WIKI
The Flying Tigers began to arrive in China in April 1941. The group first saw combat on 20 December 1941, 12 days after Pearl Harbor (local time). It demonstrated innovative tactical victories when the news in the U.S. was filled with little more than stories of defeat at the hands of the Japanese forces, and achieved such notable success during the lowest period of the war for both the U.S. and the Allied Forces as to give hope to America that it might eventually defeat Japan. AVG pilots earned official credit and received combat bonuses for destroying 296 enemy aircraft, while losing only 14 pilots in combat.
The American Volunteer Group was largely the creation of Claire L. Chennault, a retired U.S. Army Air Corps officer who had worked in China since August 1937, first as military aviation advisor to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in the early months of the Sino-Japanese War, then as director of a Chinese Air Force flight school centered in Kunming. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union supplied fighter and bomber squadrons to China, but these units were mostly withdrawn by the summer of 1940. Chiang then asked for American combat aircraft and pilots, sending Chennault to Washington as an adviser to China’s ambassador and Chiang’s brother-in-law, T. V. Soong.
Chennault spent the winter of 1940–1941 in Washington, supervising the purchase of 100 Curtiss P-40 fighters and the recruiting of 100 pilots and some 200 ground crew and administrative personnel that would constitute the 1st AVG.
Of the pilots, 60 came from the Navy and Marine Corps and 40 from the Army Air Corps. (One army pilot, Albert Baumler was refused a passport because he had earlier flown as a mercenary in Spain, so only 99 actually sailed for Asia. Ten more army flight instructors were hired as check pilots for Chinese cadets, and several of these would ultimately join the AVG’s combat squadrons.) The volunteers were discharged from the armed services, to be employed for “training and instruction” by a private military contractor, the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company (CAMCO), which paid them $600 a month for pilot officers, $675 a month for flight leaders, $750 for squadron leaders (no pilot was recruited at this level), and about $250 for skilled ground crewmen. Some pilots were also orally promised a bounty of $500 for each enemy aircraft shot down, and this was later confirmed by Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
Chennault set up a schoolhouse that was made necessary because many pilots had “lied about their flying experience, claiming pursuit experience when they had flown only bombers and sometimes much less powerful aeroplanes.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers
Yes, you have a good eye for charting historical trends. I disagree on one point. If stupidity like this continues, it won’t be all of eight months later that we will be fighting a world war.