In years gone by we have been fortunate to have Americans on our tour, both pilots and ground personnel, who fought side by side with the Chinese against the Japanese in WW II. The respect and honor paid to these Americans by the Chinese people was very moving and hard to convey by words alone.

The Chinese contribution has all but been ignored and yet these unsung hero’s sacrifices are what allowed our American flying forces to achieve the success they did. So I would like to tell you some of the Chinese side of the story.

During the ten years that I have been visiting the great country of China I have witnessed its phenomenal growth. Seemingly to have sprung up overnight it is an example of just how much the Chinese can accomplish in a short period of time.

In WW II the Chinese also accomplished the seemingly impossible.

Western road engineers had estimated it would take many years to build the Lido road. The Chinese, working alongside American army engineers, built it in less than two years using nothing more than picks and shovels.

In just three months, with up to 90,000 Chinese working on a single air field, the Chinese built all the airfields General Chennault needed for the 14th Army Air Force. This allowed General Chennault to take the war to the Japanese very early on in the conflict.

The early warning network consisted of Chinese guerillas and civilians in the field who, at great risk of capture and death, called in information on Japanese aircraft movements. Most of these calls came into the command cave the FTHO is restoring.

But the greatest comfort and aide of all was the knowledge by our pilots that if they were shot down and picked up by the Chinese they had a good chance of escaping the Japanese and returning to their base alive. 95% of downed pilots picked up by the Chinese made it back to their base to fight again.

Now to the stories as told to me by the people who lived them. I had a Flying Tiger who accompanied us to China in 2005 who was shot down and he related the story of his escapes to me.

He was picked up by the villagers near where he crashed. They took him to their village and took his boots away. He spoke no Chinese and they no English. His thought was “Oh great they are going to strip me of anything of value and turn me over to the Japanese”.

Two of the villagers took him to their home and when the Japanese came they hid him in a chamber below their bed. It is a chamber used for hot coals in the winter to keep warm.

Two Japanese soldiers entered the home and began to beat the two Chinese homeowners unmercifully in an attempt to discover his whereabouts. At one point he said he could have reached out and touched the boot of the Japanese solider.

Then another Japanese solider came and said something to the two that were there and all three soldiers left the home and the Japanese left the village. Only then did the pilot discover that the villagers had given his boots to a young man who had left a trail out of the village which the Japanese fell for.

Later a missionary came to guide the pilot back to his base and he asked the missionary to ask the two villagers why they risked their life to save his? They said “when the Japanese come we see fear in the eyes of the Chinese, when the Flying Tigers come we see fear in the eyes of the Japanese”.

The men of the CBI and 14th Army Air Force set aerial combat and transport records, under the worst of conditions, which have never been equaled and never will be.

They tied up a Japanese Army of 1.2 million men and an air force of over 1000 planes while destroying another 2500 Japanese planes. Imagine if you will what MacArthur’s Island hopping campaign might have gone like if those resources had been available to the Japanese war machine.

Until the Lido Road was opened late in the war The Hump transport pilots, or CBI group, supplied the fighting forces in China with everything they needed to fight the war.

All supplies were brought in by air right down to items like toothpaste and paper clips.

These (CBI) transport pilots did this over one of the worst areas in the world to fly. Mountains that reached higher than some of the planes could climb forced them to fly through passes, weather that was unpredictable and treacherous caused many to break up or crash because of turbulence and icing and, last but not least, were the Japanese fighters that regularly patrolled the passes shooting down the unarmed and slow transports.

This supply route became known as the Aluminum Trail due to the large number of wrecks dotting its path. More Hump pilots were killed than fighter and bomber pilots combined. In fact the Hump pilot’s accomplishment was so great that it became the model used for the Berlin airlift.

The Chinese solider depended on this airlift for all his arms and supply. Always short of what he needed to fight a well-armed and equipped Japanese army, he none the less performed heroically in the defense of his country.

A story that was told to me by one of the Hump pilots demonstrates just how much the Chinese solider was willing to sacrifice for his country.

This Hump pilot was flying a C 47 full of Chinese soldiers from India, where they had trained, back to China over the Hump. They hit weather and the plane iced up making it impossible for the pilot to maintain altitude.

On board was an English speaking Chinese officer whom the pilot told to have the troops prepare for a crash because they were too heavy and could not maintain altitude. Not to long thereafter the plane began to climb, the Chinese officer came forward and when the pilot looked back the cabin was empty. All the troops had jumped out to lighten the load and when questioned by this pilot the officer’s simple reply was that “the plane and the material that it could supply to the Chinese army was more important to China’s survival than the troops”. With that he went back and also exited the plane.

