The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1 (archived PDF)

C O M M I T M E N T S T O C H I N A
pines and more recently of American air units operating in the
Netherlands East Indies, he was now to command an air force based
in India with a mission for the support of China. Key decisions would
involve consideration of the interests, not always identical, of two
major allies. Once again he had to improvise an organization in the
face of a rapidly advancing enemy whose conquest of Burma, which
held the key to any plan for the immediate assistance of China, would
be completed before the Tenth could be given the means to fight.
Lacking personnel, planes, and other equipment that make up an air
force, Brereton would not even command the major American air unit
operating within the theater. For ere the famed American Volunteer
Group ( A V G ) had been inducted into the AAF in July, General
Brereton was transferred, with such striking force as the Tenth
possessed, to the Middle East.
The AVG
T h e exigency of war had determined the time and circumstances of
General Brereton’s arrival in India, but the decision to conduct aerial
operations in support of China came as a logical culmination of a well-
defined American policy extending back to the Japanese occupation
of Manchuria in 193 I . At that time the American people had been un-
prepared to go beyond a general indorsement of the policy of non-
recognition for such conquests enunciated by Henry L. Stimson,
Secretary of State, who was now serving as the Secretary of War. But
we had watched with growing concern the progress of Japanese
forces in China, and with increasing admiration the evident purpose
of the Chinese to continue their resistance. This concern had become
acute by 1941, when all approaches to China had been sealed off ex-
cept for the Burma Road, a tortuous truck route hewed through the
mountains between Lashio and Kunming in 1937-38.2
A quickened interest displayed in the Sino-Japanese conflict by the
American government in I 94 I reflected not merely a growing popular
demand, in which the traditionally isolationist section of the press
tended to join, but the government’s own concern over the prospect
of an early involvement in war with both Germany and Japan. If
we were to fight both of them (and the two had entered recently
into a formal alliance clearly directed against the United States) , the
most realistic of considerations argued for every possible effort to
strengthen China, especially in view of strategic plans then taking
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