Tiger Fight by Anthony Saunders

Tiger Fight By Anthony Saunders Formed in the months before Pearl Harbor by veteran U.S. aviator Claire Chennault, then a recently-appointed brigadier-general in the Chinese Air Force, an intrepid band of buccaneering American pilots and ground crew volunteered to fight against the Japanese in China. Officially named the 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG), they would soon become known more simply as the Flying Tigers.By 1941 Chinese forces, having been at war with Japan since 1937, were struggling. Strangled by a Japanese blockade of their ports they were left with a single lifeline through which to receive supplies from the outside world – the infamous Burma Road, a tortuous trail hacked through the jungles and mountains linking south-west China to the port of Rangoon. With the Imperial Japanese Air Force determined to bomb the trail into oblivion, the task of stopping them was given to Chennault’s Flying Tigers.Heavily outnumbered with seldom more than 50 or 60 serviceable P-40s onc