The fact that this pilot could relate this story to me tells you that he survived because of the sacrifice made by those Chinese soldiers. Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo was a devastating blow to Japanese moral and a huge boost to ours.

We all know that part of the story. But did you know that after bombing Tokyo all the planes were slated to land in China? When they arrived over China they could not find their intended landing strips and all the crews crash landed or bailed out.

Eight pilots were captured by the Japanese, the rest were rescued by the Chinese and returned to American bases.

The Japanese, in retaliation, killed every man, women and child in any area that those bombers could have landed, in all over 250,000 Chinese civilians were killed.

These rescues often put the Chinese at great risk. WE went to the largest village in China, Shesadawang, (7 million people) with four Flying Tigers from the 528th Dragonflies Fighter Squadron. Their visit had been touted in the local papers for several days. When we arrived at the city outskirts we were met by 300 police and escorted to our hotel down a boulevard lined with people.

When we arrived at the hotel there were bands playing, dignitaries meeting us, flowers for the Tigers wives and a red carpet leading to the hotel entrance. One of our guides came to me and said there were some Chinese gentlemen who wanted to talk to me in the crowd at the hotel. I went with the guide to meet these gentlemen. They had all rescued Flying Tigers during the war. One gentleman had a picture of ten airmen, with himself, from a bomber crew he helped rescue. He wanted to know if I could tell what had become of these men. At the time I knew little of the internet and the photo wasn’t in enough detail to give me a clue as to their unit or plane type. I told the gentleman that I was sorry but I could not tell him what had become of the men he had rescued.

He then told me the story of their rescue.

The bomber crew, 10 men, were picked up and dispersed in the country side near the Chinese village where the bomber crashed. The Japanese came into the village and attempted to discover the bombers crew’s whereabouts by torturing the villagers.

First the Japanese took the old women of the village and cut their fingers off one by one. They did not talk.

Then the Japanese took babies from mother’s arms and threw them down wells. Still they did not talk. Then the Japanese began bayoneting the men of the village and still mno one talked.

Trying the Japanese left the village and all ten airmen made it back home alive because of the sacrifice made by those Chinese villagers.

On another trip to China we were accompanied by a Flying Tiger fighter pilot who had to bail out over enemy territory. He was picked up by Chinese villagers. This is his story.

He was taken to the village and hidden in a secret room with a young Chinese mother and her baby. Shortly thereafter the Japanese entered the village and began searching for him. The baby began to fuss so the young mother held the baby to her breast to keep it quiet.

When the Japanese finally left the village the baby had died of asphyxiation. This Flying Tiger made it home because of that young mothers sacrifice.

These are just some of the stories of many that I have heard from the people who lived them. Stories of courage, sacrifice, cooperation, hardships and of friendship. All these stories emanate from one of the most perilous periods the world has ever faced. A time when the American and Chinese people worked together to defend their countries from a vicious and merciless invader.

The Flying Tigers and Chinese built a bridge between our two cultures that we can cross today. The bonds of friendship are there for us to enjoy and employ.

They sacrificed their youth and shed their blood so that we could have freedom of choice. We can honor them by working together to insure a better world for all people.

To paraphrase a great man, Winston Churchill, it can truly be said of the Chinese – Never have so many sacrificed so much for so few and paid such a heavy price.

WHY THE FLYING TIGER HISTORICAL PARK

The Obvious Answer

The obvious answer is it is a chance to honor, preserve the memory of, and record for history the remarkable story that is the Flying Tigers, the Chinese and the CBI theater of World War II. A history that for many reasons has been overlooked, forgotten, or buried.

Many books have been written about the Flying Tigers and the pilots who flew the Hump but for the most part the story and record set by these combatants has been passed over when reporting on the larger history of the Pacific War in WW II. The Chinese contribution has all but been ignored and yet their sacrifices where what made it possible for our American fighting men to achieve the success they did.

So, within the park grounds, the museum and the cave, we will tell their story. We will have memorial walls and statues honoring those who gave the ultimate sacrifice on foreign soil. The museum will have archives which will hold records, books and personal accounts of that dark period in our world history. Photographs and artifacts, both military and personal, will be on display. Archival film footage will allow one to revisit that time and experience a little of what these warriors experienced.

