Martha ByrdCritiques

Claire Lee Chennault was the colorful leader of the Flying Tigers, the famed volunteer group who served in China in the early days of America's involvement in World War II. Chennault should have been played by John Wayne in a movie. He was tough, compassionate, diplomatic, and brash, and he was a leader beloved of his men and hated or disrespected by much of the Army brass. The story of Chennault's brilliant approach to battling Japan in the air has been told in a variety of books and movies, usually focusing on the pilots and planes. But this book tells an equally exciting but ultimately disheartening story of the immense struggle Chennault underwent in trying to accomplish his task. Army and Army Air Force generals like Joe Stillwell, Hap Arnold, and George Marshall may not exactly have sabotaged Chennault's part of the war effort, but they certainly did little to help it, having little understanding and no respect for Chennault's ideas or for his close relationship with the Chinese people and their leader, Chiang Kai-Shek. While Chennault could be bull-headed and unwilling to see the larger picture, what comes across most strongly in this well-researched and fascinating book is the picture of a man forever stymied in doing what he felt was right. While the Flying Tigers material is fairly familiar to World War II students, the sections dealing with the later years of the war and then the post-war collapse of Nationalist China and Chennault's efforts to ward off the communist takeover of the country are far less well-known. Chennault comes across as a real man, a dynamo built on a very human frame. Mary Byrd has written an excellent biography, one that is frustratingly repetitive at times simply because the same frustrations kept happening over and over again to its subject.