Claire Lee Chennault was a medically retired Army Air Corps officer, partly deaf, when he arrived in China in 1937 as a civilian aviation adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. He spoke no Chinese, and every directive passed through Soong Mei-ling, Madame Chiang, later the group’s honorary commander. Running a flight school in Kunming, he studied Soviet volunteer squadrons and Japanese aircraft until the Soviets withdrew in 1940. That winter he went to Washington and, with quiet support in the Roosevelt administration, obtained 100 Curtiss P-40 fighters originally allocated to Britain, bought with a U.S. loan to China and routed through the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, CAMCO, to get around neutrality laws.
Recruits resigned their commissions and traveled on civilian passports for $600 to $750 a month plus a $500 bounty per confirmed kill. Chennault, called the Old Man, tested each pilot at Toungoo in Burma and moved those with padded records to other jobs. He banned turning fights with the nimbler Ki-27 and Ki-43 and taught dive and zoom attacks, backed by a civilian warning network of village observation posts. In their first combat on December 20, 1941, they broke up 10 bombers headed for Kunming, and in May 1942 their attacks in the Salween River gorge stopped a Japanese crossing. The group was credited with nearly 300 enemy aircraft for 14 pilots lost in air combat before it was absorbed into the Army Air Forces on July 4, 1942.
- The shark mouth paint came from a magazine photo of a British P-40 in North Africa, a design the British took from Luftwaffe Bf 110s in Crete.
- The volunteers had four doctors and three nurses, and mechanics stripped wrecked planes for parts.
- In April 1942 pilots revolted over low-level morale missions that paid no bounties, and Chennault suppressed it.
- General Clayton Bissell’s push for regular army discipline led most original pilots to refuse commissions.
- The volunteers were not recognized as U.S. military veterans for their CAMCO service until 1992.
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