With the Tigers Over China, 1941-1942

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Military History History 1999 With the Tigers over China, 1941-1942 Jerome Klinkowitz University of Northern Iowa Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Klinkowitz, Jerome, "With the Tigers over China, 1941-1942" (1999). Military History. 17. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_military_history/17 With the Tigers over China — • — 1941-1942 With the Tigers over China 1941-1942 ]erome Klinkowitz THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OP KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 1999 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 03 02 01 00 99 12 3 4 5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klinkowitz, Jerome. With the Tigers over China, 1941-1942 / Jerome Klinkowitz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-2115-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. World War, 1939-1945—Aerial operations, American. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Aerial operations, British. 3. World War, 1939- 1945—Campaigns—Pacific Area. 4. World War, 1939-1945— Personal narratives, American. I. Title. D790.K564 1999 940.54'25—dc21 99-13691 For Wendell Lampe and John Lounsberry, neighbors and friends Contents Acknowledgments • ix Geographical, Historical, and Textual Notes • xi Introduction: The War that Wasn't First • 1 Tigers over Burma • 11 At Odds in China • 55 The RAF's Less than Finest Hour • 97 An Adventurers' War • 149 Bibliography • 167 Index • 171 Acknowledgments - • - With the Tigers over China is a study of how participants in America's and Britain's Far East air war during 1941 and 1942 wrote about their experiences. Their writing is par- ticularly important today because this theater of operations has been too often neglected. It was not a global priority at the time, and because the nature of its flyers' successes (in an otherwise losing cause) confounded accepted images of air combat, it was rarely given its due in official histories after- ward. To remedy this situation means reading and consider- ing how the participants viewed their war, something I have been able to undertake only with the help of many others. My earlier studies of such materials from the air war in World War II's European and Mediterranean theaters (Their Finest Hours and Yanks over Europe) were aided by firsthand help from veterans of the conflict, and their personal assis- tance continues with this book. Therefore, my thanks go to Leroy Newby (a bombardier on B-24s), Alan F. Kelsey (an air gunner on Wellingtons and Lancasters), Clyde B. East (a Mustang pilot), Dr. D.W. McLennan (a flight leader in the Royal Canadian Air Force), Don Charlwood (a navigator on Lancasters for the Royal Australian Air Force, serving in England with the RAF), and John Richards (a Coldstream x • Acknowledgments Guardsman with a special interest in the air battles above his home in Plymouth). In recent years, my work has been enriched by many conversations with my neighbors, Wendell Lampe and John Lounsberry, who were part of the war at sea and in the air and who have helped me comprehend the conflict's larger dimensions; it is to them that this book is most respectfully dedicated. Aviation specialist booksellers are another important re- source, all of whom have provided help especially tailored to a researcher's needs. Among these are Kenneth Owen, of the Owens Book Centre in Tavistock, England, whose shop near the old corn market contains signature boards from flyers in almost every RAF unit from World War II, including the American Eagle Squadrons. Others are Brian Cocks of Helpston, near Peterborough, and—in the United States—Jim Peters of Crawford-Peters Aeronautica (San Diego) and the specialists at Zenith Aviation Books (Osceola, Wisconsin). Collector and literary critic Peter Reed, an RAF veteran teach- ing at the University of Minnesota, has been a great help and good friend. Terrence J. Lindell of Wartburg College shared resources, as did Robert F. Donahue of Springfield, Massa- chusetts, who most kindly supplied photographs found among the effects of his late brother, Flight Lieutenant Arthur G. Donahue, an American volunteer in Britain's Royal Air Force. Bob Nandell of the Des Moines Register and indepen- dent researcher Tom Boyle of Bennett, Iowa, supplied photographs as well, for which I am grateful. Professionally, the University of Northern Iowa and its Graduate College remain my sole source of research support, most recently a semester's Professional Development Leave. My wife Julie has been a patient companion in exploring old air bases in the United States, England, Europe, and the Pacific. Our family's peace- time flyer, my uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Richard P. Klinko- witz, Wisconsin Air National Guard, Retired, has always been an inspiration, from sitting me in an F-89 Scorpion cockpit as a youngster to discussing military flying in recent years. Most of all, I am grateful to the memoirists themselves, who not only fought an especially dangerous war but wrote about it when it was a less than popular thing to do. Geographical, Historical, and Textual Notes - • - Burma, China, and Singapore form the geographic triangle that constitutes the Far East of this book. Once a province of India, by 1940 Burma (to the immediate east of the Indian subcontinent and directly south of China's western reaches) was a separate country, albeit under British con- trol. Located south of both Burma and China at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore in 1940 was a British crown colony. Although Burma gained independence from British rule in 1948, Singapore remained part of the Commonwealth until 1963. In the air war fought in Far Eastern skies, the Japanese Zero fighter was a worthy opponent of both the American P-40 Tomahawk and the British Hurricane. Its success prompted an equivalent of the "Spitfire snobbery" preva- lent among Luftwaffe pilots in the European Theater, for just as German pilots preferred to identify their troublesome opponents as being R.J. Mitchell's classic warbird, many American and British flyers tended to report any well-per- forming low-wing monoplane as the Mitsubishi Zero, when in fact the adversary could well have been the Nakajima Ki- 43 Hayabusa. In June 1941, the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) xii • Geographical, Historical, and Textual Notes was renamed the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), which in 1947 became a separate service, the United States Air Force (USAF). In the narrative that follows, American forces are described by their name at the time and by the appropriate abbreviation. Publication dates are given at the first appearance of works cited in the text. Thereafter, pagination is given in parentheses. A full bibliography of books quoted is found at the end. Introduction — • — The War that Wasn't First - • - No universally common date marks the beginning of the Second World War. Depending on when which of the eventual Allied or Axis powers joined it, its commencement can be years apart. The Soviet Union, for example, was a bel- ligerent only in the European theater until August 1945, when at the very end it declared war against Japan. Italy was in an even more complex position, not declaring war on the Allies until June 1940 and being taken out of the Axis well before Germany surrendered. Britain's declaration in September 1939 and America's entry in December 1941 are more evident dates, provoked as they were by Hitler's assault on Britain's ally Poland and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, respectively. When it comes to World War II in the Far East, starting times are even more problematic. Is it July 7, 1937, when Japan began a shooting war with China at the Marco Polo Bridge? Or is the real date as early as 1931, when Manchuria was declared a Japanese protectorate? If either date is accepted, it makes the Far Eastern theater the Second World War's first scene of action. Adding credibility to this notion, especially in terms of the air war that so distinguished the entire world conflict, was that one of its major American fig- ures was working on military aviation in China four and 2 • With the Tigers over China one half years before Pearl Harbor. But even if Claire Chen- nault's employment by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is considered a localized anomaly, his subsequent organiza- tion of the American Volunteer Group, or AVG, must count as a serious factor as China and the rest of the Far East became a theater of globally important air combat. Yet because the men in what became known as the Fly- ing Tigers were a volunteer group, and even more so because hostilities did not come to Britain's territories in the Far East until even later—beginning in December 1941, so long after the Blitz on Poland, the Battle of France, and the Battle of Britain had characterized England's air war as a cross-Channel affair—conflict in the Far East was regarded as the war that wasn't first.

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