The Less Obvious Answer Is More Compelling

People and governments tend to forget what happened, sanitize what happened, or distort the record of what happened for their own ends. Nowhere is that more true than in the CBI and China theater of WW II.

In the late 1990’s the Japanese government published a text book for their high school students which depicted the Japanese Army of WW II as an “Army of Liberation”. This text book failed to mention the rape of Nanching, unit 731- the Japanese chemical and biological experimentation unit which used Chinese civilians and prisoners of war as guinea pigs, Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, Korean comfort women, or any of numerous other atrocities committed by the Japanese military forces in WWII.

When the Asian nations who had these crimes perpetrated upon them learned of this text book there was hue and cry which demanded that the Japanese remove the text book from their schools. The book was withdrawn but it exemplifies the lengths that will be gone to in order to cover up and remove from history that which is undesirable or embarrassing to a people or a nation.

On a tour to China while in Guilin we came across a couple of Japanese tourist who were asked if they had sensed any hostility from the Chinese for the atrocities committed by the Japanese against the Chinese in WWII. Their answer was eye opening. “Oh we weren’t in China in WW II.”

These Japanese tourist didn’t know because their government has chosen to keep this embarrassing part of Japan’s history from them. History ignored or forgotten is history to be repeated and we never want this kind of history repeated again.

Guilin is rapidly becoming the fourth leg on the tourist route to China and, as such, the Flying Tiger Historical park and General Chennault’s Command and Operation Cave will be on a well traveled path and accessible to people of all nations. This should insure that the widest possible audience is exposed to the history that occurred here and in the rest of China.

The last reason for the park is we have an opportunity to strengthen and build on the genuine feelings of good will left by the Flying Tigers. The Chinese have never forgotten what these men accomplished on their soil for their benefit and the Flying Tigers have never forgotten what the Chinese did for them. 95% of all Flying Tigers who were shot down in enemy territory and who were picked up by the Chinese made it back to their own lines to fight another day. Often the Chinese rescuing the Flying Tigers paid the ultimate price protecting the Tigers.

The Flying Tiger Historical park will be a place where our two great nations and people can come together to remember and honor the past while working for a bright and peaceful future.

By flying badly needed aviation fuel, troops and supplies to China, we were doing more than our share to support the 14th Air Force, then headquartered in Kunming. Earlier, the overland route from Burma to China (the Burma Road) had fallen into Jap hands. Not only was my plane involved in the evacuation of Luichow and Kweilin, it was the last US. plane out of Kweilin before that city and its air base fell.

What now follows is my recollection of the Calamity in Kweilin long, long ago: Our final mission to Kweilin was for the purpose of evacuating high-ranking brass and any war correspondents who had remained behind to cover the deliberate destruction of the base before the enemy could get to it. After a 500-mile flight from Kunming, we circled and landed in the midst of ongoing fires, and bomb explosions. B-29’s and P-51’s were still flying missions and returning. Whether the control tower was still standing, whether we landed without landing instructions, I am unable to recall.

This day was to be the last day for the 14th Air Force to utilize Kweilin as a B-29 base, from which air strikes had been launched against the Japanese. We had been told that this was going to be a “scorched earth” evacuation–leaving nothing or very little behind for the enemy to use against us. Where was the enemy? Well, are you ready for this?

Jimmy Dykeman, flight engineer and I had been ordered by our pilot(s) to “Guard” the plane by remaining aboard until we took off the following morning with the evacuees. The pilot and co-pilot then hustled over to the base war room, presumably to meet with the brass, later on to spend the night. To this day, I still believe that Dykeman and I were the only aircrew members on that lonely runway that night.

If you and a psychiatrist were to discuss a very old traumatic event, he or she might tell you that any normally healthy person can suffer a memory loss concerning that event. That sounds reasonable. However, through all these years, from 1944 to this present day, I have been drawing a blank every time that I try to recall the pilots’ names. Yet, the event remains as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday.

By nightfall, 9,000 advancing Jap cavalry troops ware estimated to be about 6 miles outside the perimeter of the field. Of course, sleep was impossible, in particular, because Jim and I were too busy peering into the darkness in the direction of the unopposed enemy. Jimmy was cradling his fully loaded sub-machine gun in his arms. I had my fully loaded .45 automatic laying beside me, the safety on. Jim’s automatic was also laying beside him on the floor of the plane. Against whom or what were we supposed to be “guarding” our plane?

