Download or read book A Few Planes for China written by Eugenie Buchan and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On December 7, 1941, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into armed conflict with Japan. In the following months, the Japanese seemed unbeatable as they seized American, British, and European territory across the Pacific: the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies. Nonetheless, in those dark days, the US press began to pick up reports about a group of American mercenaries who were bringing down enemy planes over Burma and western China. The pilots quickly became known as Flying Tigers, and a legend was born. But who were these flyers for hire and how did they wind up in the British colony of Burma? The standard version of events is that in 1940 Colonel Claire Chennault went to Washington and convinced the Roosevelt administration to establish, fund, and equip covert air squadrons that could attack the Japanese in China and possibly bomb Tokyo even before a declaration of war existed between the United States and Japan. That was hardly the case: although present at its creation, Chennault did not create the American Volunteer Group. In A Few Planes for China, Eugenie Buchan draws on wide-ranging new sources to overturn seventy years of received wisdom about the genesis of the Flying Tigers. This strange experiment in airpower was accidental rather than intentional; haphazard decisions and changing threat perceptions shaped its organization and deprived it of resources. In the end it was the British - more than any American in or out of government - who got the Tigers off the ground. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the most important man behind the Flying Tigers was not Claire Chennault but Winston Churchill.
Download or read book Flying Tiger written by Robert Lee Scott Jr. and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-19 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flying Tiger: Chennault of China by Robert Lee Scott, Jr. tells the story of a rebel whose concepts as to the use of air power often clashed with the orthodox and standardized teachings of the military schools of his time.
Download or read book The Flying Tigers written by Sam Kleiner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thrilling story behind the American pilots who were secretly recruited to defend the nation’s desperate Chinese allies before Pearl Harbor and ended up on the front lines of the war against the Japanese in the Pacific. Sam Kleiner’s The Flying Tigers uncovers the hidden story of the group of young American men and women who crossed the Pacific before Pearl Harbor to risk their lives defending China. Led by legendary army pilot Claire Chennault, these men left behind an America still at peace in the summer of 1941 using false identities to travel across the Pacific to a run-down airbase in the jungles of Burma. In the wake of the disaster at Pearl Harbor this motley crew was the first group of Americans to take on the Japanese in combat, shooting down hundreds of Japanese aircraft in the skies over Burma, Thailand, and China. At a time when the Allies were being defeated across the globe, the Flying Tigers’ exploits gave hope to Americans and Chinese alike. Kleiner takes readers into the cockpits of their iconic shark-nosed P-40 planes—one of the most familiar images of the war—as the Tigers perform nail-biting missions against the Japanese. He profiles the outsize personalities involved in the operation, including Chennault, whose aggressive tactics went against the prevailing wisdom of military strategy; Greg “Pappy” Boyington, the man who would become the nation’s most beloved pilot until he was shot down and became a POW; Emma Foster, one of the nurses in the unit who had a passionate romance with a pilot named John Petach; and Madame Chiang Kai-shek herself, who first brought Chennault to China and who would come to visit these young Americans. A dramatic story of a covert operation whose very existence would have scandalized an isolationist United States, The Flying Tigers is the unforgettable account of a group of Americans whose heroism changed the world, and who cemented an alliance between the United States and China as both nations fought against seemingly insurmountable odds.
Download or read book Flying Tigers written by Daniel Ford and published by Warbird Books. This book was released on 2023-05-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During World War II, in the skies over Burma and China, a handful of American pilots met and bloodied the "Imperial Wild Eagles" of Japan and won immortality as the Flying Tigers. One of America's most famous combat forces, the Tigers were recruited to defend beleaguered China for $600 a month and a bounty of $500 for each Japanese plane they shot down--fantastic money in an era when a Manhattan hotel room cost three dollars a night.This May 2023 revision has never-before-published information about Chennault's early years. "Admirable," wrote Chennault biographer Martha Byrd of Ford's original text. "A readable book based on sound sources. Expect some surprises." Flying Tigers won the Aviation/Space Writers Association Award of Excellence in the year of its first publication.
