Flying Tigers

The subtitle is The Story of the American Volunteer Group, and the book was originally published in 1942.

He book is about American pilots who volunteered to fly planes in China to try and oppose the Japanese invasion of that country. They were all volunteers; they flew planes that were okay, but not state-of-the-art. They were majorly outnumbered by the Japanese. They had major problems getting replacement parts.

Yet the way they fought managed to cause serious losses to the Japanese fighters and bombers. They also did some bombing of their own against Japanese targets.

This book is the story of how they came into existence, what they did, and eventually what happened at the end. During their existence, they destroyed 286 Japanese planes (at a minimum), resulting in the death of around 1500 Japanese pilots and other plane crew, with a loss of 11 of their own known dead, and four missing-in-action.

The book is well written and reads easily. It's a fascinating story from the earliest days of World War II, and well worth the read.

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