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The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan Before Pearl Harbor - Hardcover

Kleiner, Sam

 
9780399564130: The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan Before Pearl Harbor
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0399564136 ISBN 13: 9780399564130
Verlag: Viking, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

The thrilling story behind the American pilots who were secretly recruited to defend the nation’s desperate Chinese allies before Pearl Harbor and ended up on the front lines of the war against the Japanese in the Pacific. 

Sam Kleiner’s The Flying Tigers uncovers the hidden story of the group of young American men and women who crossed the Pacific before Pearl Harbor to risk their lives defending China. Led by legendary army pilot Claire Chennault, these men left behind an America still at peace in the summer of 1941 using false identities to travel across the Pacific to a run-down airbase in the jungles of Burma. In the wake of the disaster at Pearl Harbor this motley crew was the first group of Americans to take on the Japanese in combat, shooting down hundreds of Japanese aircraft in the skies over Burma, Thailand, and China. At a time when the Allies were being defeated across the globe, the Flying Tigers’ exploits gave hope to Americans and Chinese alike.
 
Kleiner takes readers into the cockpits of their iconic shark-nosed P-40 planes—one of the most familiar images of the war—as the Tigers perform nail-biting missions against the Japanese. He profiles the outsize personalities involved in the operation, including Chennault, whose aggressive tactics went against the prevailing wisdom of military strategy; Greg “Pappy” Boyington, the man who would become the nation’s most beloved pilot until he was shot down and became a POW; Emma Foster, one of the nurses in the unit who had a passionate romance with a pilot named John Petach; and Madame Chiang Kai-shek herself, who first brought Chennault to China and who would come to visit these young Americans.

A dramatic story of a covert operation whose very existence would have scandalized an isolationist United States, The Flying Tigers is the unforgettable account of a group of Americans whose heroism changed the world, and who cemented an alliance between the United States and China as both nations fought against seemingly insurmountable odds.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Samuel Kleiner is a lawyer based in New York City. He was raised in Tucson, Arizona and holds a BA from Northwestern University, a doctorate in international relations from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a JD from Yale Law School. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Dancing in the Sky

To understand Claire Chennault you have to trace his roots to the backwoods of northeast Louisiana. The Chennault house was a few miles south of Gilbert, a town of just a few hundred people. Raised up several feet to protect it from the floods that plagued the flatlands, the house was a small, single-story cottage with gingerbread trim and an inviting porch in the back. It was a modest abode, but it was the pride of John Chennault, Claire's father, a cotton farmer who had built the house with his own hands in 1905 when Claire was a boy. Claire Chennault would fondly recall "roaming the oak woods and moss-draped cypress swamps of the Mississippi flood plains in northeast Louisiana." The Tensas River basin was Chennault's childhood playground—he spent time hunting and fishing by himself in the swamps. As he grew older, his father would let him go on treks for days at a time. Claire would take a fishing rod and survive on whatever he could catch, frying catfish and bream with a slab of bacon. He would live in a lean-to he built out of tree branches and sleep on a pile of leaves, and when he wanted to bathe would jump in a watering hole. He shot his first gun, a Winchester rifle, at the age of eight and soon graduated to shooting squirrels. He learned how to build a pyramid trap, a box that was held up by a twig with some oat or corn flakes as bait. He became self-reliant during this idyllic childhood, which resembled that of the hero of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of his favorite books. His solitary adventures in the woods, however, may have masked a darker side of his childhood. His mother died when he was only five, and a stepmother he loved passed away a few years later. The woods were always there for him.

Chennault also had a vivid imagination that drew him to distant lands, and he dreamt of someday seeing more of the world. Although he didn't excel at school—he didn't like following instructions or sitting still—he found a collection of books at his grandfather's house about the ancient Greek and Roman wars and would spend hours transfixed by reading them. He recalled, "Although I had no idea where Greece, Carthage and Rome were, I was enthralled by the charging elephants, armored warriors and burning ships in the colored engravings of the battles of Thermopylae, Zama, Cannae and Salamis." He wanted to escape from his seemingly inevitable fate as a cotton farmer like his father, and instead become a soldier. In fact, he came from a long line of fighting men. He could trace his paternal lineage to a soldier who had fought in the American Revolution; his mother was a direct descendant of General Robert E. Lee.