Download or read book Flying Tigers Chennault in China written by Ronald Heiferman and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We began at Toungoo in July 1941 with a kindergarten for teaching bomber pilots how to fly fighters." Within a few months Claire Chennault had welded his men into a first rate air guerilla force, bombing and strafing in the service of China. Known as the Flying Tigers, they were spurred on by a reward of 500 dollars for every Japanese plane downed. - Back cover.
Download or read book China s Wings written by Gregory Crouch and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Enduring Patagonia comes a dazzling tale of aerial adventure set against the roiling backdrop of war in Asia. The incredible real-life saga of the flying band of brothers who opened the skies over China in the years leading up to World War II—and boldly safeguarded them during that conflict—China’s Wings is one of the most exhilarating untold chapters in the annals of flight. At the center of the maelstrom is the book’s courtly, laconic protagonist, American aviation executive William Langhorne Bond. In search of adventure, he arrives in Nationalist China in 1931, charged with turning around the turbulent nation’s flagging airline business, the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC). The mission will take him to the wild and lawless frontiers of commercial aviation: into cockpits with daredevil pilots flying—sometimes literally—on a wing and a prayer; into the dangerous maze of Chinese politics, where scheming warlords and volatile military officers jockey for advantage; and into the boardrooms, backrooms, and corridors of power inhabited by such outsized figures as Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; foreign minister T. V. Soong; Generals Arnold, Stilwell, and Marshall; and legendary Pan American Airways founder Juan Trippe. With the outbreak of full-scale war in 1941, Bond and CNAC are transformed from uneasy spectators to active participants in the struggle against Axis imperialism. Drawing on meticulous research, primary sources, and extensive personal interviews with participants, Gregory Crouch offers harrowing accounts of brutal bombing runs and heroic evacuations, as the fight to keep one airline flying becomes part of the larger struggle for China’s survival. He plunges us into a world of perilous night flights, emergency water landings, and the constant threat of predatory Japanese warplanes. When Japanese forces capture Burma and blockade China’s only overland supply route, Bond and his pilots must battle shortages of airplanes, personnel, and spare parts to airlift supplies over an untried five-hundred-mile-long aerial gauntlet high above the Himalayas—the infamous “Hump”—pioneering one of the most celebrated endeavors in aviation history. A hero’s-eye view of history in the grand tradition of Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, China’s Wings takes readers on a mesmerizing journey to a time and place that reshaped the modern world.
Download or read book China Clipper written by Robert Gandt and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the China Clipper shattered aviation records on its maiden six-day flight from California to the Orient in 1935, the flying boat became an instant celebrity. This lively history by Robert Gandt traces the development of the great flying boats as both a triumph of technology and a stirring human drama. He examines the political, military, and economic forces that drove its development and explains the aeronautical advances that made the aircraft possible. To fully document the story he includes interviews with flying boat pioneers and a dynamic collection of photographs, charts, and cutaway illustrations.
Download or read book China Airborne written by James Fallows and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our most influential journalists, here is a timely, vital, and illuminating account of the next stage of China’s modernization—its plan to rival America as the world’s leading aerospace power and to bring itself from its low-wage past to a high-tech future. In 2011, China announced its twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of China’s project, making clear how it stands to catalyze the nation’s hyper-growth and hyper-urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America’s transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Completing this remarkable picture, Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi’an, home to 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly-line workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China’s pursuit of aeronautical supremacy. He concludes by explaining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and for the rest of the world—and the right ways for us to respond.
Download or read book Dragon s Wings written by Andreas Rupprecht and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China continues its rise as a world power, there is growing interest in its military aviation. Very little has been published in the past on the subject because of the difficulty of obtaining information, but aviation authors Tony Buttler and Andreas Rupprecht have been researching this subject together for a number of years, both from the perspective of their interest in the Chinese aircraft and also through an interest in Chinese secret aviation projects. They have now amassed enough material to put together a book on Chinese fighter and bomber aircraft development since Mao’s Communist Party took control of the country in 1949. The book examines the design and development of the country’s major military combat aircraft (fighters, bombers, attack aircraft, antisubmarine) since the industry became established after the Second World War, plus a good number of design proposals which, for whatever reason, were rejected or abandoned. The text is supplemented with photographs, line drawings, and color artwork of the aircraft.