If we slept at all, it was fitfully. Awake, we wondered about those poor, helpless Chinese women and children, and their slow, tortuous, daylight march out of Kweilin, desperately trying to avoid being discovered by the Japs. We wondered about the guys who were making the 500-mile overland trip back to Kunming, in convoys of trucks and jeeps, over mountainous roads. Would they all live to tell about it? Later that day, we heard a rumor that an entire Chinese Army, the 93rd, had pulled away (retreated from their positions, wherever that had been), leaving the air base defenseless. This rumor turned out to be true.

That night, our racing thoughts produced a vision of hordes of Japs overrunning the base and, of course, capturing Jimmy and me. We couldn’t see them–but, we thought we could hear them—or were those heavy thuds ours? If, in fact, they are enemy troops–then what? Simple enough! Take out as many of them as possible before they eighty-six us’. Hey, we’re loaded for bear, right? a sub-machine gun, 2 automatic pistols and a full case of ammo! It’ll be a turkey shoot–us against them! Right? Wrong!

It was still dark when we heard and saw the flash of exploding bombs which, we were later told, had been buried in the fighter strip. Sometime after daybreak, while Jim and I were wondering why we were still alive, our smiling pilots and another guy jumped out of a jeep and started walking towards our plane. Could they somehow have known that we would complete this mission without encountering the enemy’?

Just as we didn’t really know where in hell the ‘brave’ soldiers of the Chinese 93rd Army were, so were we equally unaware of the enemy’s true location. Perhaps the Japs were much further away than we had estimated. Anyhow, there was no way in the world that we could convey our feelings about our involuntary “guard duty” aboard our plane. Aw, screw it! We were still breathing!

The other C-47’s were dangerously overloaded with all kinds of stuff when they took off before we did. As for us, our only cargo was a war correspondent named H. R. Isaacs. The brass had already left on other planes. We were, indeed, the last American plane out of Kweilin. Once airborne, we circled the field to set a course back to Kunming. “There goes the runway, Jim,” I said, knowing that we were getting our last look at what had become a calamity in Kweilin.

More than a few military leaders of that era, including General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, General Chennnult, and others who were there, called the loss of Kweilin “the worst strategic defeat ever suffered by an American Air Force.” Because of our losses of air bases in South Central China, the ‘secretly’ planned air, ground and sea invasion of the enemy-held China coast, two years in the planning, never happened. Instead, thousands of lives were saved by President Truman’s decision to drop “The Bomb” an Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.

Where was I when that happened? By virtue of my ASR [Adjusted Service Rating], at 5 points for each decoration and each campaign in which I had participated, I was aboard a troopship, the General M. M. Patrick, heading home for a 90 days of Stateside R&R, after 436 combat missions over China. Burma and India. On September 12, 1945, instead of having spent the previous 10 days on furlough, I became a civilian once again.

From memory Larry Greenfield Radio Operator, 4th Combat Cargo Squadron,1st Combat Cargo Group 1999

Finally, my father arrived. He was so handsome, so beautiful I remember, in his Army Air Corps uniform – khaki pants, and the olive (was it?) jacket with his pilot’s wings and captain’s bars. It was the best looking uniform ever! If only I had it today – my mother threw so many things away.

I really didn’t know him, he didn’t know me, but I remember looking forward to being with him. I didn’t understand, of course, until years later why he spent so little time with me that day, instead disappearing with my mother.

He had been away a total of five years.

Like other men who returned from the war, he spoke little of his experiences. I cannot remember a single story he told us of his exploits. He and I did spend time together. At various times he owned a Piper airplane, a Cessna 140, and later when he could no longer pass the flight physical, a beautiful old 1930’s wooden cabin cruiser boat, and he taught me what he could at my young age. I loved navigation best, he showed me off to his friends because I could hold a compass course and tell directions at night from the stars. He taught me the various propeller airplanes of the day.

Eventually I could tell him the type of aircraft just from the sound of it flying overhead. The memories of that time with my father sustain me today.

Soon after the war, my father and his brother-in-law bought a 65 horsepower Piper J3 aircraft. Like so many other experienced airmen of that time my father thought there were great opportunities in private aviation.

They had bought a piece of land on the shoreline of the Potomac River, south of Washington (if we had that today, we’d be very rich), and opened a seaplane base where they were going to instruct students. They bolted floats onto the Piper at National Airport and my father had put the plane and floats on dollies, taxied out to the runway, and flew the plane off the dollies – letting them shoot down the runway. I wish I had seen it. A slightly embarrassing story soon followed. I was 6 years old and my sister 3 or 4. He took us to the seaplane base for the first time. I took one look at that small fabric-covered airplane bobbing at the dock and said “I’m not getting into that!” My younger sister took the first flight with my father. I decided not to ever repeat that mistake again! I flew with him whenever I could, first in the Piper seaplane and later in the Cessna 140 tail dragger. We flew the little two-seat Cessna to his sister’s farm in upstate New York. We landed on a grass strip in a farmer’s field and I got to visit my aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill.

