3 – Too good to be true
To recruit pilots for the American Volunteer Group, Bill Pawley employed Richard Aldworth, widely but wrongly believed to have flown for France before the U.S. entered World War I. Aldworth was bedridden that spring at Walter Reed Army Hospital, so someone else was needed to do the legwork. Skip Adair from the flight school at Yunnan-Yi was available: a flight of Zeros had strafed the airfield toward the end of 1940, destroying twenty training planes and persuading Adair it was time to go home. Chennault signed him on as an army recruiter. A retired U.S. Navy commander, Rutledge Irvine, was scouting naval bases even before CAMCO got the contract to recruit for China. Supposedly there were others, and Chennault claimed to have been threatened with arrest at Hamilton Field while looking for pilots. But no AVG veteran remembers being signed up by anyone except Irvine, Skip Adair, or (toward the end of the summer) Richard Aldworth with his aura of the Lafayette Escadrille.
In almost every case, potential volunteers were offered the rank of pilot officer, paying $600 a month and (they were told) equivalent to first lieutenant in the U.S. Army. For an especially qualified man, there was the possibility of appointment as flight leader, $675 a month and supposedly equivalent to captain.
These were heady offers. Most of the pilots approached by CAMCO were serving at the lowest commissioned level—second lieutenant or ensign—and at least one was an enlisted man. Signing up with CAMCO thus meant instant promotion and double or triple what they earned in U.S. service. The recruiters also promised a bounty for each Japanese plane they shot down, but in terms so vague that not everyone believed it.
Irvine’s first prospects were a couple of dive-bomber pilots on Ranger, one of two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers on the Atlantic coast. Twenty-two years old and fresh out of flight school, Eddie Rector had joined Ranger the previous summer to fly one of its monoplane Vought SB2U Vindicators, which did double duty as scout planes and dive bombers. Rector was a North Carolina native, medium height, handsome as a movie star. After his first tour with the fleet, supporting U.S. Marines practicing amphibious assaults on Cuba, Ranger brought him back to Norfolk, Virginia. There, on New Year’s Day 1941, he met a new pilot. He was tall and lanky, with jug ears, a worried expression, and an unlikely background: born in Japanese-occupied Korea, the son of a missionary who later became chaplain to the Texas Rangers. This was David Hill, who of course was called Tex.
Ranger took them to the Caribbean for further landing exercises, then home again to Norfolk. “The word spread,” Rector told me in 1986, “that there was this guy looking for people to go out and fly for China.” He and Hill decided to look into it. In what would become a familiar script over the next four months, they went to a Norfolk hotel room to meet Rutledge Irvine. He promised them exciting work, fabulous pay, and all in a worthy cause. Pilots were needed, Irvine said, to stop the Japanese from bombing the Burma Road and enable China to continue to receive supplies from the west. As Rector recalled Irvine’s pitch, he showed them a map that included Rangoon, Kunming, and Chongqing. “The only way the Chinese can keep fighting,” Irvine told them, “is to maintain the supplies that come up the Burma Road, and you will go over there under the command of Colonel Chennault and you will defend the Burma Road all the way up to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province.”
“Well, hell,” Rector recalls saying, “we’re interested.” But he had doubts—not about the job, but the likelihood that it would ever come to pass. Back at their billets, he mourned: “Tex, this is too good to be true. This will never happen; they’ll never let us go.”
Their next assignment was even more exciting than the Cuban landings. Ranger escorted British convoys out to a line drawn from Iceland to the Azores—the entire North Atlantic, for all practical purposes. Here, in what President Franklin Roosevelt with astonishing panache had defined as U.S. waters, the airmen swept out in front of the convoys, looking for German submarines. If they saw anything threatening, they radioed the information to the carrier, which informed the Royal Navy destroyers that made the actual attack. Officially, this duty was “neutrality patrol.” American sailors called it “the secret war.” Whenever Ranger returned to Norfolk, Commander Irvine met his prospects with news of the fighter group being readied for service in China.
Skip Adair was doing similar work at U.S. Army airfields. Adair was thirty-two, tall, dark-haired, and sober. He made an especially rich strike at Mitchel Field on Long Island, where he signed up nine pilots from the 8th Pursuit Group, all with experience in the Curtiss P-40B, virtually identical to the Tomahawks diverted to China. Among them was Parker Dupouy, an engineering graduate from Brown University, who explained that he volunteered because Asian duty seemed less dangerous than serving in Europe. “It seemed to me,” he told me, “that sooner or later we would be in the war, and I would rather be shooting Japanese than Germans. That was wrong, but I didn’t know it at the time.”
The same thought occurred to Albert Probst, a red-headed second lieutenant at Maxwell Field in Alabama. Skip Adair turned up one day, looking for a pilot named Baumler (also first-named Albert, but better known as Ajax) who’d flown as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. Red Probst explained that the former soldier of fortune was temporarily assigned to Eglin Field in Florida. “Adair then started talking to me,” he told an interviewer in the 1970s, “and the first thing I knew, he had recruited me.” Probst was in debt, and he figured that shooting down Japanese bombers would be both safe and lucrative: “Let’s see now,” he mused. “I am making $210 a month now, and you are going to pay me $600. I get a free trip to China, and if we go to war with somebody, I won’t be on the first string, but the second string. I don’t want to have anything to do with them Germans, so I’m going to get over there and help those Chinese.”
Ajax Baumler didn’t wait to be recruited. According to Matthew Kuykendall, then at Eglin, the combat veteran knew “most of the brass in the Air Corps” because of his escapade in Spain. Hearing that pilots were needed for the Chinese Air Force, Baumler commandeered a Seversky P-35 and flew up to Washington to check out the rumor. He returned with a contract and assured Kuykendall that he too could qualify for service in China. A cautious type, Kuykendall didn’t commit himself until he returned to Maxwell Field and talked to his buddies. Then he signed up, along with Red Probst and two more.
Eddie Rector was perfectly willing to fly against Germans, given the chance. But that did not seem likely, and by the end of June he was ready to sign the contract Irvine was offering. “All I’d ever lived for since I was twelve years old,” he told me, “was to fly airplanes, and I [thought] if I’m going to fly combat airplanes, I want to smell a little cordite, and this is my opportunity to do so. But more important than that was the fact that I’d read everything Kipling had ever written, and I was just fascinated with that part of the world—Burma, India, China—the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking eastward to the sea. I thought: This is my opportunity to see it, and I’ll get paid for it.... And I thought: My God, I’ve come along in life at the proper time. And those two things are why I signed up.”
Tex Hill signed, too. “I’d always wanted to go back to the Orient,” he told an interviewer in 1962. “But the thing that motivated me to go to China was, more or less, adventure. I had no particular dedication to anything.” Also joining from Ranger was Bert Christman, who as a civilian had worked as a comic-strip artist for Associated Press Feature Service, chronicling the adventures of Scorchy Smith, an American mercenary pilot who flew and fought in Latin America. As Rector told the story, when the three young men announced they were resigning their commissions, the base commander climbed aboard his personal seaplane and flew to Washington to complain to Admiral Stark himself. The commander flew back to Norfolk a chastened man, Rector recalled, his protest rebuffed with the words: “this is presidentially approved, and that is it.”
