I don’t know if he was the last Flying Tiger, but if he isn’t, there can’t be many left:
In September 1941, he left the Army Air Forces to volunteer for service in China as part of a secret program, the American Volunteer Group, nicknamed the Flying Tigers, under Gen. Claire Chenault. Made up of about 400 pilots and ground personnel and based in Burma, the Flying Tigers protected military supply routes between China and Burma and helped to get supplies to Chinese forces fighting the Japanese.
The group’s exploits became legend. Flying the P-40 aircraft, their fuselages painted with a toothsome tiger, the Flying Tigers were credited with shooting down 299 enemy planes and destroying 200 on the ground, even though the Japanese at times outnumbered Chenault’s group 15 to 1. On one day in late February 1942, the Flying Tigers downed 28 Japanese planes while losing none.
During one of the 1942 engagements, Gen. Bond destroyed three Japanese I-97 planes while piloting his P-40B. He was credited with nine kills in all.
Gen . Bond was shot down twice himself. On May 4, 1942, three Japanese fighters zeroed in on his plane over Pao-shan, China, and his plane and his clothing caught fire. Parachuting into a cemetery, he ran to a creek and was able to douse the flames. After spending a few weeks in a hospital, he returned to combat and was shot down again June 12, 1942. Despite head injuries — and shrapnel that he carried in his head the rest of his life — he was back in action a week later.
They probably still make them like that, but the opportunities to show it may be fewer. When I was a kid, I read Robert Scott’s God Is My Co-Pilot
Also, I’ve never been in a serious physical altercation in my life, and don’t know if I would have the physical courage to march into a battle. When I read accounts of warfare (particularly the Civil War or WW I) I recoil, and can’t imagine how they did it. I’m glad that we have people who do, though.
But I could always imagine strapping myself into an airplane and shooting down other airplanes. Getting shot down myself…not so much.
In my view, every American veteran of WWII was a hero, but some like General Bond just gained a bit of additional (well deserved) fame. To me his passing highlights the fact that we are loosing WWII veteran’s at a tremendous rate, slowed only by the thinning of their ranks. There is only one surviving American veteran of the First World War and I dread the not too distant future day when WWII vets are only a memory as well. My father, a deceased WWII vet, could remember reunions of Confederate Civil War veterans in the early 1930’s, but for my grandchildren WWII veterans will seem as far removed from reality as Civil War veterans seem to us now. The thought saddens me greatly.
I worked with a guy who was ex-Iraqi veteran Army all the way. He desperately wanted to be a helicopter pilot but he washed out because of the depth perception test. I was like, “Yea, they did that in Flying Tigers. Scrubbed a guy out cause he couldn’t see the sizes differences between two airplanes. Yet he went up anyways and died — dumb bastard.” He was like, “Yea, they go crazy with it now days. They take 2 bowling pins an cut one down ever so slightly lower than the other and you have to guess which is further back than the other.” He said it was really the test that catches most people.
70 years ago today, Germany invaded Poland and WWII began. Some historians point out that Japan and China had been fighting for some time before hostilities began in Europe, so I’ve seen several dates for when the war actually began. Be that as it may, the youngest WWII veterans are in their 80s now and are rapidly dissappearing.
I met Greg “Pappy” Boyington in 1981 at the Oshkosh convention. He was one of the Flying Tigers and later went on to lead VMF 214. He was shot down (IIRC, late 1944) and spent the rest of the war as a POW. The Japanese pilot who shot him down was also at Oshkosh that year. I heard they got on famously.
I also had a phone conversation with Flying Tiger veteran Eric Shilling in 1996. Some credit him with the shark’s mouth design for the AVG’s P-40s although a RAF unit had used the design before.
The winged tiger that became the symbol of Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers was a development that came only after the A.V.G. had been in combat for months and captivated the imagination of the media and public back home. At the request of the China Defense Supplies in Washington, D.C., Walt Disney’s artists in Hollywood developed the logo of a winged tiger flying through a “V” for victory, which was soon painted on all aircraft of the A.V.G.
