When a Hawk Smiles

(See Cover)

Battlewise Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, knew that in taking the Gilbert Islands the U.S. had taken a short step toward Tokyo. The Admiral was proud of that step, but he could see beyond the islands. At his first press conference in nearly a year, he told Honolulu correspondents: "My opinion is that Japan will be defeated from China. . . . China with her reservoir of personnel and the possibility of airfields in easy striking distance of Japan is one of the steps along the road."

The General Listens. To Major General Claire Lee Chennault, perhaps more than to any other man, the Admiral's statement made excellent sense, held out a promise. Strangled by a Japanese land-sea blockade, General Chennault and his Fourteenth Air Force are operating at the end of a thin, 16,000-mile supply line, the longest in the world. A southeast China port through which can flow thousands of tons of needed war materiel from the U.S. is Claire Chennault's key to decisive victory. Only the Navy, knifing through the Gilberts toward Truk, and northward to Wake and Guam, while General Douglas Mac Arthur pushes toward the Philippines, could open such a port.

Last week the full realization of his hopes was not exactly near, but it seemed nearer than it ever had before. Much of the Pacific, and perhaps Malaya, must be cleared before the Navy, even in over whelming force, can open and sustain Chennault's cherished entry through the China coast. But the Navy has recognized his need and his potentialities. The Army must give him more planes, lick terrific problems of air supply before he can do his utmost within unopened China. But the Army, like the Navy, has at last recognized Chennault and China.

To show what he could do, the Fourteenth's commander last week sent his fighter-escorted, medium-range B-25 bombers racing over Shinchiku airdrome on Formosa off the east coast of China (see col. 1). The fact that medium-range B-25s and fighters could reach Formosa reminded observers that the Chinese had long since built advance airdromes in eastern China, in the hope that they some day would be used against Tokyo.

The Hawk. It is Claire Chennault's face that stops a man, meeting him for the first time. The skin is burnt and leather-beaten by the sun to a permanent brown, cut and scarred by razor-sharp lines that drop perpendicularly about his mouth. About the eyes sky-strain has woven a lacework of crow's-feet. Within this net work, two coal-black eyes brood and smolder. Said an artist assigned to do a portrait of the General : "That man has the face of a hawk."

The hawk face is not a cruel face. Rather, it expresses a tension bred of Chennault's whole mature life. A Louisiana cotton planter's son, he worked his way through college, taught in a country school. In World War I he enlisted as a private, got a commission at an officers' training camp, transferred from the infantry into aviation. Discharged in April 1920 (he did not go overseas), Chennault returned to his cotton plantation in the Louisiana delta. Several months later he was back in the Army, a first lieutenant in the Air Corps.