Magic from Waterproof

For the bitter, uphill fight that must be made in China, Burma and India, the U.S. Army Air Forces will have the finest fighter squadrons in the world. The Army made certain of that last week: it appointed Brigadier General Claire Lee Chennault to boss the fighter command headquartered in Calcutta.

More than any flying man in World War II, 49-year-old Claire Chennault, leathery student of the split-second formation attack, has proved that fighting quality can triumph over numerical odds and superior equipment in the hands of the enemy. The proof is provided by the hottest, most destructive, most deadly accurate air-fighting outfit in the world: China's American Volunteer Group.

Chennault created the Flying Tigers as Knute Rockne created the great teams of Notre Dame. And in their sphere the Flying Tigers are as fine a team as Notre Dame ever was. Flying U.S.-made P-40s of outmoded design, always short of equipment and ammunition, always hiding out from the Jap while they were on the ground, the A.V.G.s ran up a score never equaled. They knocked better than 300 Japanese planes out of the air, destroyed a hundred or so on the ground, saved many a ground force with its back to the wall. A.V.G.'s own losses: about 15 pilots.

Drill Does It. A.V.G. pilots were not rakehell supermen who needed no discipline and could worry along with second-rate planes. They were--and are--super-pilots. Every man among them got a postgraduate education from the onetime schoolmaster from Waterproof, La. who left the Air Corps in 1937 with the conviction that only war would prove his combat theories.

At air races, where he brought crowds up on their hind legs with the formation acrobatics of his Men on the Flying Trapeze, at fields where he was stationed as a flying officer, Claire Chennault never left anything to chance--beyond the possibility of a failing motor when his pursuit ship was on its back. As studious on the ground as he was daredevil in the air, he spent hours planning his acrobatic shows. He taught his youngsters precision flying, discipline, teamwork.

Young A.V.G. pilots, picked from the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, heard the Chennault doctrine endlessly in the training weeks before they first took the air against the Jap in December. Chennault lectured them at blackboards, took them aloft to show them what he wanted: not individual heroes, but everlasting teamwork; no crackpot do-or-die attacks, but slashing, concentrated assaults that would blast the enemy out of the sky.

Reducing Zero. He carried model airplanes with him. At mess, at recreation, on the field, he fished them out, put them through fighting maneuvers, figured out play after mass play to outsmart the Jap. He analyzed the enemy's crack Zero fighter, reduced its performance to ten or eleven categories (climb, speed, firepower, etc.). Beside that record he set the performance of the old P-40, decided the P-40 was superior in two or three categories. He concentrated on these categories, and no A.V.G. man thenceforth tried to compete with the Zero except in power plays Chennault laid out for his ships.

The Chennault doctrine will spread even more widely than his transfer suggests. For the A.V.G. is also to be transferred to U.S. service. Every pilot, a devout student of the Old Man, will spread his gospel of the flying team. They will spread it with authority, too, for each man is good enough to command a fighter squadron.

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