After almost six months of continuous combat duty in China with the Fourteenth Air Force, Sergeant Hobart Jones, the nose-gunner and engineer of a Consolidated B-24J named Tough Titti, was no stranger to surprises. One experience he later vividly recalled happened in midsummer 1944, while he and his unit, the 375th Bomb Squadron, 308th Bomb Group, were leaving the target area, 18,000 feet over Nanking.

‘We’d just assembled into a tight defensive formation with maybe 100 feet separating our planes, Jones said. And several thousand feet over our heads, our escorts — a mix of P-40s and P-51s — were in the middle of a dogfight with a bunch of Jap fighters. I happened to be looking over to my left when this Jap fighter — I believe it was an Oscar [Nakajima Ki.43] — just seemed to drop out of nowhere and form up right behind our left wing. Jones threw up his hands and mimicked the shock that had been on his face at the time. I thought I was hallucinating! he declared with a laugh. The Jap pilot and I were staring at each across a space of maybe 50 feet, maybe less. The guy had on a fur-trimmed helmet and sported a bushy mustache, and he was grinning — grinning at me! Nobody could take a shot at him because our planes were in each other’s line of fire. After what must have been only two or three seconds of looking at this guy, my headset erupted with the voice of my pilot screaming, `Step up! Step up!’ He was calling the plane next to us, telling them to move so we could get a clear shot. But the exact instant the other ship moved, the Jap flicked over on his back and split-essed right out of there — I mean, got clean away without one shot being fired!

In a one-year odyssey, Jones had left his family farm in Shady Grove, Ark., enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), trained all over the United States and arrived in China in February 1944 as a buck sergeant. In the States, we’d all [B-24 crews] been trained strictly for high-altitude, daylight precision bombing, Jones said, but that turned out to have little bearing on what they did with us in China. After we got there, we were required to fly whatever kind of mission the military situation called for from day to day. It wasn’t unusual, he explained, for us to fly a long mission to Hong Kong — a 1,400-mile round trip from our base at Chengkung [near Kunming] — where we’d be dropping bombs on the docks from 20,000 feet; then, a day later, get ordered to make a low-level bomb run on a bridge or a railroad tunnel. To Jones, low meant as near to the ground as they could get and still clear obstacles, at times down to 50 feet above the ground. Sometimes we’d go right down on the deck and strafe, he said, to shoot up the Jap supply boats on the rivers or maybe a train if we caught one.

Jones recalled that the 375th’s most persistent problem wasn’t combat requirements but supplies: Our B-24 outfits normally had to fly three to five resupply trips to India and back just to get everything we needed — gas, bombs, ammunition and so on — to mount one combat sortie. Of course that meant flying `the Hump,’ a three-and-a-half-hour trip each way, and most of the time we did it in overloaded airplanes. [The Hump was the name American aircrews had attached to the Himalayan mountain range.] And the shortage of parts made it impossible to keep a lot of the B-24s in service. The biggest number of planes I ever saw the 308th put in the air at one time was 28, and that was only once.

During World War II, the China-based Fourteenth Air Force was not only the most short-lived of the numbered air forces, existing for a period of less than 34 months (March 5, 1943 to December 31, 1945), it was the smallest to operate in a combat theater, reaching a peak strength of just six air groups and four auxiliary squadrons (approximately 700 airplanes) by the end of 1944. It holds the singular distinction of being the only numbered air force to have been wholly created, organized and operated within a war zone. Despite its limitations, the Fourteenth went on to produce a truly astounding war record: 2,908 enemy aircraft destroyed or damaged against 193 combat-related losses of its own; 2.1 million tons of shipping sunk or damaged; 99 warships sunk or destroyed; an estimated 18,000 small rivercraft (carrying enemy troops and supplies) destroyed; and 1,225 locomotives, 817 bridges and 4,836 trucks destroyed. Added to that were approximately 59,500 Japanese troops killed in close air support engagements.

For most of its life the Fourteenth Air Force was commanded by one of the most controversial USAAF leaders of the wartime period, Maj. Gen. Claire Lee Chennault. The ultimate success of the Fourteenth did little or nothing to relieve the longstanding estrangement between Chennault and his superiors at the Pentagon. When the Japanese threat in China had been neutralized, he was relieved of command. On September 2, 1945, during the surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, five-star Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur was reported to have asked, Where’s Chennault? He had not been invited.

Unlike the other air forces created during World War II, the Fourteenth was not the typical, planned-from-the-top military organization; in fact, the U.S. military leadership, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down, was unanimously opposed to the idea of establishing a separate numbered air force in China. All of them believed that such a venture would be a tactical and logistical rat hole down which money, materiel and manpower needed elsewhere would be wasted. Yet, even before the United States entered the war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was anxious to make some gesture to assist the beleaguered Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government had been embroiled in a war with Japan since 1937 and had repeatedly begged the United States for help. So in April 1941, against the advice of his military staff, Roosevelt authorized the Chinese to recruit pilots and ground crewmen from the U.S. military services for a civilian fighter unit to be called the American Volunteer Group (AVG). He also allowed the Chinese government, through a civilian cover organization, to purchase 100 Curtiss Hawk 81A-3 fighters (export models of the P-40C) that had been earmarked for Britain’s Royal Air Force.

The man selected by Chiang to organize, train and lead this force was ex-U.S. Army Air Corps captain Claire Lee Chennault, who since 1937 had functioned as Chiang’s chief adviser on military aviation matters. Though classified as an eccentric by his former Air Corps peers, Chennault had nonetheless spent his time well in China, not only learning to effectively deal with his Chinese hosts but also becoming an expert on Japanese tactics and capabilities.

The earliest mission of the AVG, which became famous as the Flying Tigers, was to protect the vital rail-, road- and sea-based supply routes between China and Burma. Despite noteworthy tactical successes (the AVG was ultimately credited with the destruction of 286 Japanese aircraft against a loss of 14 of its own pilots), Chennault’s small fighter band was unable to reverse the overwhelming tide of invading Japanese forces, and the Burma supply routes were completely sealed off in early March 1942. China was effectively severed from surface contact with the rest of the world, and the only means of resupply was by air via India — over the Himalayas, the highest mountain range in the world.

When the civilian AVG was disbanded on July 4, 1942, it was incorporated into the China Air Task Force (CATF), a subcommand of the AAF’s India-based Tenth Air Force. Claire Chennault was recalled to active duty in the AAF at the rank of brigadier general and placed in overall command of the CATF. Starting with one fighter group consisting of 51 P-40s inherited from the AVG, the CATF was soon augmented by North American B-25s of the 11th Bomb Squadron and tasked with the broad responsibilities of interdicting enemy movements, protecting the southern and eastern approaches across the Himalayan Mountains, and defending the China terminals and bases.

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