These American Soldiers Are Revered In China

During World War II, some American engineers were given a one-year contract to live and work in China, flying, repairing and making airplanes. Pay is as much as US$ 16,725 a month with 30 days off a year. Housing is included, and you’ll get an extra $700 a month for food. And there’s an extra $11,000 for every Japanese airplane you destroy – no limit.

That’s the deal – in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars – that a few hundred Americans took in 1941 to become the heroes, and some would even say the saviors, of China.

Those American pilots, mechanics and support personnel became members of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), later known as the Flying Tigers.

The group’s warplanes featured the gaping, tooth-filled mouth of a shark on their nose, a fearsome symbol still used by some US military aircraft to this day.

The symbolic fierceness was backed up by AVG pilots in combat. The Flying Tigers are credited with destroying as many as 497 Japanese planes while losing only 73.

Today, despite US-China tensions, those American mercenaries are still revered in China.

"China always remembers the contribution and sacrifice made to it by the United States and the American people during the World War II," says an entry on the Flying Tigers memorial page of China’s state-run newspaper People’s Daily Online.

The bond is such that the daughter and granddaughter of the Flying Tigers’ founder are among the few Americans invited to Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing commemorating the end of World War II.

In the late 1930s, China had been invaded by the armies of Imperial Japan and was struggling to withstand its better equipped and unified foe. Japan was virtually unopposed in the air, able to bomb Chinese cities at will.

Leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had been able to loosely unite China’s warlords under a central government, later hired American Claire Chennault, a retired US Army captain, to form an air force.

Chennault first spent a few years putting together an air raid warning network and building airbases across China, according to the Flying Tigers’ official website. In 1940, he was dispatched to the United States – still a neutral party – to find pilots and planes that could defend China against Japan.

With good contacts in the administration of US President Franklin Roosevelt and a budget that could pay Americans as much as three times what they could earn in the US military, Chennault was able to get the fliers he needed.

A deal was secured to get 100 Curtiss P-40B fighters built for Britain sent to China instead.

In his memoirs, Chennault wrote that the P-40s he got lacked a modern gun sight.

His pilots were "aiming their guns through a crude, homemade, ring-and-post gun sight instead of the more accurate optical sights used by the Air Corps and the Royal Air Force," he wrote.

What the P-40 lacked in ability, Chennault made up for in tactics, having the AVG pilots dive from a high position and unleash their heavy machine guns on the structurally weaker but more maneuverable Japanese planes.

In a low, twisting, turning dogfight, the P-40 would lose.

The pilots Chennault enrolled were far from the cream of the crop.

Ninety-nine fliers, along with support personnel, made the trip to China in the fall of 1941, according to the US Defense Department history.

Some were fresh out of flight school, others flew lumbering flying boats or were ferry pilots for large bombers. They signed up for the Far East adventure to make a lot of money or because they were simply bored.

Perhaps the best known of the Flying Tigers, US Marine Greg Boyington – around whom the 1970’s TV show "Black Sheep Squadron" was based – was in it for the money.