Claire Lee Chennault
Claire Lee Chennault (September 6, 1893 – July 27, 1958) was an American military aviator best known for his leadership of the "Flying Tigers" and the Chinese Nationalist Air Force in World War II.
Quotes
[edit]- Nowadays, dynamite, TNT, and fuzes, as well as fire bombs, time clocks, knives, pistols, rifles, and tommy guns can turn an occupied country into a hell for its conquerors. These are the weapons of sabotage and, in broader terms, of guerrilla warfare. Old-time campaigners considered this form of internal Strife a rag-tag orphan of war, troublesome until quelled by firm measures. But, though military strategists have been slow to admit it, there are no longer any firm measures that will quell it. Even the torture and mass murder of civilians may multiply a conqueror’s underground enemies. Assuming an outside source of supply, the airplane, the cargo parachute, and the portable radio, twentieth-century guerrilla warfare can assume maddening dimensions.
- "My Plan to Fight Red China", in the Congressional Record, vol. 97, pt. 2 (March 19, 1951), p. 2567
- Sometimes, I feel that the Administration is working around toward my plan for building up the strength of South Korea and Nationalist China to the point where eventually they can carry the war to the Communists on the mainland. ... There is no justification for the employment of United States soldiers either in the Far East or in Europe. If the people and the governments in these areas do not wish to fight Communism, we should let them be communized.
- Letter to James A. Noe (December 13, 1954); Noe Papers. Reported in Martha Byrd, Chennault: Giving Wings to the Tiger (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), p. 354
Way of a Fighter (1949)
[edit]- Robert Hotz (ed.) Way of a Fighter: The Memoirs of Claire Lee Chennault (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1949)
- I am convinced that the people of this planet must ultimately and inevitably move toward a single form of world government if civilization is to survive. But it is our immediate task to see that this world government comes as a mutual federation of free peoples rather than through the ruthless domination of a master state enslaving all the others. In this struggle there are still many battles that cannot be avoided. The most critical of these now is to prevent the Communists from organizing the vast and rich land mass of China under their whip and turning its weight against us and the other free peoples of the world.
- Foreword, pp. xxi–xxii
- My plan proposed to throw a small but well-equipped air force into China. Japan, like England, floated her lifeblood on the sea and could be defeated more easily by slashing her salty arteries then by stabbing for her heart. ... The first phase of these operations entailed pounding the airfields, ports, staging areas, and shipping lanes where the Japanese were accumulating their military strength in Formosa, Hainan Island, Canton, and Indo-China. ... The second phase was to be directed against the Japanese home islands, to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu.
- Ch. 7, pp. 96–67
