Word: chennault
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...Hawk. It is Claire Chennault's face that stops a man, meeting him for the first time. The skin is burnt and leather-beaten by the sun to a permanent brown, cut and scarred by razor-sharp lines that drop perpendicularly about his mouth. About the eyes sky-strain has woven a lacework of crow's-feet. Within this net work, two coal-black eyes brood and smolder. Said an artist assigned to do a portrait of the General : "That man has the face of a hawk...
...hawk face is not a cruel face. Rather, it expresses a tension bred of Chennault's whole mature life. A Louisiana cotton planter's son, he worked his way through college, taught in a country school. In World War I he enlisted as a private, got a commission at an officers' training camp, transferred from the infantry into aviation. Discharged in April 1920 (he did not go overseas), Chennault returned to his cotton plantation in the Louisiana delta. Several months later he was back in the Army, a first lieutenant in the Air Corps...
...Chennault was a pursuit pilot with ideas. His famed stunt team (the "Three Men on a Flying Trapeze") thrilled air-meet crowds. But its purpose was serious: to impress on the Air Corps the value of precision pursuit operation. The conservative Air Corps command paid little or no attention to these and other Chennault ideas...
Finally, in 1937, the Army retired him when he was 56 - officially, because of his partial deafness. Major Chennault told a friend: "I'm glad to get out [of the Air Corps]. They're still running it with the old 1917-18 ideas." That same year the dark, determined Louisianian went to Shanghai and became Chiang Kai-shek's air adviser. "Why," he had growled, "should I worry my brains out when I can prove my theories somewhere else?" In a few months, the Japs almost wiped out his infant air force, but Chennault did not regret...
...brigadier general, took over command of the Fourteenth's predecessor, the starveling China Air Task Force. He wanted to retain the A.V.G. as an independent striking force, but Washington told him to get into the Army - or else. "I don't want to be a general," Chennault sighed, "but I can't fight without planes." For a while he almost had to fight without them anyway: in the summer and fall of 1942 his bomber force sometimes averaged five B-25s, his fighter force was down to 20 P-40s, and for months he never had more...