Background
Claire Lee Chennault was born on September 6, 1893 in Commerce, Texas, United States. He was the son of John Stonewall Chennault, a farmer, and Jessie Lee. He grew up in rural northeastern Louisiana.
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military leader airline executive
Claire Lee Chennault was born on September 6, 1893 in Commerce, Texas, United States. He was the son of John Stonewall Chennault, a farmer, and Jessie Lee. He grew up in rural northeastern Louisiana.
He was a bright though reluctant student. In 1909-1910, while at Louisiana State University (where he took ROTC training), he applied for admission to both West Point and Annapolis, but decided against a military career. He did a brief stint of study at the State Normal School at Natchitoches and received a teaching credential in 1910.
For several years Chennault taught public school and held other jobs, but he knew he wanted to fly. He was repeatedly rejected for flight training after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, but was commissioned a first lieutenant in the infantry reserve. While stationed in San Antonio, Texas, he learned to fly at Kelly Field; he won his rating as a fighter pilot in 1919. Discharged from the army a year later, he farmed briefly in Louisiana, and on September 24, 1920, was commissioned a first lieutenant in the new Army Air Service. Chennault's subsequent assignments included service with the Ninety-Fourth Fighter Squadron at Ellington Field, Texas, and command of the Nineteenth Pursuit Squadron, stationed at Wheeler Field, Hawaii. He was promoted to captain in 1929, while serving at Brooks Field, Texas. From 1930 to 1937 he was at the Air Corps Tactical School, Langley Field, first as a student then as instructor. While there he organized and led the Air Corps acrobatic exhibition team (popularly known as "Three Men on a Flying Trapeze"). During these years he developed the theories of air tactics he later applied against the Japanese in China; in 1935 he published them in a textbook, The Role of Defensive Pursuit. Chennault attacked the fashionable theory that bombers could operate without escort by virtue of their speed and firepower; he perfected team combat tactics, experimented with airdrop supply and paratroop techniques, and crusaded for greater firepower and range in fighter aircraft. His vigorous public advocacy of these views made him unpopular with the dominant strategic bombing school in the Army Air Corps. In April 1937, suffering from overwork, chronic bronchial trouble, and partial deafness, he accepted retirement for physical disability with the rank of captain. The day after retiring, Chennault left for the Far East to survey the Chinese air force for Mme. Chiang Kai-shek. After the Japanese invasion in July, he became personal adviser to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and supervised the training of the Chinese air force by American instructors at bases in southwestern China. Late in 1940 Chiang sent him to the United States to enlist support for an American-manned and -equipped air force. He faced bitter opposition, particularly from the Army Air Corps chief, General H. H. Arnold. But China had friends in high places, including President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. Chennault was able to recruit some 100 pilots and to buy the same number of new Curtiss-Wright P-40B fighters. By midsummer of 1941 his American Volunteer Group (AVG)--soon nicknamed the Flying Tigers from the tiger-shark teeth, tongue, and eyes painted on the noses of the aircraft--was training at a Royal Air Force base at Toungoo, Burma. After the Japanese invasion the main base was moved to Kunming in southern Yunnan, China. From mid-December until its incorporation into the United States Army in July 1942, the AVG ran up a remarkable record. Chennault trained his men to fight in pairs, stressing accurate gunnery and hit-and-run tactics to exploit the P-40's firepower, ruggedness, and speed in diving and level flight against the fast-turning but fragile and lightly armed Japanese Zero fighters. His ground crews were drilled in rapid refueling and repair, and the virtually foolproof Chinese air-raid warning net protected his small force from surprise attack. With the RAF the AVG kept Rangoon and the Burma Road open for two and a half months in 1942; it was a key factor in defeating the Japanese invasion of Yunnan that spring, and it stopped enemy bombing of China's cities. At a cost of four pilots lost in air combat out of a total of twenty-six for all causes, it destroyed at least 299, and probably another 153, enemy aircraft. During the next three years, Chennault's expanded forces (China Air Task Force and, after March 1943, the Fourteenth Air Force) destroyed some 2, 600 enemy aircraft and probably 1, 500 more, sank 2, 300, 000 tons of enemy merchant shipping, and killed 66, 700 enemy troops, losing about 500 aircraft in combat. During most of the war Chennault was at odds with his American superiors, especially the China-Burma-India theater commander, Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell. But Chiang Kai-shek's confidence in him never wavered, and he won the respect of Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who replaced Stilwell after his forced recall in October 1944. The Stilwell-Chennault feud transcended professional disagreement; each saw the other as personally unprincipled, prejudiced, and power-hungry. Late in 1942 Chennault was able, with the help of Wendell Willkie, to bring his strategic ideas to Roosevelt's attention. He asserted that with 150 fighters and smaller numbers of bombers, maintained at full strength, he could cripple the Japanese air force in less than a year and then bomb Japan into submission. Stilwell's view, supported by most of the high command, was that Japan would react to such a threat by overrunning the American air bases in eastern China and that the Chinese armies could not stop them. Chennault rated Chinese capabilities higher. In May 1943 Roosevelt gave him a free hand and a six-month priority on tonnage flown over the "Hump" from India. After suffering heavy damage, the Japanese launched their offensive in 1944 and captured the main American bases, as predicted. The Fourteenth Air Force continued to operate with growing effect from other bases farther west. By 1945 China had become a military backwater. In the spring Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall and General Arnold forced Chennault's ouster, on the basis of Stilwell's charges of insubordination. Chennault retired the following October with the rank of major general. Chiang Kai-shek awarded him China's highest honor, the Order of the White Sun and Blue Sky. After the war Chennault became a leading champion of resistance to Communism in the Far East. In 1946 he retired to China and organized a civil airline, with himself as president, to carry relief supplies into the interior under contract to the Chinese Nationalist Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. CAT, as the airline was popularly known, was reorganized as Civil Air Transport in January 1948, and by the end of that year its expanding relief and commercial operations had made it one of the world's largest air cargo carriers. During the ensuing Chinese civil war CAT continued to work for the Nationalists, airlifting supplies to isolated garrisons and evacuating troops and refugees before the advancing Communists. As the first of the Central Intelligence Agency's commercial "proprietaries, " CAT provided logistical support to CIA operations in Korea, Indochina, North Vietnam, Laos, and Tibet. CAT transports had a major supply role in the Korean War, and during the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 kept the garrison supplied until it was overrun.
On December 25, 1911, he married Nell Thompson; they had eight children. After divorcing his first wife in 1946, Chennault married Anna Chan, a Chinese journalist, on December 21, 1947; they had two daughters.
