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\n Consider this job offer:\n <\/p>\n
\n A one-year contract to live and work in China, flying, repairing and making airplanes. Pay is as much as $16,725 a month with 30 days off a year. Housing is included, and you\u2019ll get an extra $700 a month for food. And there\u2019s an extra $11,000 for every Japanese airplane you destroy \u2013 no limit.\n <\/p>\n
\n That\u2019s the deal \u2013 in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars \u2013 that a few hundred Americans took in 1941 to become the heroes, and some would even say the saviors, of China.\n <\/p>\n
\n Those American pilots, mechanics and support personnel became members of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), later known as the Flying Tigers.\n <\/p>\n
\n The group\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n Today, despite US-China tensions, those American mercenaries are still revered in China.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cChina always remembers the contribution and sacrifice made to it by the United States and the American people during the World War II,\u201d says an entry on the Flying Tigers memorial page<\/a> of China\u2019s state-run newspaper People\u2019s Daily Online.\n <\/p>\n \n The bond is such that the daughter and granddaughter of the Flying Tigers\u2019 founder are among the few Americans invited to Wednesday\u2019s military parade in Beijing commemorating the end of World War II.\n <\/p>\n \n 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.\n <\/p>\n \n Leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had been able to loosely unite China\u2019s warlords under a central government, later hired American Claire Chennault, a retired US Army captain, to form an air force.\n <\/p>\n \n Chennault first spent a few years putting together an air raid warning network and building airbases across China, according to the Flying Tigers\u2019 official website<\/a>. In 1940, he was dispatched to the United States \u2013 still a neutral party \u2013 to find pilots and planes that could defend China against Japan.\n <\/p>\n \n 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.\n <\/p>\n \n A deal was secured to get 100 Curtiss P-40B fighters built for Britain sent to China instead.\n <\/p>\n \n In his memoirs, Chennault wrote that the P-40s he got lacked a modern gun sight.\n <\/p>\n \n His pilots were \u201caiming 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,\u201d he wrote.\n <\/p>\n \n 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.\n <\/p>\n \n In a low, twisting, turning dogfight, the P-40 would lose.\n <\/p>\n \n The pilots Chennault enrolled were far from the cream of the crop.\n <\/p>\n \n Ninety-nine fliers, along with support personnel, made the trip to China in the fall of 1941, according to the US Defense Department history<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n 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.\n <\/p>\n \n Perhaps the best known of the Flying Tigers, US Marine Greg Boyington<\/a> \u2013 around whom the 1970\u2019s TV show \u201cBlack Sheep Squadron\u201d was based \u2013 was in it for the money.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cHaving gone through a painful divorce and responsible for an ex-wife and several small children, he had ruined his credit and incurred substantial debt, and the Marine Corps had ordered him to submit a monthly report to his commander on how he accounted for his pay in settling those debts,\u201d according to a US Defense Department history of the group.\n <\/p>\n \n Chennault had to teach his disparate group how to be fighter pilots \u2013 and to fight as a group \u2013 essentially from scratch.\n <\/p>\n \n Training was rigorous and deadly. Three pilots were killed early in accidents.\n <\/p>\n \n During one training day, which became known as \u201cCircus Day,\u201d eight P-40s were damaged as pilots landed too hard, or the ground crew taxied too fast, causing collisions.\n <\/p>\n \n Chennault expressed his disappointment at his group\u2019s first combat mission against Japanese bombers attacking the AVG base in Kunming, China, on December 20, 1941. He thought the pilots lost their discipline.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThey tried near-impossible shots and agreed later that only luck had kept them from either colliding with each other or shooting each other down,\u201d the Defense Department history says.\n <\/p>\n \n Still, they shot down three Japanese bombers, losing only one fighter that ran out of fuel and crash-landed.\n <\/p>\n \n The pilots quickly conquered their steep learning curve.\n <\/p>\n \n A few days after Kunming, they were deployed to Rangoon, the capital of British colonial Burma and a vital port for the supply line that got allied war materiel to Chinese troops facing the Japanese army.\n <\/p>\n \n Japanese bombers came at the city in waves over 11 days during the Christmas and New Year\u2019s holidays. The Flying Tigers ripped holes through the Japanese formations and cemented their fame.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe AVG had officially knocked 75 enemy aircraft out of the skies with an undetermined number of probable kills,\u201d the group\u2019s website says<\/a>. \u201cThe AVG losses were two pilots and six aircraft.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The Flying Tigers spent 10 weeks total in Rangoon, never fielding more than 25 P-40s.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis tiny force met a total of a thousand-odd Japanese aircraft over Southern Burma and Thailand. In 31 encounters they destroyed 217 enemy planes and probably destroyed 43. Our losses in combat were four pilots killed in the air, one killed while strafing and one taken prisoner. Sixteen P-40\u2019s were destroyed,\u201d Chennault wrote in his memoir.\n <\/p>\n \n Despite the Flying Tigers\u2019 heroics in the air, allied ground forces in Burma could not hold off the Japanese. Rangoon fell in March and the AVG retreated north into Burma\u2019s interior.\n <\/p>\n \n But they\u2019d bought vital time for the allied war effort, tying down Japanese planes that could have been used in India or elsewhere in China and the Pacific.\n <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/160920082943-flying-tigers-p-40-warhawk-us-archives.jpg\")
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