Nonconformist Hero

FLYING TIGER: CHENNAULT OF CHINA (285 pp.)--Roberf Lee Scott Jr.--Doubleday ($3.95).

Claire Chennault died last year of cancer, Lieut. General U.S.A.F. (ret.). Before that, says this biographer, his persistent ailment had for years been nothing more deadly than a heavy heart. Author Robert Lee Scott Jr. ought to know. He flew in China with Chennault's legendary Flying Tigers, then commanded Chennault's fighter forces in what must have been one of the most gallant and frustrating wars ever fought. Flying Tiger an angry book, is almost as important for what it tells of its villains as it is for the love it accords to its hero. Yet, ironically, its villains cannot be thought of as bad men, only as fallible and shortsighted ones: Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall, General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, Chennault's theater commander, and General Clayton Bissell, Stilwell's second-in-command.

Stilwell had an infantryman's myopia when it came to the real uses of airpower (he even walked out of Burma after his defeat, though Pilot Scott had flown in to rescue him), and Marshall could be relied on to back Stilwell in any disagreement with Chennault. Moreover, as Author Scott only suggests, Stilwell bitterly disliked Chennault's friend, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. The overriding issue of Chinese Communism is all but unmentioned in Scott's book, although the Marshall and Stilwell blindness to the Communists' real purpose lay at bottom of their inability to see the need of helping Chennault and China more than they did. Flying Tiger is written by a fighting man who sees above all the tragedy of Claire Chennault. But by this time, every thinking U.S. reader will realize that the greater tragedy was that of his own country and of China.

In 1937, when he was 47, Chennault went to China at Chiang Kai-shek's request to form an air force, after he had retired from the U.S. service and a losing battle, not unlike Billy Mitchell's, to show the true role of airpower in modern war. When war with Japan came, the Flying Tigers made up the only Allied air force in being in a critical battleground. Yet even after he had been put in command of a U.S. air force of his own and had won the rank of general, he was still treated as a crackpot, remained low man on the totem pole when it came to supplies. He was virtually pushed into retirement days before war ended and did not even get the courtesy of space on the battleship Missouri when the Japanese surrendered.

Much of Chennault's sad and brilliant saga has already been set down by others, some of it by Author Scott himself in God Is My Co-Pilot (TIME, Aug. 9, 1943). But Scott's present accounts of battles in the China air, of maddening service red tape and of Chennault's leadership have the ring of truth, loyalty and experience. Generals in higher places treating Chennault as they did may have had reasons Fighter Scott never knew about. What he shows in Flying Tiger is an advantage few of them enjoyed: the knowledge that comes only to the man on the trigger.

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