100 books like A Flying Tiger's Diary

Like the Tigers themselves, their granite-faced commander was much glorified during the war and afterward, but he was a man with flaws. Claire Chennault lied about his age, among other things, and it wasn’t until Martha Byrd thought to examine the family bible that the record was corrected. Hers is the only reliable biography of the man who forged the fighter group that defended Burma and China in the early days of the Pacific War.

R. T. Smith was a Flying Tiger ace, credited with a fraction less than nine Japanese planes shot down. He also took some remarkable photos. Postwar he tried many things, including freelance publishing, and he had the happy inspiration of reproducing his wartime diary just as he wrote the words in 1941-1942, making it the only first-person account that hasn’t been edited for publication. Hard to find but very much worth looking for.

The beguiling Olga married an aircraft salesman named Harvey Greenlaw (among others) and with him was hired by Chennault for his pick-up AVG headquarters. She became a combination den mother and sex symbol for the Tigers in Burma, where she was charged with keeping the group’s “war diary.” When the Greenlaws came home in the summer of 1942, Olga brought a copy with her, and from it and her personal diary wrote this wonderful account of her year with the AVG. As with R. T. Smith’s facsimile diary, her facts check out, and I relied on her book while writing my own. Later, with her heirs, I edited a slimmed-down version so it would be more widely available.

Greg Boyington was a Flying Tiger before he took command of the famous “Black Sheep” fighter squadron and recipient of the Medal of Honor. He may have been Olga’s lover, and he certainly was Chennault’s most troublesome pilot. The two men despised one another, and Tonya was Boyington’s revenge. The novel is a thinly disguised and highly improbable account of the “Flying Sharks” in Chinese service. Great literature it’s not, but those who know something about the AVG will have a lark matching his characters with their real-life counterparts. 

In my bookshelf alone I count eight unit histories of the American Volunteer Group, the storied band of American pilots and technicians who fought for China in the first seven months of America’s involvement in World War II. I’m sure there are more. But when I need to check a fact about the AVG, the first book I turn to is Daniel Ford’s 1991 work. Ford was the first author to research Japanese sources to tell the full story of the Flying Tigers, and for that he was roundly criticized by AVG veterans who felt he had denigrated them by revealing that Japanese records did not support all of the AVG claims of combat success. In my view, however, the important contribution of the AVG was not the number of enemy planes its pilots did or didn’t shoot down but instead was the morale boost its successes gave to an… show more.

When I met Don Lopez in the late 1970s while he was the deputy director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, I was interviewing him for a magazine article about his exploits as a fighter ace in China during World War II. The intelligence, graciousness and sense of humor I noted that day come through loud and clear in this memoir published in 1997. In contrast to the rest of the books I’m highlighting here, Lopez provides a vivid, first-hand account of what it was like to actually do the fighting in the skies over China, 1943-45. A terrific storyteller, he goes beyond descriptions of exciting air battles to explain the emotional highs and lows he experienced as his personal successes and those of his fellow pilots in the air failed to blunt the major enemy offensive that was underway on the ground at that time.

This is a well-written book about one of America's most famous fighter aces, a Flying Tiger. Flying Tiger is an endearment for the American Volunteer Group—a group of American pilots who fought the Japanese in WWII in China and changed the course of Chinese history through unparalleled valor.

As an author of three historical novels about the Flying Tigers, I read almost all the books on this subject.“Tex” Hill: Flying Tiger touched me the most. It inspired me to write my novels. Danny Hardy, an American pilot, a Flying Tiger, was created because of my love and admiration for Tex Hill, a man of courage and integrity, a true American hero.

The Message is a novel about five codebreakers and one traitor. Set in China during World War II when the Chinese resistance challenged the Japanese backed puppet government, this is a complex counterintelligence novel, written by a Chinese storyteller, who is no stranger to the Chinese intelligence services. By telling the same story from two different perspectives, Mai Jia, as a colleague recently suggested, intentionally problematized the truth because both versions were plausible. I recommend this book because it provides insight into the multilayered intelligence story of wartime China, it is one of the few books on this topic, and it was written in China and published outside of the country with permission from the government.

I’m always struck by how modern Eileen Chang’s voice feels to me, even though her stories take place in China decades ago.

Little Reunions, for instance, opens with the main character Julie facing her school exams just before the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during WWII. But I found it easy to identify with Julie—her observations, her longings, and even her pettiness.

It’s one thing to read about a character who would get your background; it’s another to read about a character who would get you. In Little Reunions, I got both.

I cannot think of a more perfect title for Michael Wang’s Further News of Defeat. Imminent loss haunts the edges of each story, ready to pounce on Wang’s indelible characters. In America, we’re often uncomfortable with this kind of storytelling. We prefer our characters to be redeemed, to either prevail over calamity or to fail due to their own weaknesses. Wang’s characters are both at the mercy of outside events and circumstances and participants in their own fates. Most of the stories are set in fictional cities and rural villages in China. War, regime and societal changes, poverty, immigration, and identity are running themes. Several of these stories are so gripping I could imagine them as longer works. Further News of Defeat is a beautifully rendered and well-researched book.