World Battlefronts: When a Hawk Smiles

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Chennault was a pursuit pilot with ideas. His famed stunt team (the "Three Men on a Flying Trapeze") thrilled air-meet crowds. But its purpose was serious: to impress on the Air Corps the value of precision pursuit operation. The conservative Air Corps command paid little or no attention to these and other Chennault ideas.

Russian military observers offered him $10,000 a year to go to Russia as military adviser and pursuit instructor. He turned the offer down, stuck with Billy Mitchell and a few other pioneers through years of frustration and discouragement.

Finally, in 1937, the Army retired him when he was 56 — officially, because of his partial deafness. Major Chennault told a friend: "I'm glad to get out [of the Air Corps]. They're still running it with the old 1917-18 ideas." That same year the dark, determined Louisianian went to Shanghai and became Chiang Kai-shek's air adviser. "Why," he had growled, "should I worry my brains out when I can prove my theories somewhere else?" In a few months, the Japs almost wiped out his infant air force, but Chennault did not regret his move or noticeably pine for the U.S. Air Corps.

He proved his theories, and the Pacific war brought the first sweet taste of public recognition. During the Burma campaign and after he withdrew to China and the long blockade, his pilots and his tactics wrote a never-to-be-forgotten record across the skies of Asia. Every agency of the U.S. Government had fought his efforts to organize the American Volunteer Group; its achievements — and his — are now a part of American glory.

On April 15, 1942, he was called back to active duty in the U.S. Army and on July 4, with the rank of brigadier general, took over command of the Fourteenth's predecessor, the starveling China Air Task Force. He wanted to retain the A.V.G. as an independent striking force, but Washington told him to get into the Army — or else. "I don't want to be a general," Chennault sighed, "but I can't fight without planes." For a while he almost had to fight without them anyway: in the summer and fall of 1942 his bomber force sometimes averaged five B-25s, his fighter force was down to 20 P-40s, and for months he never had more than 80 planes fit for combat.

The Tigers. "We beat the Zeros with our P-40s; but if we had Zeros and the Japs P-405, we would change our tactics and still beat them," Chennault has said.

Not boasting, but with the assurance of experience and of deep, intelligent study, Chennault taught his early pilots to minimize the P-40's disadvantages and utilize its advantages : greater fire power, heavier armor for pilot and fuel, sturdier construction, a much higher diving speed. He also insisted on using a tight, flexible and ecomical two-plane formation. He discouraged dog-fighting by individual pilots. Essence of his teaching: hit hard, hit precisely, hit as a team.