Download or read book Aces of the Republic of China Air Force written by Raymond Cheung and published by Osprey Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ace pilots of the Republic of China Air Force have long been shrouded in mystery and obscurity, as their retreat to Taiwan in 1949 and a blanket martial law made records of the RoCAF all but impossible to access. Now, for the first time, the colorful story of these aces can finally be told. Using the latest research based on released archival information and full-color illustrations, this book charts the history of the top scoring pilots of the RoCAF from the beginning of the gruelling, eight-year Sino-Japanese War to the conclusion of the Civil War against the Chinese Communists. Beginning as a ragged and very disparate group of planes and pilots drawn from various provincial air forces, the RoCAF gradually became standardised and was brought under American tutelage. Altogether it produced 17 aces who scored kills while flying a startling variety of aircraft, from biplanes to F-86 Sabres.
Download or read book Topgun Days written by Dave Baranek and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dave Baranek (callsign "Bio") was one of 451 young men to receive his Wings of Gold in 1980 as a naval flight officer. Four years later, seasoned by intense training and deployments in the tense confrontations of the cold war, he became the only one of that initial group to rise to become an instructor at the navy's elite Fighter Weapons School. As a Topgun instructor, Bio was responsible for teaching the navy's and Marine Corps's best fighter pilots how to be even better. He schooled them in the classroom and then went head-to-head with them in the skies. Then, in August 1985, Bio was assigned to combine his day-to-day flight duties with participation in a Pentagon-blessed project to film action footage for a major Hollywood movie focusing on the lives, loves, heartbreaks, and triumphs of young fighter pilots: Top Gun. Bio soon found himself riding in limousines to attend gala premieres, and being singled out by giggling teenagers and awed schoolboys who recognized the name "Topgun" on his T-shirts. The book ends with his reflections on his career as a skilled naval aviator and his enduring love of flight.
Download or read book China Through the Eyes of a Tiger written by Roland Sperry and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contemporary China written by and published by . This book was released on 1941 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Tales of the Flying Tigers written by Daniel Ford and published by Daniel Ford. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What God abandoned, these defended / And saved the sum of things for pay." In the bleak winter of 1941-1942, no American or British force could stem the tide in Southeast Asia, as the Philippines, Thailand, Malaya, and Singapore fell to the victorious Japanese. Only in Burma was there a ray of hope. There, over beleaguered Rangoon, a few dozen Americans clawed Japanese warplanes from the sky for a cash bounty from the Chinese government. Wearing mismatched uniforms, with Chinese insignia, and flying cast-off fighter planes, they did what no other air force seemed able to do, and won immortality as the Flying Tigers. Daniel Ford wrote "the definitive history" of the American Volunteer Group, as it was formally known. Here, he has collected five e-books about the Flying Tigers into an omnibus that details the AVG's planes, pilots, and history as remembered in the United States and in Japan. An essential collection for every admirer of the Flying Tigers. Revised and updated March 2022. "The AVG's first encounter with the Japanese Air Force over Kunming, China, on 20 December 1941 is often written about. The version Dan Ford presents here is probably the most complete picture extant." (First Blood for the Flying Tigers) "I can wholeheartedly recommend his work to anyone desiring insight into the early years of the JAAF" (Rising Sun Over Burma) "Very well written and full of new information about a fascinating time in our history" (100 Hawks for China) "A unique insight into how the Japanese appeared to the pilots meeting them, and how the AVG learned to deal with them" (AVG Confidential)
Download or read book China On The Eve Of Communist Takeover written by A. Doak Barnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-17 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book attempts to illuminate some of the trends and conditions in China just prior to, and at the time of the Communist takeover. The conditions that existed just prior to 1949 provided the immediate starting point, the base line, from which the Chinese Communists, once in power, embarked upon their tremendous political, economic, and social t
Download or read book Aviation written by and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
