3 – Too good to be true (part 4)
In June, the first contingent reported to Gene Pawley in Los Angeles. There were some epic transcontinental journeys. Joe Jordan and his buddy decided to fly, but got off the plane in Omaha so the finance clerk could visit his ex-wife in Sioux City. There being no other transport, they chartered a plane. Back in Omaha, they missed their scheduled flight and boarded a train, then abandoned that in Cheyenne to stretch their legs and buy a bottle of whiskey. They couldn’t find any liquor, so they sought a taxi to take them to Utah. (Jordan’s memory, or his knowledge of geography, may have been playing tricks by the time he told this story to a Columbia University interviewer in 1962). Failing in that, they boarded a train with a club car. This saw them safely to the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles, where they arrived on June 6, only to be sent north by bus to San Francisco.
Paul Frillmann chaperoned the advance party on President Pierce, her name painted over and her staterooms converted to barracks. The ship was crammed with reinforcements for Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s army in the Philippines. The AVG contingent consisted of thirty men, all ground crewmen and clerks except Frillmann, whom they called “Holy Joe.” The senior army officer was annoyed by the former enlisted men who bedded down in the first-class lounge: he wanted them to drill with his troops, stand for inspection, and snap to attention when he passed. “Go away, soldier,” they told him. “We’re free men.” In Honolulu, they tried to smuggle women aboard the transport. In Singapore, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, they whistled at British customs officials in tropical shorts. Quartered for sixteen days in the Raffles Hotel, they played golf in their rooms. Jim Regis, hired as a photographer, dunked the secretary of the English Club in the swimming pool. There was also a bogus beauty contest, for which prizes were promised but none awarded, and at which Regis, Jordan, and—yes—Frillmann served as judges. “Drove the Limeys wild down there,” Paul Perry fondly recalled. “Bunch of crazy Americans, bringing all the native girls into the Class A dining room and drinking all their gin and tonic and everything.”
Somebody was indiscreet enough to explain their mission to a United Press correspondent, who filed this dispatch on July 9: “Thirty United States airplane mechanics and maintenance men arrived here today from New York, and will go to Rangoon next week en route to [China], where they will aid the Chinese Air Force. It was understood that a number of American planes of various types already had arrived at Rangoon and that more were en route there.” So much for the secrecy that was supposed to surround their mission. With the Time story earlier in the summer, the Japanese had ample warning of the American Volunteer Group’s arrival.
The main contingent—37 pilots, 84 ground crewmen and clerks, and 2 nurses—were now gathering at hotels in San Francisco. They wore civilian clothes, and their passports described them as anything but what they were. Gil Bright, former flight instructor at Pensacola, put himself down as a hardware clerk as a wink to his father, a wholesaler in Reading, Pennsylvania. Robert M. Smith, the diary-keeping mechanic, went as a radio announcer, a profession he’d followed for two years at KFXJ in Grand Junction, Colorado. Robert (Moose) Moss, a stocky P-40 driver from the 1st Pursuit Group at Selfridge Field, put himself down as an acrobat. Lanky Bob Neale from Saratoga was a rancher.
As for their commander, Chennault’s passport identified him as “executive”—close enough in the circumstances. Overnight on July 7, four years after the opening shots of the Sino-Japanese War, he flew to San Francisco. He paid a courtesy call on the Chinese consul and conferred at the Mark Hopkins with Richard Aldworth and Doc Gentry. Among other concerns, they debated the wisdom of sending two women on a ship full of lusty males. The nurses prevailed, but were given an above-decks cabin to keep them out of harm’s way. The vessel was Jagersfontein of Dutch registry, belonging to the Java Pacific line.
Chennault then boarded the Pan Am Clipper for the overnight flight to Honolulu. The AVG contingent sailed next morning, July 8, which was foggy and cold in the tradition of San Francisco Bay. Charlie Mott, former dive-bomber pilot on Saratoga, was in charge. At twenty-six, he was older than most of the pilots, and a married man in violation of navy regulations. “When I left my darling wife at ten [a.m.],” he wrote after Jagersfontein motored under the Golden Gate bridge, “I was trying to be casual ... but just about managed to do it without breaking down. Words can’t tell of the void this parting has left in me.” At sea, Mott did his best to keep discipline, policing the below-decks crap game, offering a bridge tournament as an alternative, and leading religious services on Sunday in the ship’s dining room.
After Honolulu, Jagersfontein was joined by the cruisers Salt Lake City and Northampton. The escort was the work of Lauchlin Currie, who feared that Japan might have the airmen kidnapped. The warships escorted Jagersfontein as she swung south of the equator to avoid the Marshall and Caroline islands, former German colonies seized by Japan during World War I. Off Australia, they were replaced by a Dutch cruiser, which escorted the liner through the Indies (now Indonesia) to Singapore. She docked on August 11, all her brandy drunk, along with 5,000 bottles of Coca-Cola.
Chennault spent three days in Hong Kong, ingratiating himself with the RAF and recruiting staff officers. His likeliest prospect was Harvey Greenlaw, former aircraft salesman, who was heading home to the United States. He and Olga were packing their trunks when Chennault came to their hotel and offered Harvey the job of executive officer—second in command—of the AVG. Chennault also signed up William Davis, an Anglo-Irishman known as Daffy. Davis claimed to have served with the Royal Flying Corps in World War I, but now wanted to avoid military service. Also a salesman, and also at loose ends, he was living in Hong Kong with a married woman named Doreen Lonborg. She regarded herself as English, though born in China and carrying a Danish passport, courtesy of her estranged husband. Of this little band of expatriates, only Doreen survived into the 1980s. She remembered Olga Greenlaw with particular awe: “She was a beautiful thing. She had green eyes and the longest lashes I’ve ever seen—the most exotic creature!—and her eyes were literally green.” In photographs, what is most striking about Greenlaw is her height. Wearing heels, she stands eye-to-eye with the men who cluster around her. Her father was a mining engineer in Durango, Mexico, where Olga and her sisters were born; in the 1920s, a tumultuous time in Mexico, the girls and their mother relocated to Hollywood, California. Olga graduated from Polytech High School, probably in 1929, ostensibly nineteen years old but actually a mature twenty-one—like Chennault’s, her age was fudged, with two years subtracted to ease the transition to an American city high school. She was “friendly, attractive, and knowledgeable,” her sister told me in 2001, then corrected herself: “She was beautiful. Whenever she entered a room, everybody looked. She demanded it.”
Harvey was a West Point graduate, though on his second attempt and in a two-year program designed to speed the flow of officers for World War I. He ranked near the bottom of his class. Worse, his first marriage ended in scandal, forcing him to resign his commission in 1931. In Hollywood, he met and courted the young Olga Sowers, before setting out to China to become a flight instructor. Harvey had never served at a grade higher than first lieutenant, but he called himself Major Greenlaw. A portrait from the AVG era shows him in a uniform cap and a khaki shirt open at the throat—a handsome man, though with an uncertain mouth and washed-out eyes. Snapshots are less flattering, showing him as overweight, puffy, and tired. Olga looks half his age, though she was in fact only ten years younger.
Chennault told the Greenlaws and Daffy Davis to wrap up their affairs and follow him as soon as they could. (Lonborg too was to come to Kunming after divorcing her husband, the Dane.) On July 18, he flew up to Chongqing on a CNAC Douglas, arriving in concert with twenty-seven Mitsubishi bombers. The raiders were new to him, twin-engine G4Ms with nearly twice the bomb load of the older G3Ms.