Long before the tiger however, it was the shark that symbolized the aggressive resolve of the A.V.G. The origin of the distinctive white shark’s teeth is somewhat vague in the legend of the A.V.G. Some accounts attribute the idea to Eric Shilling, a former Army pilot who noted that the Japanese, as an island people of fishing fleets, “entertained a wholesale fear of sharks,” prompting the nose design as an A.V.G. strike at Japanese superstition.
In his autobiography James Howard recounts that: “One day Bert Christman had shown me a picture of a P-40 on the cover of the British newspaper India Illustrated weekly. The plane was being operated by the British from an airfield in North Africa. its nose had been painted with the head of a shark, its sharp teeth glistening from a wide-open mouth. It was a natural. The air scoop behind the propeller made a perfect outline for a shark’s head. It was adopted immediately by the three squadrons and painted on all of our planes. Some men even thought that this ferocious image would help to scare the superstitious Japanese pilots and make them turn for home.” In fact, the fearsome shark nose had been used by German pilots even before the R.A.F. painted teeth on their P-40s in the Libyan Desert.
WWII vets are a pretty amazing group of people. I’ve had the good fortune to meet many of them over the years. At the same time, I hold today’s servicemembers in very high regard. They volunteered in a time of war knowing what they were getting into. That takes guts.
One of the things I have picked up some glimmers of with regard to the story of Chennault and the AVG is Chennault being way ahead of his time with respect to “air combat between dissimilar aircraft.”
Wheras the impressive combat effectiveness of the AVG is always subject to revision based on scrutiny of claims and historical data, at the very least, Chennault’s mercenary pilots held their own against the Zero in “obsolete” P-40 aircraft, and his ideas must have been unheeded after Pearl Harbor when American forces had high losses against the Japanese.
There is some inkling of this in John Toland’s “Flying Tigers”, that Chennault was teaching what were considered highly unorthodox air combat tactics. Another inkling was a showing of the John Wayne movie “Flying Tigers”, where Mr. Wayne lands his P-40 after a combat skirmish, his Chinese rigger excitedly points out bullet holes, and John Wayne nonchalently and laconically remarks, “Termites.”
That showing of the movie was followed by interviews with some of the actual AVG pilots, was it squadron leader David Hill who was loosely who the John Wayne character was supposed to be? In it, who I believe was Hill remarked that the movie was not technically accurate in depicting turning “dogfight” combat between P-40’s and Zeroes, explaining that one “simply did not turn with the Zero”, and how the tactic was to put the P-40 into a straight-down dive, where the lightweight Zero would suffer from aeroelastic effects of transonic flight and be uncontrollable.
There was also some mention about why the Japanese bombers appeared upside down in the gun camera footage. Apparently Chennault had determined that the bombers had a blind spot in the 6-o’clock low position where they could not depress their tail gun, and he had his pilots engage the bombers by first diving below them, doing a barrel roll, and then doing a kind of upside down dive on them from this vulnerable direction.
I mean Chennault was pure Sun Tzu, figuring out how to fight to one’s own strengths and the enemy’s weakness with the weapons one had on hand (the P-40). He may have had a similar advantage to Americans who had fought air combat as mercenaries in the Spanish Civil War. I believe he had gone “native” and had close ties to the Chinese, perhaps engaging the Japanese in combat not only when he was still learning but when the Japanese were in the early phases of developing their own air combat tactics.
But however he came about his knowledge, he was way ahead of his time, doing something the Navy “Top Gun” school and Air Force “Red Flag” exercise were trying to figure out generations later, such as figuring out how big, heavy planes such as the Phantom and Tomcat could be used to engage the lighweight MiG, much like the Zero, being much more agile and maneuverable but suffering from aeroelastic loss of control in the Mach.
Why does the WaPo write Chennault’s name with only one ‘n’? Is that the correct spelling?
After the tribute to Bond, this website has a list of the current survivors. Warbirdforum