Preface (continued)

Sixty-four years have passed since the Tigers disbanded, yet fresh stories by and about them come along at regular intervals. I fear I'll make no new friends among AVG veterans when I address one of these accounts, published by Chris Shores in 1993. In the second volume of his meticulous series about the air war in Southeast Asia, published under the title Bloody Shambles, he came close to accusing the Flying Tigers of "acquiring" victories from their colleagues in the Royal Air Force, in order to split the combat bonuses paid out by the Chinese government. I take up this prickly subject in Chapter 11, with respect to the conflicting stories of Allied raids on Moulmein in February 1942, though the accusations aren't limited to a single day.

For the new edition, I've also had the benefit of recently published studies by Alan Armstrong, Terrill Clements, Neil Frances, Umemoto Hiroshi, Ray Wagner, and Daniel Whitney, and memoirs by Chuck Baisden, Tex Hill, Frank Losonsky, and Muriel Sue Upfill. And I'm indebted to several individuals who corrected errors or supplied new information. They include Martha Byrd, who wrote the definitive biography of Chennault; Joan Corcoran, who was present when the Flying Tigers got their name; Suzuki Goichi, who flew against the Tigers in their first combat; Tom Trumble, the Old Man's friend and secretary for many years; and Walter Tydon, project engineer for the P-40. First-hand information and critiques came--in sometimes fiery form--from history buffs Dave Dunlap, Rick Dunn, Corey Jordan, Kirk Setzer, and Brad Smith, and from AVG pilots Charlie Bond, Joe Rosbert, and especially the late Erik Shilling. (Not the least of my debts to Erik is that he goaded me into taking up flight training at the age of sixty-six, and eventually to become a certificated pilot.)

While folding in the new material, and making amends for earlier sins of omission and commission, I took the opportunity to shorten and simplify my original text. In that task, I was aided by Sally Ford, formerly my editor, now more nearly my co-author. In the interest of brevity, I include only limited source notes, posting detailed notes, bibliography, and background material online at www.flyingtigersbook.com.

Throughout the text, I follow the standards of measurements in common use in 1941-1942. Distances are given in land (statute) miles, speeds in miles per hour, and altitudes in feet.

I use the postwar Pinyin system for rendering Chinese place names--so it's Beijing, not Peiking; Guilin, not Kweilin--because Pinyin gives a better idea of how a word is pronounced, but I retain the older spelling for historical figures like Chiang Kai-shek. For Japanese words, I use a simplified Hepburn system for rendering them in the western alphabet. Note that the Japanese, like most Asians, put the family name first, followed by an individual's given name; I respect that practice in this new edition, though I didn't in the first.

Burma now calls itself Myanmar. Though grateful for the freedom I enjoyed to travel in that country, I don't feel bound by a dictatorship's preferences, so the country remains Burma--and its capital, Rangoon--in the pages that follow.

Finally, today's U.S. dollar is but a shadow of the greenback of the 1930s and 1940s. Taking average wages as the standard of comparison, you can safely multiply dollar figures in this book by twenty to find their value in our much-devalued currency. The young person who wrote the dust-jacket copy for Flying Tigers in 1991 took pains to note that they'd volunteered to fly for China for "only" $600 a month. It was with some difficulty that I persuaded her that they were rather well paid, their stipend being the equivalent, in our dollars, of $144,000 a year.

Daniel Ford, Durham, New Hamphire, January 2007