Claire Lee Chennault

Claire Lee Chennault (September 6, 1893 – July 27, 1958) was an American military aviator. He is most famous for commanding the "Flying Tigers" and later the Chinese Nationalist Air Force during World War II.

In the 1930s, Chennault strongly argued for fighter-interceptor aircraft, known as "pursuit" planes, at a time when the U.S. Army Air Corps prioritized high-altitude bombing. He left the U.S. Army in 1937 and moved to China to work as an aviation adviser and trainer.

From early 1941, Chennault led the 1st American Volunteer Group, nicknamed the Flying Tigers. He also commanded the regular U.S. Army Air Forces units that took over in 1942. He had a long-running conflict with General Joseph Stilwell, the U.S. Army commander in China. Chennault helped China’s Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to remove Stilwell in 1944. The China-Burma-India theater was strategically important because it tied down many key elements of the Imperial Japanese Army on the Chinese mainland, preventing their use against Allied forces advancing toward Japan through two Pacific campaigns.

**Early life**

Chennault is widely reported to have been born in Commerce, Texas, on September 6, 1893, though no documentary proof of his birthdate or birthplace exists. For most of his life, he gave 1890 as his birth year; after his death, his widow corrected it to 1893. His parents were John Stonewall Jackson Chennault and Jessie (née Lee) Chennault. The surname is French in origin, pronounced "Shen-OH" in French, but his Americanized family said "Shen-AWLT." He grew up in the Louisiana towns of Gilbert and Waterproof. He began claiming he was born in 1889 or 1890, possibly because he was too young for college after high school, so his father added three years to his age. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1901, and he was raised by his aunt, Louise Chase, alongside his brother and her sons.

**Early military career**

Chennault attended Louisiana State University from 1909 to 1910, listing his birth month as June to meet the age requirement of 16 "at nearest birthday," and completed Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) training. He and his wife, Nell, moved to West Carroll Parish, where he was principal of Kilbourne School from 1913 to 1915. When World War I began, he graduated from Officers' School at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana and was transferred to the Aviation Division of the Army Signal Corps on November 27, 1917. He learned to fly in the Army Air Service during the war. After the war, he graduated from pursuit pilot training at Ellington Field, Texas, on April 23, 1922, and stayed in the service after it became the Air Corps in 1926. After graduating from the Air Corps Tactical School in 1931, he became Chief of the Pursuit Section there.

**Leadership**

Into the mid-1930s, Chennault led and represented the 1st Pursuit Group of the Army Air Corps aerobatic team called the "Three Musketeers," based in Montgomery, Alabama. The group performed at the 1928 National Air Races. In 1932, as a pursuit aviation instructor at Maxwell Field, he reorganized the team as "Three Men on the Flying Trapeze."

**Resignation**

Poor health—deafness and chronic bronchitis—disputes with superiors, and being passed over for promotion as unqualified led Chennault to resign from the military on April 30, 1937, at the rank of major. As a civilian, he was recruited to go to China and join a small group of Americans training Chinese airmen.

**In China**

Chennault arrived in China in June 1937. He had a three-month contract paying $1,000 per month to survey the Chinese Air Force. Chiang’s English-speaking wife, Soong Mei-ling (known to Americans as "Madame Chiang"), ran the Aeronautical Commission and became his immediate supervisor. When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in August, Chennault became Chiang Kai-shek’s chief air adviser, helped train new Chinese pilots, and sometimes flew scouting missions in an export Curtiss H-75 fighter. He also organized the "International Squadron" of mercenary pilots. In late 1937, the Chinese Air Force considered bombing the Japanese home islands with bombers launched from mainland China, with Chennault advising. Various pilots from the International Squadron—specifically the 14th International Bomber Squadron, from Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States—proposed raiding Kagoshima with incendiary bombs, but the plan was rejected due to the "exorbitant remuneration" demanded by the foreign volunteers. The mission was eventually given to Capt. Xu Huansheng and Lt. Tong Yen-bo of the 8th Bomber Group.

Under the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1937, Soviet-made bombers and fighters increasingly replaced the battered Chinese air force’s U.S.-made aircraft, such as Hawk IIIs and Boeing 281 Peashooters, and were supplemented by Soviet volunteer combat pilots. As the Chinese Air Force Academy at Jianqiao Airbase moved inland after the fall of Shanghai and Nanjing, Chennault went to Kunming’s Wujiaba Airbase in Yunnan Province, in southwestern China, to reorganize and train new Chinese cadets using the American army air corps training model. On October 21, 1939, as Japanese schnellbombing (fast bombers flying without fighter escorts) terrorized the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing, Chennault, accompanied by four Chinese officials, boarded the Pan American Airways Boeing B-314 California Clipper in Hong Kong and arrived in San Francisco on October 26.