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On December 7, 1941, a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the
United States into armed conflict with Japan. In the first three
months of the war the Japanese seemed unbeatable as they seized
American, British, and European territory across the Pacific: the
Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies.
Nonetheless, in those dark days, the U.S. press began to pick up
reports about a group of American mercenaries who were bringing
down enemy planes over Burma and western China. The pilots quickly
became known as the Flying Tigers and a legend was born. But who
were these flyers for hire and how did they wind up in the British
colony of Burma? In the standard version of events, an American
named Claire Chennault had convinced the Roosevelt administration
to establish, fund, and equip covert air squadrons that could
attack the Japanese in China and possibly bomb Tokyo-even before a
declaration of war existed between the United States and Japan.
That was hardly the case: although present at the creation,
Chennault was not the sole originator of the American Volunteer
Group. In A Few Planes for China, Eugenie Buchan draws on
wide-ranging new sources to overturn seventy years of received
wisdom about the genesis of the Flying Tigers. This strange
experiment in airpower was accidental rather than intentional;
haphazard decisions and changing threat perceptions both shaped its
organization and deprived it of resources. In the end it was the
British-more than any American in or out of government-who got the
Tigers off the ground. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the most
important man behind the Flying Tigers was not Claire Chennault but
Winston Churchill.
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