My father had a workshop in the basement. He made toys for us by hand!

He made a tool chest for me. The kid up the street had an elaborate Lionel electric train set. My father bought manual track switches, wound his own electromagnets and changed them to electric track switches. He handcrafted wooden trestle bridges and town scenes. He built a beautiful miniature Hoosier cabinet for my sister’s play kitchen. He built me a scooter and a wagon. He was a terrific carpenter and craftsman. The 1950’s was an era when families craved new “laborsaving” appliances. My father and another uncle built their own 20 cubic foot deep freezers – from wood, masonite, metal tubs, copper tubing, fiberglass insulation, spring-hinged doors, interior lights that turned off automatically! I remember that they didn’t know whether they bought the right sized compressor for the size of the freezer.

So, my father put an old clock in a coffee can, fashioned an aluminum disk that fit the hour hand shaft, and cut round pieces of paper to lay on top of the slowly turning disk. Then he rigged a coat hanger to the compressor and attached a pencil to the other end. Each time the freezer turned on or off, the vibration caused the pencil to make a mark on the paper to record the time the compressor had to run. He built a solid oak workbench with an array of handmade drawers that I still use today. The most treasured object I now have is a finely crafted mahogany chest he built to contain his Kodachrome color slides from the war. It deserves an article in Fine Woodworking magazine.

He taught me photography, woodworking, electricity – we enclosed an old porch on our house together. We went camping, took the boat out onto the Chesapeake Bay, in the days when there were no other boats as far as you could see, slept overnight, and I cooked breakfast with the early morning mist rising off the water and duck and geese nearby the tall grasses on the eastern shoreline. He taught me to do things right, or don’t do them at all.

He taught me a Greatest Generation trait that now has all but disappeared, good old American “know-how.”

He was proud of me, too. The boat had an old 6-volt electrical system and the engine was sometimes hard to start. At age 10, I figured out how to wire a switch and cable to another battery allowing him to throw the switch for a few seconds during starting to boost the system to 12 volts. Many decades later his brother told me that he had proudly told him this story about what I had done.

The next year, in the season of his 40th birthday – he died. He went to work one morning and never returned. He knew – a week before he took me for a walk and told me that I was the man of the family and that I would have to take care of my mother and three younger sisters. I didn’t understand what he was saying. I was 14.

The burial was at Arlington National Cemetery, on the central hill 100 feet from where now President John Kennedy lies. Full honors with a horse drawn caisson and a 21-gun salute. I had the memory of the years I had spent with him as a youth. I was awed by the ceremony at Arlington. But I didn’t think then to make the connection between the honors he received there and what he might have done during the war.

Our family began to unravel. My mother, Mary Helen, was a 1950’s housewife with no career. She was a brilliant woman, but how she raised her four children alone, by herself, I do not understand. I had spent 10 years with my father, so I had some sense of family, some sense of his companionship, some sense of being guided by a father. But my three younger sisters: Shirley had known him 10 years, but Joanne (dad’s favorite) only four years, and Stephanie only 18 months. Dad had died of a kidney disease that induced heart failure. Had he lived another year until the dialysis machine was introduced he might have lived. His kidney disease was contracted, then amplified, by health problems he experienced in India and Burma.

I didn’t know what to do. All of us children felt a loss of pride and a sense that we were not as good as other families we knew, shame almost. Without our father, in a fractured family, we foundered.

More than a third of a century passed. My youngest sister, Stephanie, herself aged only 40 years, died – partially I think from having been nurtured by her dad for only her first 18 months of life.

I had failed my father. I did not take care of the family as he had asked of me.

Our family, as a family, no longer functioned in the traditional sense. Except . . . except . .. there was a tiny hidden thread back to my father I as yet knew nothing about.

