The Hooded Falcon

He grew up on a flatlands farm near Waterproof, La., but farming was not in his blood. He was a fighter, afire with the killer instinct and the true fighter's determination to win. As a boy in the Louisiana marshes, he dropped his bird with the first shot. As a young schoolteacher, he asked for a school in Franklin Parish, where no teacher had lasted a term, and in the requisite number of recesses he beat his beefier charges into docility.

This was a truculent spirit headed for war. When war came in 1917, he was among the first to enlist, one of the earliest transfers to the Army Signal Corps' budding air arm. After that, there was no turning for him. "I have tasted of the air," he wrote his father, "and I cannot get it out of my craw."

What Odds? In the long sag of peace, this leathery bantam spoiled for a mix. Everything Claire Lee Chennault did, he did belligerently. With two flying sergeants, he barnstormed the land in three precisely flown P12 pursuit planes -- the famed "Three Men on a Flying Trapeze" of the air shows. What he wanted to prove was that precise and darting aggression spelled air power, but nobody cared. And when his noncommissioned wingmen flunked their tests for commissions, his gorge rose hot as a Louisiana pepper, and he resigned his own commission, saying: "I'm glad to get out. They're still running on the old 1917 ideas."

What to do with a slightly deaf, incipiently bronchial, incurably mettlesome aviator? The Chinese knew. Thy were at war with Japan in 1937, and they invited him over to whip their hodgepodge of an air force into battle trim. Now he was in his natural element. He sent radio-equipped coolies to the far frontiers to crank out warning of every Nipponese air strike. He saw the big show coming, and by Pearl Harbor, bossed an air force of trained American volunteers, which never numbered more than 55 flyable P-40s and 80 pilots. For $600 a month and $500 a kill, his Flying Tigers knocked the Zeros out of the sky. "Make 'em play your way," he said, and his pilots did.

In the seven months after Pearl Harbor, the Tigers racked up 284 kills and 300 probables, in exchange for twelve pilots, two crew chiefs and 21 planes. He rewrote the book of aerial combat, insisting on two-plane teams, dropping the first fire bombs on the inflammable architecture of the East, coaching his sky raiders to dive, squirt, pass and run. He lived on rice and red ants, coffee and cigarettes; he dwelt in mud and bamboo; he dressed in shorts and a billed, battered, nondescript cap. "Old Leatherface,'' the Chinese fondly called him, and guarded his precious store of gasoline.

What Chance? And when his American Volunteer Group was absorbed into the U.S. Army as the Fourteenth Air Force, he continued to punish the Japs in the same old way. The bag was rich --928 planes, 345 probables, 482 damaged, 20,000 Nips strafed dead. But it wasn't the same. This wasn't a fight any more, but a rout.

After the war, old "Pop" turned his hand to the Civil Air Transport, a Chinese commercial line that is healthy and profitable still. This, too, was tame stuff for an incandescent spirit. He took a second wife, a Chinese girl, and she bore him two children to add to the eight he had by his first. But what he needed was another uphill fight to win, and there was none around. Aimless, restless, unhappy, the hooded falcon began to wane. "Pop's face," an old China hand said, "looks like it's worn out three bodies already."

In poker, in war, in life, the doughty warrior had one question to ask: "What chance have I got of winning?" This week, in New Orleans' Ochsner Foundation Hospital, shrunk to a shell by cancer, Lieut. General * Claire Chennault, 67, lost.

* A special act of Congress, rushed through without objection or debate and promptly signed by the President, granted Chennault his deathbed promotion.

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