On paper, the men who flew for the American Volunteer Group in 1941 were carpenters, musicians, bankers, students and clergymen. One was a stonemason. Claire Chennault, the man who commanded them, travelled on a passport that described him as a farmer.

None of it was true, and all of it was necessary. The United States was neutral. The Neutrality Acts were still on the books. Serving American officers could not legally resign one week and fly combat against Japan for a foreign government the next — except that around a hundred of them did exactly that, with the knowledge and the signature of the President.

The combat record of the Flying Tigers has been told many times. The paperwork that made them possible has not, and it is the stranger story: a private aircraft company used as a front, an unpublished executive order, a one-year contract with a bounty clause, and a government that then spent forty-nine years declining to admit any of them had been soldiers.

The Problem Roosevelt Had

By the winter of 1940 China had been fighting Japan for three years and was losing the air war comprehensively. Chennault, a retired US Army Air Corps captain working as air adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, wanted American aircraft and American pilots. He had an ally in Washington in Lauchlin Currie, an economist and White House adviser.

Their first proposal asked for 500 combat aircraft. It was cut to 200 fighters and 66 bombers. The hardware was never the hard part.

Sending serving American officers to fight for a belligerent power while the United States was formally neutral was not a grey area. It was the precise thing the Neutrality Acts existed to prevent. Roosevelt’s answer, in April 1941, was an executive order that was never published, authorising what was initially conceived as a clandestine “Special Air Unit” of three combat groups drawn from the Army, the Navy and the Marine Corps.

An unpublished order is not something you can wave at a port official or a foreign ministry. What it could do was clear the way for somebody else to do the hiring.

A Private Company Called CAMCO

That somebody was the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company. CAMCO was a real business, built by William Pawley in partnership with the Chinese Nationalist government, with plants at Hangzhou, Wuhan and finally Loiwing on the China-Burma border. It also ran an assembly operation at Mingaladon airport outside Rangoon, which is where the group’s fighters were put together and test-flown.

And it was the employer of record. Recruiters, among them retired Navy officers, worked their way around American military bases from 15 April 1941, looking for pilots and mechanics with the right experience and the wrong amount of caution. The men they signed were, on paper, civilian employees of an aircraft company, hired for training and instruction.

Every individual part of that was legally defensible. Together they amounted to a government hiring mercenaries through a shell, and the historian who has done more than anyone to document the group does not dress it up.

Ford’s verdict on the legality is equally direct: the arrangement violated the spirit if not the letter of the Neutrality Acts. And the distinction mattered enormously later, because these men really were civilians. Some of them resigned from the AVG before Pearl Harbor and went home to take flying jobs — an option that would not have existed had they been covert servicemen.

What the Contract Actually Said

The terms were a year of service, with the written assurance that a man could return to his former rank afterwards. The money is the part that gets quoted, and it deserves to be.

A squadron leader earned $750 a month. A flight leader, $675. A wingman, $600. Ground crew earned somewhere between roughly $150 and $350 depending on trade, and sources differ on the exact bands. Set that against the roughly $260 a month a serving US military pilot was drawing at the time and the appeal is obvious. Daniel Ford’s comparison is the one that lands: $600 was about the price of a new Ford V-8, every month.

Then there was the bounty. Five hundred dollars for each Japanese aircraft confirmed destroyed — which is to say, almost another month’s pay for a single successful engagement.

The bounty is the detail that most complicates the heroic version of the story, and it is also the detail most often softened. It was never in the written contract. It was promised orally, later confirmed by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and it was paid slowly: several pilots recorded waiting on money owed by the Generalissimo. In the end 296 bounties were paid out, to 67 pilots.

This is not a scandal and it was not hidden from the men. It is simply what the arrangement was. They were well-paid professionals on a one-year foreign contract with a performance incentive, and the reason that framing grates is that it sits badly next to the newsreel version. Both are true.

Fake Passports and Invented Trades

Getting the men out of the country was its own problem. A US passport issued to a serving officer heading for a war zone would have defeated the whole arrangement, so the passports described other lives entirely.