A few years later in the 1990’s, before she died, my mother was cleaning out her records. One day she handed me an old letter. “It’s from your father”, she said. I opened it. His handwriting so beautiful – something not seen anymore. He had written the letter in July 1945 when flying a C-54 across the Pacific on a long night flight. He said to me that he was sorry that he had been away during the important first years of my life, that he was sorry that on his return visit I didn’t know him, and that when he finally returned “we will have so many things to do together, and so many things to learn together.” He said “I have an important job to do and maybe someday you’ll be able to tell your children that you didn’t have to go off to fight a war right in the prime of life because their granddad and a lot of other men like him saw to it that the last one was done up right.” Further, he said “Yours will be the job to see that it remains that way. It’s your life, your world, and your job.” “I’ll make it up to you, son, for being absent in this time, and hope you’ll someday think there is no one like your dad – that someday you’ll be proud of what I did.” Then, “Love, Dad.”

I was stunned. This letter from my father traveled halfway around the world, and through a half of a century of time, before it reached me. And he was speaking directly to me. All of the time that our family had lost its way without our father. . . all of this time, this letter was making its long journey to my hands.

I knew that it would take some time, but that it would change everything. We knew that my father was in the war. We knew he was a pilot. That’s all.

More than that, he told us nothing. My mother told us little. My father’s older brother didn’t remember. How could I be proud of what my father did if I didn’t know what he had done? I vowed at that moment to find out, to trace his history in the war, to follow his footsteps from so long ago.

I was lucky. My father took hundreds of color slides in the war. I found his flight logbooks. I rescued many of letters he wrote home to mother.

I contacted the Army Times newspaper. I was surprised that they were so kind to me. They suggested that I contact the China-Burma-India Veterans Association and the Hump Pilots Association. I was elated. The thought that these organizations that were connected to my father’s experiences still existed and that I might find people who knew his history or even remembered him filled me with emotion. My initial hope was that I would soon find someone who remembered my father. If I found someone who knew him, they would have an adult memory of him, and a memory of him in the war in CBI, to supplement our childhood-only memories.

I first phoned Homer Cooper of the CBIVA. I described the situation and he invited me to the 2000 National Reunion in Texas. As I talked with Homer, telling him what I knew of my father, my tears began. He told me that was normal for people who finally made a long delayed contact. I also met, by chance, Rudy Gaum of the CBIVA, at a WWII air show in Frederick, Maryland. I saw his CBI patch and just walked up to him and started a conversation.

I traveled to the reunion in Texas. Initially I feared that I would be greeted as an outsider, an intruder, a camp follower, but just the exact opposite was in store for me. Homer introduced me at the meeting and I described my quest for my father’s history to the whole assembly. I distributed war-time photos of my father and a paper I had written of his history as I knew it at that point — in it asking if anyone remembered my dad. There I also met Sy and Faye Kantor. Sy and I hit it off immediately — we talked for hour upon hours about CBI aviation stories Sy knew so much about WWII aircraft that in a later visit we made to the Smithsonian together, the historian there was asking Sy questions. Faye adopted me as her honorary CBI son. I took some of my father’s color slide from CBI to the meeting and I showed them to Dario (who later worked on the Mercury, Apollo, and Lunar Lander spaceflight programs) and Annette Antonucci, Bill and Angela Toy – who I admired greatly, and Carmen and Joan Germano, now dear friends.

Here I also talked with a veteran, Jarvis Moore, who only a few days after I first met him told me this story: In the jungles of Burma he happened upon a GI who had been mutilated by the enemy. He described the horrible detail.

The GI begged him to kill him. Of course, he could not. As he told me this, his eyes were overflowing with tears and his trembling hand, I remember, was touching my shoulder. He told me that he had kept this story secret all of his life, not telling his wife or children. But he told me – after knowing me for just one or two days. We embraced as we departed. I felt a great love and empathy for him and wanted to talk again with him at the next meeting the following year but he died before we could see each other again. I wrote a small article in the Fall 2001 CBI Sound-Off magazine about our meeting and the story he told, revealing it to his family. I asked his wife and children to know the secret he carried in his heart for 55 years with great pain – and to be exceedingly proud of him.

Six months later I attended the Hump Pilots Association national meeting.

Here, too, I feared rejection, but soon met Jay Vinyard, the president of HPA, and his wife Sally. Jay talked to me about my father and Sally, too, adopted me as her honorary CBI son. I met George and Patti Saylor, friends to this day. George went on to fly F-86s on high altitude reconnaissance flights years before the famous U-2 flights. Also, Roy and Pat Ladd – Roy was a B-36 pilot after the war – a B-36 had 6 propeller engines and 4 jet engines.

