Warriors Who Ride the Wind: Flying Tigers--Fourteenth Air Force

Sewn binding. Paper over boards. 267 p. Illustrations. Map. This is one of the American Heroes Series. From Wikipedia: "The 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force in 1941 1942, nicknamed the Flying Tigers, was composed of pilots from the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC), Navy (USN), and Marine Corps (USMC), recruited under presidential authority and commanded by Claire Lee Chennault. The ground crew and headquarters staff were likewise mostly recruited from the U.S. military, along with some civilians. The group consisted of three fighter squadrons with about 20 aircraft each. It trained in Burma before the American entry into World War II with the mission of defending China against Japanese forces. Arguably, the group was a private military contractor, and for that reason the volunteers have sometimes been called mercenaries[citation needed]. The members of the group had lucrative contracts with salaries ranging from $250 a month for a mechanic to $750 for a squadron commander, roughly three times what they had been making in the U.S. forces. The Tigers' shark-faced fighters remain among the most recognizable of any individual combat aircraft and combat unit of World War II, and they demonstrated innovative tactical victories when the news in the U.S. was filled with little more than stories of defeat at the hands of the Japanese forces. The group first saw combat on 20 December 1941, 12 days after Pearl Harbor (local time). It achieved notable success during the lowest period of the war for U.S. and Allied Forces, giving hope to Americans that they would eventually succeed against the Japanese. Using Japanese reconstructed or remembered accounts, one researcher has decided the number of victories claimed by the AVG was much lower. However there still exists the combat records of the AVG which other researches have found very credible. The AVG pilots were paid combat bonuses for destroying nearly 300 enemy aircraft, [1] while losing only 14 pilots on combat missions. [1] In July 1942, the AVG was replaced by the 23rd Fighter Group of the United States Army Air Forces, which was later absorbed into the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force with General Chennault as commander. The 23rd FG went on to achieve similar combat success, while retaining the nose art on the left-over P-40s." Very good. No dust jacket. COver has slight wear and soilng. Sticker for Best Autobiography on front cover. Bar code sticker and some soiling on back cover.…