The listed occupations ran to banker, clerk, musician, student, carpenter, sheet metal worker, electrician and stonemason — any civilian trade that would not invite a second question. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, later a Medal of Honor recipient with the Marines, travelled as a member of the clergy. Chennault went as a farmer.

The cover was not airtight. Albert Baumler, an Army pilot who had already flown as a mercenary in the Spanish Civil War, was refused a passport on exactly those grounds — which is how a recruitment target of 100 pilots became 99 before anyone had left the United States.

A Hundred Fighters That Belonged to Britain

The aircraft came from the same kind of improvisation. The AVG’s hundred Curtiss P-40s were Tomahawk IIBs built against a Royal Air Force order and originally bound for North Africa — the same variant, and effectively the same production run, that equipped the RAF squadrons then fighting in the desert.

They were diverted to China. One was dropped into the water during transport and another was damaged in training, which left 99 airframes for a group that rarely had more than about 36 serviceable at any one time. CAMCO assembled and test-flew them at Mingaladon.

Everything about the arrangement is visible in a single photograph of an AVG fighter: an American aircraft, built to a British contract, flown by American pilots who had resigned from the American military, wearing the twelve-pointed sun roundel of the Republic of China.

Seven Months, Then the Bill Came Due

The AVG did not fire a shot until after Pearl Harbor. Its combat career ran from mid-December 1941 to mid-July 1942 — about seven months, in which the group was credited with 296 Japanese aircraft destroyed and lost ten men killed in action, seven of those in accidents rather than combat. Nineteen of its pilots became aces.

Two further volunteer groups had been in preparation. A 2nd AVG had recruited 82 pilots and 359 ground crew and was to fly Lockheed Hudsons and Douglas DB-7 bombers; a 3rd was to be drawn from the Navy and Marine Corps in early 1942. Pearl Harbor ended both. Once the United States was in the war there was no longer any reason to hire its own airmen through a Delaware-registered proxy.

Which left the question of what to do with the men who were already there. On 4 July 1942 the AVG was dissolved and the US Army Air Forces activated the 23rd Fighter Group in its place. The expectation in Washington was that the Tigers would simply put the uniform back on.

They did not. The induction was handled badly — veterans described the pressure applied as heavy-handed — and General Marshall had to be told there was no legal authority to conscript them, because they were civilians. Only five pilots accepted commissions on the spot, David “Tex” Hill among them. Around 29 AVG members in total went across to the new group, and some 55 pilots and ground crew agreed to stay on for a fortnight, to 18 July, to hand over. The rest went home, or took well-paid civilian flying jobs in China.

It is a very unromantic ending, and it follows directly from the contract. Men hired as contractors behaved like contractors when the contract expired.

It Took Forty-Nine Years to Call Them Veterans

The arrangement that made the AVG possible also made it disposable. Because the men had been civilian employees of an aircraft company, the United States did not regard their service as military service. No veteran status. No benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. For most of their lives, the most celebrated American airmen of the early Pacific war were, officially, former employees of CAMCO.

That changed on 19 April 1991, when the Department of Defense Civilian/Military Service Review Board ruled under DoD Directive 1000.20 on AVG service between 7 December 1941 and 18 July 1942.

The ruling applied only to those honourably discharged from the group. By 1991 many of the men it covered were dead.

There is a straight line from the first decision to the last. To get Americans into the air over China in 1941, the government had to make them not-soldiers. Having made them not-soldiers, it could not easily unmake it — not when the war ended, not when the survivors asked, not for half a century. The shark mouths and the newsreels arrived immediately. The recognition took until the men were old.

Sources: Daniel Ford, Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and the American Volunteer Group, and the AVG FAQ and veterans records at warbirdforum.com; HistoryNet; MilitaryHistoryNow; Wikipedia entries for the Flying Tigers, the American Volunteer Group, William D. Pawley and the 23rd Fighter Group