A Heritage of Chinese & American Cooperation during World War II

Daniel Jackson

THE FLYING TIGERS

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“The Japanese had full advantage in the air. They were extremely arrogant. They occupied the entire sky. The sky was entirely their territory. After the Flying Tigers came, the sky was our territory.”

-Lu Caiwen, Nationalist Intelligence Officer

The distinctive shark mouth on a P-40 fighter is the most recognizable symbol of Chinese-American friendship and cooperation. World War II was a seminal event in China’s history. Yet while most Americans know something about the mercenary airmen that volunteered to help defend it from an aggressive Japanese conquestThey do not understand the true depth or breadth of that two-way relationship

• The Sino-Japanese War • Challenges to Cooperation • A Two-Way Partnership • The Salween Campaign

The Sino-Japanese War

The Japanese invasion and occupation of China can be summed up in one word: devastation.

The out-of-control destruction of Nanjing was just one example among many of the brutality of conquest and occupation.

Japan saw its effort as a colonial project, a rejection of increasing global contact following the Great Depression by creating their own exclusive political-economic sphere in East Asia.

Between July 7, 1937 and December 7, 1941, Japan came to control China’s skies, along with 95% of its industry, ¼ its area, and half its population.

The Nationalist government traded space for time, retreating deep into the interior, establishing their new capital at Chongqing, in Sichuan Province.

In the north, the Chinese stopped the invaders by blowing the Yellow River dams. In the south, Nationalist general Xue Yue stopped them at Changsha. The front settled into a prolonged stalemate.

Unable to break the stalemate on the ground, in May 1939 the Japanese Army and Navy began massive bombing raids on the new capital, making it the most bombed city in the world until London took that dubious distinction during the Battle of Britain. In August 1940, they unleashed the new A6M Type “Zero” fighter and swept the Chinese Air Force from the skies.

“The Japanese fighters and bombers never stopped attacking us. I remember a Japanese fighter that flew low enough for me to see the pilot’s face. If I threw a rock at the airplane, I think it would have likely hit it… the Japanese were unopposed wherever they flew.”

- Luo Chih-tsai, Nationalist soldier

Luo Chi-tsai, a Nationalist soldier interviewed for the book, fled his home during the Japanese invasion. The enemy armies and air forces terrorized the people all across the country.

Completely blockaded along the coast, the Chinese built a road from Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, to Lashio in British-occupied Burma. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese closed this last remaining supply route by invading Burma from Thailand. They drove up toward Yunnan, sending the British and Chinese troops retreating in disarray. In May 1942, troops of the Japanese 56th Division continued into China, pursuing Chiang’s retreating troops to the banks of the Salween River.

By this time, the Chinese were no longer alone in their fight. Prior to Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt authorized a clandestine group of 100 planes and pilots to support China in its war against Japan. These were the famed Flying Tigers of the American Volunteer Group commanded by Claire Lee Chennault. With the Japanese poised on the banks of the Salween, Flying Tiger ace “Tex” Hill, led the group’s P-40s in attacks on the gorge. They bombed the road, making it impassable, and strafed the Japanese.

Meanwhile, the Chinese fell back to prepared defensive positions on the east bank of the river. Together with the American planes, they managed to stop the Japanese. Though kept from advancing deeper into China, the Japanese managed to complete their blockade.

Challenges to Cooperation

The Japanese offensive left Nationalist China in possession of the country’s least-developed provinces; areas that still depended on subsistence agriculture. The population was largely illiterate. Rampant inflation and the surge of refugees following the Japanese invasion reduced most of the population to absolute poverty.

After the Japanese captured Burma in 1942, all that remained was a tenuous air link from airfields in the Assam Province of British India, to Kunming.

That air route crossed over some of the most rugged and difficult terrain in the world; the “Hump,” an epic spur of the Himalayas that cuts south, dividing India from China.

Aircrews called it “the Aluminum Trail” for the over 600 airplanes that crashed in attempting to cross it.

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Because it was the entry port for all supplies arriving in China, Yunnan Province and Kunming specifically, soon became the center of American operations. This was the headquarters of General Chennault’s China Air Task Force and 14th Army Air Force.

