses were two pilots and six aircraft.”
The Flying Tigers spent 10 weeks total in Rangoon, never fielding more than 25 P-40s.
“This tiny force met a total of a thousand-odd Japanese aircraft over Southern Burma and Thailand. In 31 encounters they destroyed 217 enemy planes and probably destroyed 43. Our losses in combat were four pilots killed in the air, one killed while strafing and one taken prisoner. Sixteen P-40’s were destroyed,” Chennault wrote in his memoir.
Despite the Flying Tigers’ heroics in the air, allied ground forces in Burma could not hold off the Japanese. Rangoon fell in March and the AVG retreated north into Burma’s interior.
But they’d bought vital time for the allied war effort, tying down Japanese planes that could have been used in India or elsewhere in China and the Pacific.
Though news didn’t travel quickly in 1941-42, the United States – still reeling from the devastating December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – was eager for heroes. The Flying Tigers fit the bill.
Republic Pictures cast John Wayne in the leading role of “Flying Tigers” in 1942. Movie posters showed a shark-toothed P-40 diving in attack mode.
Meanwhile, the AVG’s sponsors in Washington asked the Walt Disney company to make a logo.
Disney artists came up with “a winged Bengal Tiger jumping through a stylized ‘V for Victory’ symbol,” the US history says.
The logo didn’t include the iconic shark mouth featured on the Flying Tigers’ aircraft.
Chennault wrote that the shark mouth didn’t originate with his group, but was copied from British P-40 fighters in North Africa, which in turn may have copied them from Germany’s Luftwaffe.
“How the term Flying Tigers was derived from the shark-nosed P-40’s I never will know,” he wrote.
When the US entered the war, US military leaders wanted the Flying Tigers assimilated into the US Army Air Corps.
But the pilots themselves either wanted to go back to their original services – many came from the Navy or Marine Corps – or wanted to stay as civilian contractors of the Chinese government, where the pay was much better.
Most told Chennault they’d quit before doing what Washington wanted. When the Army threatened to draft them as privates if they didn’t volunteer, those who’d considered signing on opted out.
Chennault was made a brigadier general in the US Army and agreed that the Flying Tigers would become a US military outfit on July 4, 1942.
Though the Flying Tigers continued to wreak havoc on the Japanese in the spring of 1942 – striking ground targets and aircraft from China to Burma to Vietnam – it was clear the force was entering its waning days, according to US military history.
The AVG flew its last mission on the day it would cease to exist, July 4.
Four Flying Tiger P-40s faced off against a dozen Japanese fighters over Hengyang, China. The Americans shot down six of the Japanese with no losses of their own, according to a US history.
Despite frosty relations with Washington in recent years, the bond that American mercenaries made with China 80 years ago remains untarnished.
There are at least half a dozen museums dedicated to or containing exhibits about the Flying Tigers in China, and they’ve been the subject of contemporary movies and cartoons.
The Flying Tiger Heritage Park is on the site of an old airfield in Guilin where Chennault once had his command post in a cave.
In the US, the website for the Louisiana museum that bears Chennault’s name sums up what he hoped his legacy would be at the top of its mainpage, using the last lines of the general’s memoir:
“It is my fondest hope that the sign of the Flying Tiger will remain aloft just as long as it is needed and that it will always be remembered on both shores of the Pacific as the symbol of two great peoples working toward a common goal in war and peace.”
