Tigers' Last Leaps

The most terrifying battle cry of World War II will soon be heard no longer on the headquarters' radio.

British pursuit pilots will still call to one another their sporting "Tallyho" as they sight the enemy and plunge out of formation to attack. The serious Germans will still rasp their guttural "Achtung! Achtung!" as they spot the foe. But the gallant, hell-for-leather professional pilots of the American Volunteer Group suddenly glimpsing a Jap formation will no longer have reason to exchange their gleeful call: "Certified check!"

The war had outgrown the A.V.G. The Army thought that it was no longer good business that some U.S. fighting men paid by the Chinese Government should get $600 a month plus a bonus of $500 per enemy plane downed. Pilots fighting for the U.S. get paid in the ungenerous Army & Navy scales. Perhaps more important: all A.V.G.'s battle-won know-how on the technique of destroying Japs was far too precious to keep concentrated in only three squadrons--it needed to be spread through the U.S. air forces.

So the U.S. Army began moving in on the A.V.G. All the signs were that Chiang Kai-shek's light-hearted mercenaries of deadly aim would soon be back in Federal service like their seam-faced leader Claire L. Chennault, recently taken off the retired list and made a Brigadier General. (The Navy and Marine Corps had a claim to some of them too; as many had been trained at Pensacola as at Randolph Field.)

It was fun while it lasted. The A.V.G.'s flyers knew their stuff from the start, got many a fine point from their C.O., many another the hard way from the Jap. Astute Claire Chennault, as fine a pursuit pilot as ever zoomed a hangar, recognized their abilities, reveled in their high spirits and let them have the run of the sky. They flew pretty much as it pleased them, picked their objectives as lightheartedly as boys going on a picnic, collected their checks, and spent their money (a lot of it on whiskey at $50 a bottle).

In that Burma sky they grew into a fighting outfit that for democratic spirit and complete lack of operations formalities may never be equaled. Nor will their record of performance soon be equaled. In their show, always against heavy odds, A.V.G. knocked down more than 200 Jap planes, lost only 16 pilots. Even some of those 16 the Jap could not claim. They were lost in forced landings and in the occasional wild flying that is inseparable from the air work of a high-spirited outfit like the Fei Hu (Flying Tiger).

Now it was about over. There would be an end to the high times in the hostels in Kunming, to souvenir-buying where price was no object, to the calculatingly reckless battles with the Jap and the thundering return to the home fields when the battle was over. There would be an end to the fat checks from Major Greenlaw, the paymaster, and an end to the squadron parties where Major Greenlaw's glamorous White Russian wife presided.

But like Eddie Rickenbacker's famed Hat-in-the-Ring outfit of World War I, and its forefather, the polylingual Lafayette Escadrille, A.V.G. would live as yarns told in bars, in books, in celluloid.

As Burma fell, A.V.G. pilots still reported their victories over the Jap with a sardonic detachment that hid their heavy-hearted realization that a great battle had been lost. "Rung the cash register again" they said, and let it go at that.

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