AIR: Same Skies, Same Hopes

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The first group of Chinese pilots to be trained in the U.S. were ready for graduation. Now, after some 20 weeks of intensive instruction under U.S. officers, they would return to China as sub-lieutenants in the Chinese Air Force.

From the rough pine stage of the post theater at Luke Field, Ariz., the President's wispy little assistant, Lauchlin Currie, who has seen China's war problem at firsthand, read them a personal message from Franklin Roosevelt: "To you, the first group . . . my heartiest congratulations. . . . I am informed that you have acquitted yourself with distinction."

They had. The legend among oldtime U.S. pilots that Chinese make poor flyers took another body blow. Luke Field's Oriental fledglings had blown a few tires, scraped a few wing tips. But they had had no serious crackups, had been smooth and unhurried in the air. Also they made instructors' eyes pop at the way they could shoot. Diving at a tiny towed target and slamming away with fixed aerial guns at a little patch of white on the ground, the top Chinese gunnery student plunked in 45 out of a possible 200. At the toughest kind of firing, where ten in 200 is considered workmanlike, he had given an expert's performance. U.S. fellow students heard of it with respectful whistles. They also commended the Chinese ability in outdoor sports, crap shooting, hangar flying (bull sessions to college students).

Major General Ralph P. Cousins, Commanding General, West Coast Air Corps Training Center, delivered the graduation address:

"These Arizona skies, which you have sailed so high and so well, meet your own native skies across the Pacific. That is a good thing for both of us to remember: the same skies, the same hopes—and we will fight together until they are no longer fringed with the same enemy. . . . This is my farewell to you, and this is my farewell message: Go back and give 'em hell!"