Excerpt from Autobiography by Charles H. Older.
"About this time a retired Navy Commander recruiting for the American Volunteer Group came to Quantico. Personal intervention from President Roosevelt was necessary to pry the pilots and ground crews from the military services. In April, 1941, an unpublicized Executive Order was signed by President Roosevelt authorizing reserve officers and enlisted men to resign from the Army, Navy and marine air services in order to join the American Volunteer Group in China.
Ken Jernstedt, Tom Haywood, and I, all Second Lieutenants in VMF-1, decided to join the AVG The procedure was first to go to New York and sign a one-year contract with Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, a front for the formation of the AVG, and then to submit our resignations through the squadron. We were told that our resignations would not be accepted until they reached Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, where, by virtue of the Executive Order from the White House providing for the creation of the AVG, they would be accepted. It happened exactly that way, and in late July, 1941, we were separated from the Marine Corps and instructed to proceed to Los Angeles where we would meet with others and receive instructions for our departure to the Orient. On August 26, 1941, we sailed from Los Angeles on the Dutch passenger cargo ship, "Zaandam." Our group consisted of six pilots and about thirty ground crew. Of the pilots three were from the Marine Corps, two from the Navy, and one from the Army Air Corps. Two other ships had preceded us from San Francisco carrying most of the pilots and crews of the AVG Our destination was Rangoon, Burma, via Hawaii, the Philippines, Borneo, Java and Singapore. We were civilians traveling with passports that listed us as having a variety of civilian occupations. To our families we were going to China to help train Chinese pilots in their war against Japan. To each other we were fighter pilots and crews sent to join a fighter group to be headed by Col. Claire L. Chennault, a retired Air Corps officer, for the purpose of protecting the Burma Road and Chinese cities from the unrestricted and indiscriminate bombing and strafing of the Japanese.
We reached Rangoon on October 9, 1941. The following day we boarded a train for Toungoo, about 175 miles northeast of Rangoon. We were still in the monsoon season and it rained the entire trip. Looking out the train window, all I could see was rain and flooded rice paddies. I was beginning to think I should have gone into seaplanes or P-Boats. When we arrived in Toungoo, the entire group that preceded us was at the station. Somewhere they found a six-piece native band that was playing, "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight."
Toungoo was the site of a small R.A.F. base that the British had turned over to the AVG for training. This was our home until just after Pearl Harbor. At Toungoo every AVG pilot received daily lectures from Chennault starting at 6:00 AM., and specialized flight training in the tactics required to defeat the Japanese with our P-40's. Chennault taught us everything he knew about the Japanese -- knowledge recorded in his notebooks from the previous four years of combat in China. Japanese flight and staff manuals captured and translated into English by the Chinese, along with lectures from Chinese fighter pilots experienced in combat with the Japanese Air Force in China, served as the foundation for developing the AVG tactics soon to be tested in combat. Before the AVG ever saw combat we knew the specifications and characteristics of every Japanese aircraft we were likely to meet, as well as the tactics the Japanese Air Force had used in China during the previous four years.
On December 12, 1941, my squadron, the Third, moved to Rangoon to join the R.A.F. in the defense of Rangoon, the southern terminus of the Burma Road. The First and Second Squadrons flew from Toungoo to Kunming on December 18. The first AVG combat came on December 20 in Western China south of Kunming, where the First and Second Squadrons shot down nine of ten Japanese bombers with a loss of one AVG fighter. The combat scene then shifted to Rangoon where the first of the large scale air battles occurred on December 23.
Concerning the AVG combat statistics, Chennault said (in "Way of a Fighter"), "Although the AVG was blooded over China, it was the air battles over Rangoon that stamped the hallmark on its fame as the Flying Tigers. The cold statistics for the 10 weeks the AVG served at Rangoon show its strength varied between twenty and five serviceable P-40's. This tiny force met a total of a thousand-odd Japanese aircraft over southern Burma and Thailand. In 31 encounters they destroyed 217 enemy planes and probably destroyed 43 more. Our losses in combat were four pilots killed in the air, one killed while strafing, and one taken prisoner. Sixteen P-40's were destroyed. During the same period, the R.A.F., fighting side by side with the AVG, destroyed 74 enemy planes, probably destroyed 33 more, with a loss of 27 Buffaloes and Hurricanes.
Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, added his eloquence to these statistics, cabling the Governor of Burma, "The victories of these Americans over the rice paddies of Burma are comparable in character if not in scope with those won by the R.A.F. over the hop fields of Kent in the Battle of Britain."
Japanese ground forces invading Burma slowly drove the AVG northward and eventually into China. The Tigers carried out their final missions supporting Chinese ground forces on both eastern and western fronts as well as taking on the Japanese Air Force wherever it could be found.
The AVG was finally disbanded on July 4, 1942. The group celebrated its final day in the air by shooting down five enemy fighters over Hengyang and escorting U.S. Army Air Force B-25's to bomb the Japanese air base at Canton. In summing up the history of the AVG Chennault said, "The group that the military experts predicted would not last three weeks in combat had fought for seven months over Burma, China, Thailand and French Indo-China, destroying 299 Japanese planes with another 153 probably destroyed. All of this with a loss of 12 P-40's in combat and 61 on the ground."
After the AVG was disbanded I returned to the United States, got married, and after a few months of flying B-24's at Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego and Tucson, was commissioned in the US Army Air Corps as a Captain. I was given command of a P-38 operational training squadron in California where recently commissioned pilots were given 120 hours of fighter tactics, gunnery and related training before being sent overseas in combat.
In the Spring of 1944 I requested re-assignment to the 23rd Fighter Group of the 14th Air Force in China. In due course my orders came through and I arrived back in China in June, 1944. I was first assigned as Group Operations Officer and later Deputy Group Commander. The 23rd Fighter Group Commanders during my second tour were David L. (Tex) Hill and Edward F. Rector, both of whom had been Naval Cadets at Pensacola and later members of the AVG
The 23rd Fighter Group was one of the highest scoring fighter groups of the war and during its existence in China from 1942 until the close of the war in 1945 it destroyed over 1000 Japanese aircraft. The most memorable mission for me during my second combat tour was one in which I led the 118th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron on the first strike on Shanghai in January, 1945. Joining up with aircraft from the 74th Squadron, 16 P-51 Mustangs simultaneously attacked three airfields at Shanghai and destroyed 72 Japanese aircraft on the ground and 5 in the air without the loss of any of our aircraft.