The Ghost of General Claire Lee Chennault

1974: I was probably . . . twelve (???) . . . when I drew this Pre-WWII "Flying TIgers" P-40 Warhawk in the skies over Southeast Asia. Brigadier General Chennault commanded the U.S. Army Air Forces in China (1942–45) from Rangoon, Burma (Now Myanmar) and Kunming, Yunnan and created the American Volunteer Group (AVG) which was known by their squadron nom-de-plume as "The Flying TIgers."

I was bored in school (Fifth or sixth grade) and I had raided a teachers stash of Prisma pencils, markers, Pentels and office supplies. The cupboard was kept locked by the teacher and I picked the lock with a safety pin, a bobby pin, and a paper clip.

My science and math teacher was Mrs. "Pushpa," from India who always wore a colorful sari and a red dot in the middle of her forehead found my drawing and told me that "Billy McDonald! Some day you're gonna go to prison!" Little did she know that someday, when I was forty-seven, I would enter the prison system . . . as a sworn and badged prison cop. She was not the first teacher to tell me that same prediction. Years earlier, my second grade teacher, a Roman Catholic nun, had threatened me with that very same future.

A decade later, my grandmother asked me to apply a few inks over it and apply some India ink hardlines so she could enter it into a Laguna Niguel Art Association community art show. As I was already in the posters and fine arts prints business by that time, I declined. She insisted. I offered to redraw the whole plane, but she was adamant. She wanted me to rescue THIS plane. And NOT touch the sky. And so my mother's mother got her way. As she always did. My wife's a lot like her.

My wife preserved this highly damaged piece that somebody in the family very ignorantly folded inside a book, flattening it and pressing it and returning it to me last year on my fifty-eighth birthday.

Meanwhile, Brigadier General Claire Lee Chennault was a fierce advocate of "pursuit" or fighter-interceptor aircraft during the 1930s when the United States Army Air Corps was focused primarily on high-altitude bombardment. Chennault retired from the United States Army in 1937, and went to work as an aviation adviser and trainer in China.

Starting in early 1941, Chennault commanded the 1st American Volunteer Group (nicknamed Flying Tigers). He headed both the volunteer group and the uniformed U.S. Army Air Forces units that replaced it in 1942. He feuded constantly with General Joseph Stilwell, the U.S. Army commander in China, and helped China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to convince President Roosevelt to remove Stilwell in 1944. The China-Burma-India theater was strategically essential in order to fix many vital elements of the Imperial Japanese Army on the Chinese mainland to limit their use against Allied forces advancing towards Japan in the two Pacific campaigns.