A WWII Tiger’s Flights Between Heaven and Hell

It was a tatterdemalion bunch of guys who shipped overseas on a Dutch freighter in 1941 for somewhere in Asia. They wore no uniforms and carried no ranks. They just wanted to be where the action was.

Dick Rossi was one of those Flying Tigers who made the first positive headlines in the disastrous start of World War II. Rossi now lives in retirement in the hills outside Fallbrook and looks back on those brief days of glory as the best and worst times of his life.

Rossi, like many of his fellow Tigers, was a military officer, an ensign in the Navy, in those days before the United States had joined the war. A pilot with an itch to be where the action was, he resigned his commission to join Claire Chennault, an Air Force officer who likewise had resigned to recruit pilots and crews for a one-year secret civilian mission to China.

The Americans--100 pilots and 200 ground support staff--were sent to the Far East to replace the decimated Chinese air force. Rossi and other Chennault recruits figured that the unauthorized mission was the speediest way to get into action against U.S. enemies.

“Not too many people figured we would be very effective,” Rossi recalled. But the American Volunteer Group, a handful of men and a very few women, soon erased the myth that the Japanese were invincible.

Now, every year or two or three, Rossi and his remaining compatriots gather to “tell bigger and better lies” and to share a close camaraderie that few ever experience--those few months of heaven and hell as Flying Tigers.

Rossi and his squadron landed in Rangoon on Nov. 12, 1941, and headed for a British-built airfield in Toungoo, about 180 miles north of the Burmese seaport.

As the last to arrive, Rossi and his squadron had only a few days to become familiar with the American P-40 fighter planes before they launched into combat.

In Toungoo, the volunteers found that their barracks were bamboo huts with thatched roofs, and their only entertainment was a movie theater and a restaurant in the neighboring village. At a stop in Singapore, the wiser ones had bought bicycles--the only way to get around in the rural region.

“A few of the guys who had come from nice comfortable BOQs (bachelor officer quarters), took one look and turned around and went home again,” Rossi said. “But most of us stayed.”

Within days of his arrival, Rossi was flying an unfamiliar Army Air Corps P-40, a one-seater fighter plane. “You couldn’t have an instructor go up with you to show you the ropes. You just fired the engine up and gave it a shot.”

Although the group’s primary mission was to keep the Burma Road open, the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, meant that Chennault’s volunteers were dispersed to fight on many other fronts to defend the Chinese. On Dec. 18, Rossi and Squadron 3 of the American Volunteer Group arrived in Kunming, China, in the wake of a Japanese bombing raid.

“We landed in the midst of terrible damage, with bodies lying all around,” he recalled.

The next day was quiet, but, on Dec. 20, the Japanese bombers returned. The American fliers were waiting for them. It was Rossi’s first combat experience and, he said, the first time that the Japanese “met real resistance.” Three Japanese bombers were shot down, and a fourth was listed as a possible kill.

The fame of the American fliers grew, spread through Chinese newspapers hungry for victories, and the title Flying Tigers was coined. U.S. newspapers soon picked up the name.

The Japanese had used Kunming as a target for practice bombing raids until the American fliers arrived. “After that day, the Japanese planes never showed up again,” Rossi said with a smile of satisfaction.

“The coolies along the road and the kids in the street treated us like heroes. They even wanted to give us a big banquet to celebrate.”

But the war overtook Rossi’s squadron, and it was called back into action in a Dec. 23 air battle over Rangoon in which “we lost two pilots, but we shot down quite a few.”

The following day, Christmas Eve, was quiet except for the voice of Japanese radio propagandist Tokyo Rose, who promised the American fliers “a big Christmas present.”

On Christmas Day, an armada of Japanese planes came over Rangoon, wave upon wave, and the American fliers went up to meet them.

Rossi’s description of the battle that followed is brief: “We had even greater luck. We did a lot of damage, and we lost a couple of planes but no men.”

Rossi does not embellish his own exploits, although he came out of the fighting with 6 1/2 (one was shared with another pilot) chalked on his P-40’s fuselage. He was never shot down or wounded in battle, “but I was in a couple of crash landings, nothing serious. Like a cut finger or a bump on the head.”

There was little military discipline in the Flying Tigers, Rossi said, “and we usually flew in our shirt sleeves or a pair of coveralls.”

They also had no military titles or salutes or dress parades, which irked the conservative British troops when they found American fliers and mechanics, clerks and physicians eating together and swapping tales, Rossi recalled.

Despite the ugly memories of the dead and the frightening memories of facing death every time he went up, Rossi also recalls those days as some of the best in his life. Like the time in Singapore when the gang was at Raffles and met the Sultan of Jahore. The royal leader bought the boys a drink and then treated them to a tour of his Malaysian palace and his private country club, where the booze flowed free.

Another time, they took Jim Howard, son of missionary parents, on a trip to an infamous Chinese red-light district where the prostitutes were rumored to be so aggressive that they “literally grabbed you off the street.”

There were about seven Flying Tigers on the spree, Rossi recalled, and, to prevent being kidnaped as they strolled past the brothels, the fliers linked arms to form a human chain, with Howard in the middle.

“When we got to about the middle of the block, we let go of Jim,” he said with a chuckle that turned into a hearty laugh.

In Rangoon, Rossi cut a dashing figure, driving about in a green 1940 Buick convertible with California license plates.

A Navy buddy had smuggled the car aboard a Liberty ship from the United States, hidden among war material. After some delicate negotiating with port authorities, Rossi drove it away.

“It was a great car,” he said. “And people were always spotting that California plate and telling me that I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

Rossi was there in the final days before Rangoon fell to the Japanese in March, 1942, and his shoulders slumped as he recounted the horrors.

“The rumors were flying around that Japanese paratroopers were landing in the outskirts of town, that 20,000 British troops with tanks were coming in.

“They opened the doors of the jails and the insane asylums and let everyone out. They were roaming in the streets.

“There was panic and looting. At first the authorities shot the looters, but after a while nobody cared. It didn’t seem to make any difference.”

To Rossi, those last days in Rangoon “were only a blur” as he and his fellow Flying Tigers flew nonstop sorties against the invading Japanese. “We went up three or four times a day, landing only long enough to refuel,” he said, and the last of the group almost failed to get the word that the British troops were pulling out.

Rossi flew the last fighter plane out to a safer field shortly before the city fell.

Rossi’s leather flight jacket, which dates from his prewar days as a Navy flight instructor at Pensacola, is a bit snug in the shoulders now, but he can still zip it up “if I pull in my chest.” His hair has gone white, and he’s added a neat brush mustache during the past 50 years, but his fellow fliers recognize him immediately at reunion time.

Rossi organized those reunions starting in 1952, a decade after the Flying Tigers were disbanded on July 4, 1942. Some of the get-togethers have been with their Chinese counterparts and one was with the Japanese fliers against whom the Tigers fought. Now he heads the national Flying Tigers association and can claim a major role in the recent recognition of the group members as bona fide U.S. veterans, carrying out a mission secretly approved at the highest levels of the Roosevelt Administration.

When the Flying Tigers were no more, Rossi went to work flying cargo planes “over the hump” from India into China, replacing the Burma Road as the only supply route open into China after the Japanese occupied all the coastal areas. He made 738 runs on the route and doesn’t know of anyone who can top that.

When the war was over, he joined the Flying Tigers again, but this time as a peacetime pilot flying charter groups for the Flying Tigers airline all over the world until his retirement to Fallbrook 17 years ago.

Nothing will shine in Rossi’s memory as do those few short months when he was one of the glory boys.

“Those were very good times,” he said.