In 1909 Chennault enrolled at Louisiana State University to study agriculture, the only course that was open to him based on his primary education, but quickly signed up for ROTC training. He was determined to live up to what was expected of him as a soldier. When he was ordered to stand guard over a stairway, marching back and forth with a bayoneted rifle in hand, upperclassmen poured buckets of water on him from the floor above, but as he later recalled, "I continued to walk my post, drenched to the skin." Whatever merit he may have had as a soldier, he quickly found that he couldnÕt keep up academically due to his limited primary education. He also found that despite his efforts, he struggled with attending to the minute details that characterized life in the army. He racked up forty demerits in just one month. During a dress inspection, he was caught with his trouser legs rolled up, which was against regulations. An officer yanked him front and center and yelled in his face: "Chennault, you will never make a soldier." The experience scarred Chennault, who came to feel that perhaps his lot in life was to be a cotton farmer after all. Over a break he returned home to fish, a source of comfort since his youth, and never returned to Louisiana State.

He dreaded what the future might hold. He knew cotton farming would mean "trying to eke a living . . . in a losing battle against palmetto root, bad weather, fluctuating prices, and the passing years." He'd seen the toll that life had taken on his father. The low price of cotton during the financial panic of 1907 had nearly wiped out the family's small farm, and an infestation of boll weevils could destroy an entire yearÕs crop. "The future seemed very dull indeed," Chennault recalled, and though he was "looking for bright new worlds to conquer," he couldn't seem to find in what direction they lay. That all would change on one Sunday afternoon at the state fair.

The Fifth Annual Louisiana State Fair was held in Shreveport in November 1910. It was primarily a celebration of the state's agricultural traditions, with prizes awarded for the best crops and livestock, but it also featured horse races, tightrope walkers, and concerts by a military band. At eight o'clock each night a thousand dollars' worth of fireworks lit up the skies, a spectacular performance set to the music of the "Last Days of Pompeii."

The fair was a place where Louisianans could gather to take pride in the state's history, but it also offered them a glimpse of the future with a display of some new technology. The big attraction in 1910 was a biplane. Less than seven years after the Wright Brothers' achievement at Kitty Hawk, few Americans had actually seen a plane in flight.

The local papers promoted the event, promising that the pilots would "astonish the people who visit the Fair by their daring skill in the air." The main pilot, Stanley Vaughn of Ohio, had designed his plane himself, modeling it after one constructed by Curtiss. On November 3, the second day of the fair, his biplane ascended but as it rose fifty feet above the field it suddenly plummeted to the earth, just "like a duck suddenly shot," as the Shreveport Times described it. After the plane hit the ground, the stunned crowd ran toward it, but Vaughn "stepped out of the [plane] without a scratch, though he had received quite a jar from the fall." He vowed that he would fly again and his machine would be ready. His next performance would be on Sunday, November 6.

"Sunday was a big day at the Shreveport State Fair," the New Orleans Times-Democrat reported. There were thousands in attendance, coming from all over Louisiana, as well as neighboring Texas and Arkansas. Claire Chennault had traveled a hundred and fifty miles from Gilbert. The Shreveport Times reported that "the sky was perfectly clear and it was just cool enough to make the exertion of sightseeing a pleasure."

As the sun began to set, Chennault and the other spectators crowded into the stands. From the tent at the edge of the field, "the whir of the engine on the aeroplane was heard, and the people soon saw the slim lines of the heavier-than-air machine roll out of the tent, and make for the center of the race course." As the craft began to roll, "eyes were strained through the dusk to see the machine, and soon outlined against the sky lighted by the setting sun, the machine arose like a mighty bird," and started to climb. After flying for a quarter mile, however, Vaughn experienced engine trouble and brought the plane down, crashing through the race-course fence. Once again he walked away unharmed.

Still, the crowd considered the flight a success—the plane had gotten off the ground. For Claire Chennault, witnessing the plane gliding overhead, even for just a few moments, was a revelation. He now saw "a new frontier" that "sowed the seed of my desire to fly," one that would shape the rest of his life. His urge was intense and immediate, but years would pass before he got his first chance to take to the sky.

Chennault finished up his studies at Louisiana State Normal and set out to become a teacher. He got a lucky break...

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Verlag
Viking
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399564136
ISBN 13 
9780399564130
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
VIKING
https://www.penguin.com/overview-vikingbooks/

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