The Fourteenth

AIR

In battle, the Fourteenth Air Force is a handful of bold-eyed young men, haunted by the necessity of economy in the use of their too-few aircraft, inspired by the genius and unerring tactical wisdom of Major General Claire Lee Chennault. On the ground it is a strange compound of unselfish human labor: patient Chinese who work miracles by numbers and sweat where machines are inadequate or just not available; windburned Americans in dusty coveralls who whoop and holler as they work, spend their off hours talking about home.

By last week, as the Fourteenth announced a routine score--33 Jap planes destroyed, 14 probables, two U.S. fighters lost in eight days--visitors to the China theater saw impressive progress from this most unusual of the war's fighting forces. No war had been won. The Jap still bombed outlying fields. Occasionally he punched at main bases and pocketed his losses. The best the Fourteenth could still do was to contain him.

But the day was gone when the enemy, simply by flying over China's amazingly efficient warning net, could suck U.S. aircraft aloft and by that deed alone strike a heavy blow in the expenditure of precious U.S. fuel. On the P-40s, the Mitchell bombers and the handful of big Liberators, tiny Jap flags were growing in number. And the U.S. death list was not growing forbiddingly long.

The Tied Score. Yet it was only a beginning, a sort of tie-score game which China and her Allies could win only by fast inflows of men and machines. It was on the ground that visitors saw the most promise for the future that is still not too hopeful. There, on new fields and old ones under improvement, they saw thousands of Chinese men and women quietly, timelessly working on the land.

Their pace seemed slow, the gait of the runty ponies between the shafts of their carts dispirited. But at day's end, when a runway had been completed, a building put up or a force-landed plane fished bodily from a swamp, Americans saw the result and never lost the wonder of China's art in the use of sheer man power.

American workers went at their jobs in their own ways. Their jeeps tipped brown plumes of dust as they whisked across flying fields and down dusty roads. They worked with their hands, too, and with what machines they had. Their pace was more muscular than the Chinese, and they laughed and kidded as they pounded nails, wore down hummocks with pick & shovel, swarmed over the planes on the flying lines.

The Long Wait. Now the Americans were getting a little equipment. They had got warm clothes for the winter, enough shoes, coveralls, gloves. Every man was above his last year's equipment of socks: one pair. But there was no time for uni form, few places to go if one had the time to polish his brass and set off to town.

So U.S. soldiers made no pretense of liking the war they were fighting. It was just a job to get done so a man could go home again. The example of the plodding Chinese, the bulk of work they turned out, was enough to spur Americans on when the thoughts of home grew dim and the dust and sweat became intolerable.

What workers had done all men could now see. On the American bases there were now respectable office buildings, warehouses, a few hostels. The shops were beginning to look like shops. The airdromes were better than ever, and more were being built.

But the China theater was still 15,000 miles from home. Across the supply line that could make the air war big, muscular and effective, still lay the enemy in Burma, the Himalayas to the west. China would have to wait, but China could wait. No one knew that better than Claire Chennault and his dust-caked men.

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