Days of the Ching Pao: A Photographic Record of the Flying Tigers-14th Air Force in China in World War II

In the summer of 1941, months before America was drawn into World War II by the attack on Pearl Harbor, a small group of American military pilots was secretly being recruited to augment Chinas Air Force. These roughly 100 pilots and 200 support crew were officials known as «The First American Volunteer Group» or AVG. After their first combat on December 18, 1941, where they were highly outnumbered and very successful, a journalist wrote in his column, «they flew like tigers . . .» From that time on, they became known as the «Flying Tigers.» The immediate successors to the Flying Tigers was an Air Corps unit called the China Air Task Force (CATF), which had been part of the 10th Air force with headquarters in India. The CATF included the 23rd fighter Group, composed of three squadrons of P-40Es, and a squadron of B-25 bombers.