The Fourteenth Air Force formed in China

On 10 March 1943 the Fourteenth Air Force of the United States Army Air Forces was activated at Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, having been formally established a few days earlier, on 5 March. Its commander was Claire Chennault, newly promoted to major general, the creator and former commander of the volunteer fighter group known as the Flying Tigers. For Chennault it was victory in a long dispute: his air arm ceased to be a subordinate unit of the Tenth Air Force in India and became an independent air force, answerable only to the commander of US forces in China, Burma and India. That commander, however, was General Joseph Stilwell, with whom Chennault had been in open conflict for a year.

From the Flying Tigers to the China Air Task Force

Chennault, a retired captain of the US Army Air Corps, had been Chiang Kai-shek’s aviation adviser since 1937. In 1941 he organised the 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG): around a hundred volunteer pilots flying Curtiss P-40 fighters, formally mercenaries in the pay of the Chinese government. From December 1941 the Tigers defended Rangoon and Kunming, and their successes, exaggerated by the press, were one of the few bright spots in the first months of the war with Japan.

Once the United States had entered the war, Washington decided to absorb the volunteers into the regular air force. At a conference in Chongqing at the end of March 1942, attended by Chiang Kai-shek, his wife Soong Mei-ling, Stilwell and Colonel Clayton Bissell, it was agreed that the AVG would be disbanded on 4 July 1942, when the pilots’ contracts expired. Chennault returned to active service in April 1942 as a brigadier general, but command of all American air forces in China went to Bissell, who was promoted with one day’s seniority over him. Chennault received only the China Air Task Force (CATF) – a formation subordinate to the Tenth Air Force, created at the beginning of July 1942 from the 23rd Fighter Group and a small squadron of B-25 bombers. Most of the AVG pilots turned down the offer to join the army, and the name “Flying Tigers” was in time taken over by their successors.

For nine months the CATF, usually with a few dozen serviceable aircraft, fought over Yunnan, Guangxi and Hunan, attacked Japanese airfields and shipping on the Yangtze, and its bombers reached Hankou, Canton, Hong Kong and Indochina. According to American figures it shot down 149 Japanese aircraft for the loss of 16 fighters – numbers which, like most claims of aerial victories in this war, were probably inflated.

The airman against the infantryman

Chennault was convinced that air power alone could decide the war in China. In October 1942, through Wendell Willkie, who was visiting Chongqing, he sent President Franklin Roosevelt a letter claiming that with 105 modern fighters, 30 medium bombers and 12 heavy bombers he could within a few months smash the Japanese air force in China and bring about Japan’s collapse. The plan was bold and cheap – it required neither large ground armies nor the reconquest of Burma – and for that reason it appealed both to Roosevelt and to Chiang Kai-shek, who did not want to risk his best divisions.

Stilwell considered it an illusion. Ever since the retreat from Burma in May 1942 he had argued that China could not be held without a reformed, well-equipped Chinese army and without reopening an overland supply route through northern Burma, and that any effective air offensive would provoke the Japanese into a ground attack on the airfields, which the weak Chinese forces would be unable to defend. The Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, shared this view, while the chief of the Army Air Forces, General Henry Arnold, although he supported strengthening air power in China, doubted both that Chennault’s promises were realistic and that he had the talent for organisation.

Roosevelt’s decision

Politics settled the matter. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Allies postponed a major offensive in Burma, and an embittered Chiang Kai-shek demanded visible proof of American support. In February General Arnold flew to Chongqing and was presented with the Generalissimo’s demands: 500 aircraft for China and 10,000 tons of supplies a month by air. Roosevelt, who wanted to keep China in the war at the lowest possible cost, decided to give Chennault his own air force. At the beginning of March Chennault was promoted to major general; on 10 March the Fourteenth Air Force began operating at Kunming, and the CATF was soon disbanded (on 19 March, according to some sources), its units being incorporated into the new air force. Organisationally Chennault was now free of the command in India, but he still depended on Stilwell – and on supplies he could not secure for himself.

The Hump

Since the fall of Burma in the spring of 1942 and the closing of the Burma Road, China’s only link with the Allies had been an airlift from the Brahmaputra valley in Assam to Kunming, over the mountains of northern Burma and the eastern spurs of the Himalayas, known to the airmen as “the Hump”. The transports flew at the limit of their ceiling, through storms, icing and monsoon downpours, from airfields that were still being built. From December 1942 the airlift was run by Air Transport Command, but in the first months of 1943 it carried only a few thousand tons a month, less than the planned 4,000 tons. Everything the Fourteenth Air Force needed – fuel, bombs, spare parts, ammunition – had to be flown in by this route. Arnold, who had flown over the Hump himself in February 1943, calculated that a transport burned three and a half tons of petrol to deliver four tons of cargo, and that a group of B-24 heavy bombers had to cross the mountains four times to build up stocks for a single raid. The 308th Bombardment Group, which arrived in Kunming at the end of March, spent its first two months ferrying fuel for itself.

Every ton for Chennault was therefore a ton taken from the Chinese troops whom Stilwell was training and wanted to arm. The dispute over the division of meagre supplies became the central issue of American policy in China.

Its place in the war

In May 1943, at the Trident Conference in Washington, where Chennault and Stilwell presented Roosevelt with conflicting plans, the President came down on the airman’s side: he ordered Hump deliveries to be raised to 10,000 tons a month by the autumn and priority to be given to supplying the Fourteenth Air Force. Chennault’s air force, reinforced by the Chinese-American Composite Wing, attacked Japanese airfields, railways and shipping from the Yangtze to the South China Sea, and at the end of 1943 struck Taiwan for the first time.

Stilwell’s warnings came true in 1944. The Japanese Operation Ichi-gō, the largest land offensive by the Japanese army in the war, routed the Chinese armies in Henan, Hunan and Guangxi and overran the Fourteenth Air Force’s forward airfields, including those at Hengyang and Guilin. Even so, Chiang Kai-shek, backed by Chennault, secured Stilwell’s recall in October 1944. Chennault, sidelined by the new command, resigned in July 1945 and left China shortly before the end of the war. The Fourteenth Air Force – which throughout its existence fought at the end of the longest supply line in the world – remained a symbol of the American presence in China, and also of the dispute that had begun with Stilwell’s arrival in China: whether the war in Asia would be won from the air or on the ground.