Chennault, for all his brilliance, was not the lead American in China. He answered to Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell.

Chennault and Stilwell had very different ideas on how to carry out the war. Chennault wanted to prosecute the war from the air. He thought the Chinese were good defensive soldiers, but that a small, efficient air effort could do disproportionate damage to the Japanese.

“I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it’s humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.” - Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell

General Stilwell disagreed. He arrived just in time to preside over the disastrous defeat in Burma. He did not think an airlift could provide enough to keep China in the war and believed very strongly that recapturing Burma was the key. He advocated flying Chinese troops to India, where he trained and equipped them for the reconquest of Burma.

Stilwell was the top American general in the China-Burma-India Theater and therefore Chennault’s boss. His boss, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General George Marshall, supported him in his focus on Burma. Marshall’s boss though, President Franklin Roosevelt, supported Chennault. He thought the air effort would do more to show American support to China than what he called “a tedious ground buildup.”

American leadership was divided and hopelessly confused.

American policy focussed on supporting Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist Chinese government in Chongqing.

Another complication was Stilwell’s relationship with Chiang. He had no respect for the leader of Nationalist China and publicly denigrated him, calling him “the Peanut” and even plotting an assassination in late 1943. Chiang, for his part, backed Chennault’s air plan.

“A l l o f u s mus t remember tha t t he Generalissimo came up the hard way to become the undisputed leader of four hundred million people – an enormously difficult job.”

- President Franklin D. Roosevelt

But most Americans fundamentally did not understand the political situation in China. Chiang was anything but its undisputed leader. Since 1937, the Japanese had battered and bruised his government and pushed it back into the interior. Mao Zedong’s communists, puppet governments collaborating with the Japanese, and warlord armies all vied with the Nationalists for power

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Chiang Kai-shek succeeded Sun Yat-sen as leader of the Nationalist movement and through the Northern Expedition greatly expanded its reach up into the Yangzi Valley and beyond.

Mao Zedong, who by 1941 was the undisputed leader of the communist movement. Throughout the war the CCP expanded to six times its prewar territory.

Wang Jingwei, a former Nationalist politician who formed a collaborationist government in cooperation with the Japanese. His “puppet” government was one of many the Japanese established throughout their Chinese empire.

Long Yun, a minority Yi warlord from Yunnan Province who rose to power through the opium trade. Though technically allied to Chiang, he constantly undermined him to preserve his own

This meant that of the over 300 divisions of the Chinese Army, Chiang had actual control of maybe 30.

There were also geographic and cultural differences dividing China. Some isolated minority groups deep in the interior paid little heed to the Nationalists and had no idea of the goings on in the war. When AVG pilot Erik Shilling crashed near a remote mountain village in Yunnan, for example, the Yi people there thought he was Japanese! They had never seen a Japanese or a Caucasian; they only knew the devastation unleashed by Japanese airplanes. The Nationalist government ended up issuing American pilots a “blood chit,” which carried Chiang Kai-shek’s official chop and alerted the reader to the fact that the aviator was there to help in China’s resistance against Japan and to help him return to friendly lines.

"If the mission of the ROC Air Force today is to defend Taiwan from Chinese air attacks, why are they honoring those American and Chinese airmen who bombed Taiwan 70 years ago?“

-Wang Ching-hung, Taiwanese Journalist

The island of Taiwan had been occupied by the Japanese since the first Sino-Japanese War in the 1890s, making issues of cultural identity there even more complicated – an issue that echoes down to today.

The 14th Air Force carried out an attack on a fleet of Japanese airplanes at Xin Zhu airfield, on

the northwest coast of Taiwan, on Thanksgiving Day, 1943. The raid was a stunning success, at least forty-two Japanese airplanes destroyed or damaged for zero American losses. But it remains controversial to the Taiwanese. When the government of the island celebrated the raid on its seventieth anniversary …

Ultimately, the greatest obstacle were the Japanese themselves. While the Allies in Europe finally invaded France and in the Pacific neared the Japanese home islands, in China, the Japanese made their largest offensive, sweeping through central China with almost half a million troops. It was a disaster of epic proportions, but it did absorb the greater share of Japanese troops while the Americans continued to drive through the Pacific.