I’ll tell you: it’s not possible to talk to a B-36 pilot enough! With all of these new best friends I’ve shared many stories and experiences since then. At the HPA meeting I learned that a large group of veterans recently traveled to China and had been greeted with warmth and love by the Chinese. I knew from my father’s logbook that Kunming, China was a frequent destination so I was sad that I had missed that trip. So I decided to travel to China myself!

I have many Koda-chrome photos my father took in Kunming in 1944. I flew to Kunming and as I rode a taxi to the hotel I showed the photos of my dad to the taxi driver with emotion I guess I did not conceal well. He spoke no English, but had a kind heart that you could see in his face – he knew what I was saying. A few hours after checking into the hotel, the taxi driver found me again, in a Denver- sized town, walking near the downtown lake. In those few hours he had contacted the Kunming Veteran’s Aviation Association, the Spring City Evening News newspaper, and the Culture Exchange Bureau. I had come to Kunming with no plans, no itinerary, no contacts. But thanks to the taxi driver, I soon had a full week of astounding events. I appeared in a front page newspaper story the next day with several of my father’s photographs of Kunming from 1944, printed in full color. The article told of my quest for my father’s footsteps and said that I was looking for a Chinese soldier, maybe 14 years old during the war, who my father had photographed and whose photo accompanied the article. The newspaper articles and my father’s photos continued on the front page of the Kunming newspaper as a serialized story for five straight days. I became a local celebrity. I had refreshed their memories of the time a half century earlier. People began calling into the newspaper wanting to meet me and tell me their war-time memories of the Americans who had helped to save their city, and wanted to give me artifacts, souvenirs of the Americans’ presence long ago, that they had hidden during the Cultural Revolution (at some risk to themselves). Two war-time Chinese pilots met with me to share my photos and their stories. Ben, from the Cultural Exchange Commission, acted as my interpreter and could not have done more to facilitate a crowded week of spontaneous events and meetings. I visited the beautiful Hump Pilot’s Monument in the hills overlooking Kunming. I visited the wreckage of an American transport plane that had been found in the mountains after 55 years – a young Chinese man sacrificed his life, dying next to the plane he was guarding until it could be carried down the mountain to Kunming. The taxi driver transported me around all week refusing any pay. Then invited me to his home for dinner with his wife and son. Now I felt . . . I felt it myself – in person . . . something I had not thought to expect before – how could I have known? I felt firsthand the sincere love the Chinese have for the Americans who came as young men to faraway China to the aid of their country in their time of greatest need. They have not forgotten. I have never experienced so much kindness and human affection – and I am the second generation.

I told my family back home that I felt my father’s hand in the events, to me unplanned, of my extraordinary trip to Kunming.

In subsequent years there were incidents that generated tension between the governments of China and the United States. But I have personally experienced the fondness the Chinese people have for us, and the American CBI veterans have told me of the fondness they feel for the Chinese people.

If, in the future, we can remember that our fathers and grandfathers fought side-by side with this bond of mutual respect, I think we, China and the U.S., will be alright.

We found the aunt of the 14-year-old Kunming soldier. He was killed in the war. The aunt, then a young girl herself, had to prepare his body for burial.

She invited me to her home for lunch where I presented to her the photo my father took of her nephew in 1944. I have become lifelong friends with Ben and with the taxi driver and his wife and son and have returned several times to visit them. I helped the son get into college and with some of his school expenses. Later I returned on two organized trips with some of the

Hump pilots, and Flying Tigers and 10th and 14th Air Force pilots and with two pilots from the Doolittle Raiders. The receptions during these trips were grand and more formal, of course. People lined the streets to see us go by.

Beautifully uniformed school children stood excitedly in precise arrangements, waved flags, played music, and placed necklaces of flowers around our necks. I received a certificate of honorary citizenship of Kunming for my father for his war time contributions, engraved with his name! Jeff Greene published a beautiful book “When Tigers Roared” that graciously included photos of my father. Retie Hua’s son, Jianning Hua, published a wonderfully comprehensive hard-bound book “American Airmen in China.

During WW II” in which my father was again honored with the photos he took in 1944. But for me these trips did not dim the experience of my original personal trip of discovery to Kunming. In common was the overwhelming outpouring of love from the Chinese people.

