3 – Too good to be true (part 3)
The contract they signed was a marvel of circumlocution. There was no mention of combat, bonus payments, or even of flying: “WHEREAS, the Employer ... operates an aircraft manufacturing, operating and repair business in China, and
“WHEREAS, the Employer desires to employ the Employee in connection with its business and said Employee desires to enter into such employment,
“NOW THEREFORE....
“ARTICLE 1. The Employer agrees to employ the Employee to render such services and perform such duties as the Employer may direct and the Employee agrees to enter the service of the Employer who, in consideration of the Employee’s faithfully and diligently performing said duties and rendering said services, will pay to the Employee a salary of _____ dollars United States currency....
“ARTICLE 2. The said employment shall become effective ... from the date of the Employee’s reporting in person to the Employer’s representative at the port of departure from the United States ... and shall continue for one year after the date on which the Employee shall arrive at the port of entry to China ... unless sooner terminated as hereinafter provided.”
CAMCO was to provide travel documents, train ticket to California, food and lodging while there, $100 in walking-around money, transport to Asia, and $500 toward his return fare at the end of his tour. If he were disabled or killed, CAMCO would pay six months’ salary to him or his estate. (He would also have a $10,000 life insurance policy, the premiums deducted from his pay.) There was no provision for him to resign, but he could be fired for insubordination, malingering, revealing confidential information, drug or alcohol abuse, or “illness or other disability incurred not in line of duty and as a result of Employee’s own misconduct”—i.e., sexually transmitted disease.
To remedy such matters as that last, CAMCO hired a U.S. Army flight surgeon, Thomas Gentry, who in turn recruited two other doctors, a dentist, and a male nurse. Gentry wanted women nurses, too, so he inquired at the Yale school of public health, where he was told to look up red-haired Emma Foster. As an undergraduate, Red Foster had spent her junior year in China and wanted to return. She could find no offers from China when she graduated, so she went to work in the Chicago slums. Doc Gentry telephoned her father, who relayed the offer, figuring that any job was better than the one she had. Foster signed up with CAMCO, along with an older nurse, Jo Stewart.
Then there were line chiefs, crew chiefs, mechanics, armorers, radiomen, propeller specialists, parachute riggers, photographers, weathermen, clerks, and orderlies—the men who’d keep the planes and pilots in the air. The air force table of organization called for 1,000 ground personnel in a fighter group. CAMCO’s quota was 200, and only 186 would actually sail for Asia. Most were army men. Signing on for $300 a month was Sgt. Robert M. Smith, a twenty-six-old college graduate serving as a mechanic in the 20th Pursuit Group. Smith had caught the travel bug from The Royal Road to Romance, an immensely popular account of the around-the-world odyssey of Richard Halliburton, formerly of Princeton. Salary was less important: “I would have signed up for $100 a month,” he wrote in his diary.
Frank Losonsky was just twenty—so young he had to get a sergeant to countersign the CAMCO agreement. But he was an Allison engine mechanic, and therefore a rich find for Skip Adair, who signed him on as a crew chief at $350 a month, the top salary offered to any enlisted man. “I wasn’t motivated to save the world, or run away from anything,” Losonsky explained long after. “The reason[s] were the money, a subsidized trip to the Orient, and the promise of adventure.”
At Mitchel Field, Skip Adair found a thirty-nine-year-old technical sergeant named Joe Jordan, who remembered Claire Chennault from the 1st Pursuit Group in the 1920s. In the 1930s, as a finance clerk, he’d paid off some pilots who were going to teach at the Hangzhou flight school. He too volunteered for Asia, mostly to oblige a buddy who wanted to go, and who wanted Jordan to keep him company.
An especially good catch at Mitchel Field was a P-40 mechanic named Chuck Baisden. “I had just turned 21,” he recalled long after. “I was making $72 a month as a staff sergeant, and these guys were offering $350 a month to do the same job. That was more money than the Group CO [commander] made!… There are guys who say they joined for patriotism, and I’m sure there were, since anyone who could read could see that things were getting worse with the Japanese; but the truth is, most of us were a bunch of adventurous kids who saw a chance to make good money and travel.”
Among the navy men who signed up were Allen Fritzke, Don Whelpley, and Randall Richardson, three weathermen at Norfolk Naval Air Station. As Fritzke told me in 1985, it was a Saturday morning in July, and he was hanging around the office for lack of any better plan. When the phone rang, he picked it up. “This is Commander Irvine,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Does anybody there want to go to China?”
“Yes,” said Fritzke. “You’re talking to one.”
“Is there anybody else there?”
“Oh, there’s a couple fellas here.” He turned to Whelpley and Richardson: “You guys interested in going to China?”
“Sure,” they said. They were young, they were bored—why not China? Following Irvine’s instructions, they went to the customary downtown hotel and were offered $300 a month to work for CAMCO. They went back to base, told the petty officer on duty they needed special-order discharges, and were sent over to see the base commander. He was outraged. “What kind of nonsense is this?” he shouted, and telephoned Irvine to set him straight. To the delight of the sailors, the admiral ended by eating humble pie: “Yes, sir, Commander, those men will be released within fifteen minutes.”
Also signing on at Norfolk was Tom Trumble, who as a seaman on Augusta had seen CAF bombs make a shambles of Shanghai. He went AWOL to find Commander Irvine, looking for him in every hotel in town. Of all the reasons for joining the AVG, Trumble’s was the maddest: he’d left a Russian sweetheart in China, and after his tour with CAMCO he meant to find her again.
But there were no staff officers for the AVG. Even more than pilots, the services needed these uniformed bureaucrats to preside over the great expansion ahead. Chennault tried to hire his half-brother Joe, then a college student, who turned him down. He had better luck with Skip Adair, who agreed to become supply officer when his recruiting chores were done. Chennault next talked to the China hands at the State Department. They suggested Paul Frillmann—the missionary who’d played left field for him in 1938, and who was now unemployed and living with his family in Chicago.
Frillmann flew to Washington, reported to the Chinese embassy, and was appointed chaplain and officer in charge of recreation, physical training, and liaison with the local populace, $350 a month. Chennault promptly put him to work, buying everything needed by 300 Americans for two years in China—coffee, ketchup, peanut butter, canned meat, canned butter, mustard, mayonnaise, flour, and sports equipment—omitting what could be purchased locally. Frillmann spent the morning drawing up lists and the afternoon in telephoning orders to Washington wholesalers. He returned to Chicago that same night, bewildered and a bit resentful at the way Chennault had taken him up, wrung him out, and sent him packing. Indeed, he was a paradigm of the Chennault technique, whose distinguishing characteristic was to grab what lay at hand and work a miracle with it. “He was a genius,” Joe Alsop told me, “at doing things with string and chewing gum.”