A Two-Way Partnership

The story of World War II in China is not just one of American airmen fighting the Japanese on China’s behalf; it was one of Americans and Chinese (from all ethnicities and all political persuasions) working together in a two-way partnership. Chinese assistance to the 14

th Air

Force, for example, allowed it to operate on half the troop-strength and one quarter the supplies a force its size would normally require. The Chinese War Area Service Corps provided food and lodging, Chinese soldiers stood guard in front of American warplanes, and Chinese spies and guerrillas provided critical intelligence information.

Perhaps the most impressive Chinese contribution was building a vast network of airfields by hand all across China.

“It looked at first like some ancient battlefield with the banners waving and the clouds of dust rolling where 80,000 men were toiling. Then you could make out the long cement-whitening mile-and-an-eighth runway and the 100-man teams that were rolling it smooth as they dragged the 10-ton rollers back and forth.” - Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway visited China in 1937 and reported on what he saw:

When I visited Kunming in 2008, a Chinese major pointed to one of these old rollers and told me that to him, it represented the friendship and cooperation between China and the United States. This piece of concrete pulled by a mass of humanity in a stone age construction effort enabled the most advanced technology of the time to take the war to the Japanese.

When Chennault first arrived in China in 1937, he began building a vast network of spotters all across China. With phones and radios, these spotters reported the movements of Japanese planes, enabling Chennault’s small air force to defend Chinese cities against a much larger enemy. Here, Chinese spotters attend a training course in Kunming to learn how to recognize different types of American airplanes.

Anywhere it became necessary to help, Chinese civilians came together to do what they could. Here they are working to pull out an American P-38 that crash-landed in a rice paddy.

Chinese soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians routinely risked their lives to help downed American airmen. This is a photo of Jimmy Doolittle next to his crashed bomber after his famed raid on Tokyo. On the night of April 18, 1942, his men parachuted or crash-landed all over Zhejiang, Jiangxi, and Fujian. With no notice, Chinese from all walks of life helped them reach American bases deep in the interior. Of the seventy-five airmen that made it to China, three perished, and eight were captured. The rest made it back to friendly territory. The consequences for this were dire; the Japanese retaliated with a punitive expedition that left over two hundred thousand Chinese dead. Remarkably, this did not discourage the Chinese from helping downed Americans throughout the rest of the war.

The Fate of America’s Missing Airmen in China

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Killed or Missing Captured Rescued

Of the 1,405 airmen reported missing by the 14th Air Force and China Air Task Force, 54% died. This is roughly the same as with American aircraft in the European Theater. It is a stark reminder of the peril of fighting the Japanese and the danger of aviation in the 1940s. Unlike in the European Theater, however, where only about 25% of those who survived managed to escape occupied Europe, the Japanese captured only about 5% while the Chinese rescued the remaining 41%.

What is truly amazing about this is these rescues happened literally all over China, often under the noses of the Japanese. Chinese partisans even rescued airmen who bailed out over occupied Shanghai. These were Nationalists, Communists, civilians with no particular affiliation, bandits, and even puppet troops supposedly collaborating with the Japanese. This meant that if you survived the crash, you had almost a 90% change of being rescued by the Chinese. Imagine the confidence that gave American airmen operating in hazardous conditions over an alien terrain.

The respect the Chinese paid to American airmen shows just how deep the relationship went. Captain Lewden Enslen crash-landed just south of Huangmei a small village in the central Yangzi River Valley on October 30, 1943 after Japanese fighters ambushed his formation. The crash left him severely injured and he died ten days later. They could not safely get his body back to friendly lines so they buried him there.