In the last trip with AVG and Hump pilots that I accompanied, a woman in Kunming, Qiyu Liao, presented an opera performance, a cantata, called “Green Path and Rainbow – the Story of the Flying Tigers and the Hump Airlift”, that she had personally written over a period of years with no external sponsorship. It was performed in a theater with perhaps 60 singers that she had trained. It tells, in song, the story of the towns and villages that were being bombed from the air by the enemy. At first, the villagers didn’t know what bombs were – they thought umbrellas would protect them from these objects falling from the sky – until the innocent men, women and children were killed, bodies blown to bits, parts hanging from tree limbs. The story tells of a young American who leaves his home and parents in Texas to fight the enemy in the skies over the Chinese villages. He falls in love with a young Chinese girl. But their love is short; he is killed in an air battle defending the village. The cantata is her life-long memory of the war and her love for the young American. At the very moment in the play the young American airman lost his life, a thunder and wind storm arose outside the theater, adding a stunning impact to the drama of the story. I missed some of the performance because I couldn’t see clearly through my tears. The performers saw my emotion and pulled me onto the stage and surrounded me in a 60-person embrace. It was the most touching performance I have ever witnessed. If this cantata could be performed to audiences widely in China and the United States, the history it portrays of the cruelty of war and the cooperation between the Chinese and the Americans, from the perspective of the Chinese villagers – it would create a deep understanding between our countries.

In this trip I visited a beautiful museum display dedicated to CBI. There I saw a Kunming man carrying his 10 – year-old son Jimmy, who had debilitating muscular dystrophy, around the museum. Normally the Chinese keep their handicapped children out of view – but this father carried his son proudly. I stopped and talked to them, introduced them to the Flying Tiger and Hump pilots, including Dick Rossi, Charles Bond, and Clifford Long, and gave jimmy the CBI souvenirs I had collected. jimmy and I, and his family, have become dear friends. I went to the Hump Pilots Memorial School and made a contribution to their library, and in turn they engraved my father’s name on the memorial stone in front of the school.

I also presented flowers at the memorial for Bob Mooney. Bob was a pilot who intercepted two Japanese bombers that were harassing a silk-road era village. He shot them down and saved the village further damage, but was hit himself. Rather that bail out, he steered his plane away from the village and died the next morning after a frantic effort by the village doctor to save him. The villagers built a monument to Bob Mooney in the nearby mountains. During the Cultural Revolution, the government removed the monument. The villagers rebuilt it in defiance of the government. This happened more than once. Finally the monument to Bob survives now, and the people in this still-small village visit and care for the monument, still remembering, to this day.

Since those first CBI meetings in 2000, I attended every national reunion of both the CBIVA and the Hump Pilots Association, as well as uncounted local CBI chapter meetings with Joe Shupe of the Stilwell Basha in Virginia and Bil Pribyl of the Free State Basha in Maryland. It surprised me then, and now, that the best friends I have had in my life are from the CBI WWII generation – from my father’s generation. I’ve shared so many of the memories of my CBI friends, I feel I am almost a part of that generation, and regret only that I missed actually taking part, with them, in WWII. Originally I had hoped to meet someone who knew my father but soon realized that instead the stories I heard from the men and women of the CBI were just what I was seeking. I was hearing what it was like in the air and on the ground in India, China and Burma. These first-hand stories gave me the understanding of my father’s life and experiences just as if he had told me himself. I knew then that even if I never met anyone who knew my father, I felt his presence in all of my CBI friends.

Now 89, Yee is a retired high school teacher living in Colorado, and one of the last men alive today to have served with Chennault and the original Flying Tigers. However, despite having served on a secret mission for the United States, he’s never been officially recognized as a U.S. veteran.

In 1991, the Department of Defense announced that anyone who helped defeat the Japanese through service in the AVG was eligible to apply for veterans status.

Yee’s request was denied, however, because while he has letters from Chennault and other officers, his Flying Tigers pin and other proof of his service, the Air Force determined Yee was missing key paperwork — namely, documentation that he was employed by the same company that paid the Americans or an honorable discharge from the AVG.

Yee’s situation makes it unclear whether such documents exist, either here or in China. Even U.S. Sen. Mark Udall’s office — which contacted the Air Force on Yee’s behalf — has been unable to find them.

The denial means that while he helped the AVG turn back the Japanese, attended AVG reunions for years and once served as president of the Colorado chapter of the China Burma India Veterans Association, Yee has never collected veterans benefits, isn’t eligible for Department of Veterans Affairs health care, and won’t receive military honors when he dies.
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That sucks. Largely because the government’s refusal to acknowledge Yee as a veteran seems to come down to a pesky piece of paperwork. That means he has never collected veterans benefits, isn’t eligible for Department of Veterans Affairs health care, and won’t receive military honors when he dies. But after all this time, Yee seems resigned to his situation.