Its hard to believe LBJ tapped her phone and wanted to prosecute this woman.
R.I.P.
Posted on 04/04/2018 7:36:05 AM PDT by mac_truck
Anna Chennault, for many years one of the most visible private citizens in Washington as a Republican fundraiser, writer and Chinese-born, anti-communist lobbyist who dabbled in foreign intrigue after the death of her husband, the renowned leader of the Flying Tigers in China and Burma in World War II, died Friday at her home in Washington. She was 94.
Her death, in her apartment at the Watergate complex, was announced today. The cause was complications of a stroke she suffered in December, her daughter Cynthia Chennault said.
In her memoir photographs, wearing a high-necked white ao dai, Chennault appears with her husband, Maj. Gen. Claire L. Chennault; with Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford; with J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI; with Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and with Nguyen Cao Ky, the South Vietnamese vice president who fled to the United States with the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Except for her husband’s picture, taken a year before he died in 1958, it is a gallery of Chennault’s Washington regalia, assembled over many years as an airline executive, hostess, Republican stalwart, advocate for the Chinese Nationalists and South Vietnam, and staunch opponent of the Communist regime that seized power in China in 1949.
She was also a vice president of the Flying Tiger Line, her husband’s postwar cargo operation; a writer of novels, poetry and nonfiction books; a Voice of America broadcaster; and the center of a social whirl at her Watergate penthouse that drew in Cabinet members, congressmen, diplomats, foreign dignitaries and journalists.
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Barbara Tuchman’s: Stillwell and the American Experience in China as a kid was first history book that made an impression on me. Chennault and his Chinese wife were featured prominently in it.
My Dad was also CBI. He flew the Hump and helped supply various Chinese units.
If a Zero got on a P-40’s tail, the Warhawk pilot would simply dive and roll to the right at high speed. The A6M Zero(Allied code name “Zeke”)with its thick, wide wings and barn-door sized ailerons couldn’t turn worth a damn in a high speed dive, especially to the right and couldn’t follow the diving P-40.
Once this was understood by Allied pilots, they simply dove on Japanese formations firing 50 cal armor piercing incendiaries at the highly flammable Japanese aircraft and diving out through the formations avoiding any aerial “dogfighting” with the highly maneuverable Zeros.
This tactic became even easier with the higher service-ceiling, higher-powered late war allied fighters like the Hellcat, P-38, and Corsair.
If that's true, they certainly earned their pay.
Incidentally, they didn't call themselves the Flying Tigers. That moniker was coined by Stateside journalists.
Its hard to believe LBJ tapped her phone and wanted to prosecute this woman.
R.I.P.
LBJ didn’t care for anti-communists who often called him “soft on communism.”
The P-40 was heavier and could out dive the zero. It also had armor, self sealing fuel tanks and six 50 caliber machine guns.
The Flying Tigers were a unique group.
I’ve read Boyingtons book and those guys fascinated me.
There was a general they all hated, referred to as “Lard Ass”.
Any idea who that might have been?
“Its hard to believe LBJ tapped her phone and wanted to prosecute this woman.”
He was probably intimidated by her.
She sounds like a strong willed woman who didn’t back down.
LBJ was a jackass.
He married Anna in 1947, when she was a hot 22 year old, and he was 54.
Typical Masshole comment.
Huh?
It was meant as a joke.
.
I don't know if it's true or if Nixon was involved or if Thieu couldn't have reached that conclusion on his own, but that's what Johnson was peeved about and what Ken Burns was complaining about in his recent Vietnam documentary.
RIP.
Really piss-poor one.
Claire Chennault was one of my boyhood heroes, as was his wife a heroine.
Too many folks today do not know the story of the Flying Tigers and what they accomplished. The airport manager in the town I grew up in was an aircraft mechanic in the Tigers. An American Indian and a great guy!
History is getting revised enough by the left without any humorous help.
“It also had armor, self sealing fuel tanks and six 50 caliber machine guns.”
The .50 BMG in the air and on the ground went a long way towards winning WWII.
It is not called “Mama Deuce” for no good reason.
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