The village sent a message to the 14th Air Force which read: “The authorities of the Huangmei

District Government were responsible for the burial of Captain Enslen. They dressed the captain in new clothes before placing his remains into a coffin painted in vermilion colour. On the morning of November 12

th a mass meeting of the local inhabitants was held to pay last

respect to the deceased hero. With Mr. Tian Jiangchang, the Magistrate of Huangmei District, as chairman, the meeting was attended by representatives of local bodies and troops and over 4,000 civilians. The burial took place at noon that day… A brick wall was built around the coffin which is further covered with rafters. In front of the grave is set up a wooden tablet on which a detailed account of the heroic deeds of Captain Enslen is inscribed.”

His body lay there in its place of honor until the end of the war, when US Graves Registration retrieved it and returned it to his wife and daughter in Springfield, Missouri.

Another interesting aspect of the two-way partnership was the Chinese-American Composite Wing. The Chinese Air Force sent pilots to Luke Army Airfield in Arizona for American pilot training. The returning aircrew received operational training in Karachi, India (now Pakistan) and then joined a wing with both Americans and Chinese flying together.

Each leadership position in the wing had a Chinese and an American commander, who worked together to plan and lead missions. It was a way to mentor and grow a Chinese Air Force in the midst of war and its veterans became the core of both the Nationalist and Communist air forces after the war.

Salween Campaign

The friction between Chennault and Stilwell delayed operations, but the Salween Front was the only place where their ideas came together.

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On May 11, 1944, forty thousand soldiers of the Chinese Expeditionary Force crossed the Salween River. Less than a month later, Allied troops would land in France. This was the first time Chinese troops invaded occupied territory to take it back from the Japanese. This was their Normandy invasion.

Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers with American advisors, equipment, and air support crossed the highest battlefield terrain of World War II. The Salween River was about two thousand feet above sea level. West of the river, the Gaoligong Mountains rise up to twelve thousand feet. One army group crossed north of the Burma Road and advanced to Tengchong. Another army group crossed south of the road and advanced toward Longling. The XXth Army Group advanced on Tengchong, while the XIth, to the south, planned to cut the Burma Road between Longling and Mangshi.

The decisive battle of the campaign was for the ancient walled city of Tengchong. It was the largest population center west of the Salween. Marco Polo visited Tengchong in the thirteenth century as he travelled the trade routes from China to India.

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During World War II, the town’s Ming dynasty wall still stood, made of volcanic stone and measuring more than thirty feet tall and twenty feet thick. Chinese artillery could not penetrate.

The Chinese charged the wall with bamboo ladders reminiscent of a medieval siege. The Japanese cut them down with automatic weapons. It was a medieval siege in the midst of the twentieth century’s greatest conflict

The CEF brought in American airplanes to breach the walls. Fighters and bombers of the 14th Air Force flew sometimes only 10 feet above the valley floor to fling their bombs into the wall

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It crumbled under the weight of their assault and Chinese troops finally surged into the city in early August 1944

The battle became a brutal house-to-house fight for every inch of the city. It took a month and a half for the Chinese to finally root out the enemy from their underground bunkers and tunnels. They often had to disassemble their artillery, carry it over the wall, and reassemble it to fire directly into enemy positions. They also used American flamethrowers to burn the Japanese from their tunnels and trenches.

The Chinese Expeditionary Force fought its way down the Burma Road and captured Wanding, on the China-Burma border, on January 20, 1945. Seven days later, Chinese troops fighting their way through Burma from India met them at the border and finally reopened the Burma Road.

Stilwell Road: 38,062 tons between February and October 1945Airlift: 71,042 tons in July 1945; 650 planes a day with an accident rate of only .239 per thousand flying hours.

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The campaign west of the Salween was about more than just a road:The CEF liberated Tengchong, Longling, Mangshi, over 400 other towns and villages; over 24,000 square miles28,384 Chinese soldiers lost, 10,620 Japanese dead. Compared to a Japanese offensive north of the Yangzi happening at the same time: 21,643 Chinese dead for 1,061 JapaneseFirst time a Chinese army removed Japanese from occupied territory.

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At the cemetery outside Tengchong 3,346 Chinese buried there, also markers for 19 Americans who died in the campaign. To the people of Yunnan, the campaign represents liberation; friendship; cooperation. In Yunnan, the heritage of Chinese-American partnership in the war against Japan has left its powerful, lasting mark on the people and landscape.

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