China Swashbuckler

Somewhere between Miami and India last week was a mystery man of U.S. aviation; a man who has concocted one big international aviation deal after another, yet is almost unknown to U.S. citizens. His name: William Douglas Pawley. His business; dabbling in anything that flies --usually at a profit.

Swashbuckling Bill Pawley started his fabulous career at 18, when he wangled a job with a New York export firm selling diving suits to Venezuela pearl divers. Since then he has led an up-&-down life that would fill several dime thrillers, has got rich and gone broke in such disparate ventures as peddling old Haitian ships to the U.S. Government in World War I; driving a milk truck in Wilmington; buying and selling land in Florida's real estate boom of the '20s.

Florida to Bangalore. It was Florida real estate that led him--with Pawley luck and Pawley supersalesmanship--into aviation. After selling some airfields to the old Curtis-Wright Flying Service, he bootstrapped himself into the vice president's chair of a Cuban flying service. He finally sold out at a sweet profit to Pan American Airways which just then was getting a start in Latin America.

Back from Cuba in 1932, he wound up as head of a Sperry subsidiary which owned a big chunk of China National Aviation Corp., an airline running between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Go-Getter Pawley went to China to see why C.N.A.C. was not coining money. The reasons are not on the record, but he finally sold out to Pan Am again. By that time Bill Pawley had made pals of China's bankers T. V. Soong and Dr. H. H. Kung--not to mention Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. Soon he convinced them that China needed its own airplane factory with Bill Pawley to build and run it.

Since then his Central Aircraft Manufacturing Co. of China has built and sold more than $30,000,000 worth of planes and repair services to China, has built and operated three different plants as the Japanese bombed them out. Profit to Pawley: up to $1,000,000 a year. First Pawley was at Shanghai; then at Hankow up the Yangtze (where he made 78 bombers and repaired 90 fighters); finally at Loi Wing just over the border from Burma. The Japs caught up with his $1,000,000 Loi Wing factory, just after he had trucked most of its machinery and equipment over the Indian border to the $3,000,000 Bangalore plant he had persuaded the Indian Government to build in 1940.

Another Pawley contribution to China was to help sell the U.S. Government on the idea of the now-legendary A.V.G.--the Flying Tigers. He began touting the scheme in 1939, but it was two years before Washington adopted the idea. But with typical Pawley luck he still got under the wire: when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor there were 100 Jap-shooting U.S. flyers in China and the A.V.G. was on the road to fame.

Bill Pawley was back in his 20-room Miami home a few weeks ago tying up the loose ends of his U.S. business, selling his newly established Intercontinent Aircraft Corp. (biggest Florida war plant) to Vultee Aircraft. Then he hopped off for India to take charge of his big Bangalore plant for at least a year. This will mean a lot of work; Bangalore already employs 5,000 native laborers and 35 U.S. supervisors, turns out three kinds of planes (engines are imported) and one glider model, keeps the R.A.F., the Indian Air Force, the U.S. Fleet's air arm and the Chinese Air Force in repair.

But in Bill Pawley's mind everything he has ever done plays second fiddle to his part in organizing the Flying Tigers. He thinks they were the fighting group which kept China in the war. Says he with perhaps pardonable pride: ". . . Unquestionably I have been one of the prime contributors to China's defense."

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