Remembering an LSU legend: Claire Chennault

Lieutenant General Claire Lee Chennault (September 6, 1893 – July 27, 1958), was an American military aviator. He is most famous for commanding the 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG), popularly known as The Flying Tigers.

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Flight leader and fighter ace Robert "R.T." Smith stands next to his P-40 fighter at Kunming, China. The “Flying Tiger” insignia was created by the Walt Disney Company.

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Claire Lee Chennault was born in Commerce, Texas, to John Stonewall Jackson Chennault and Jessie (nee Lee) Chennault. He was reared in the Louisiana towns of Gilbert and Waterproof.



Chennault attended Louisiana State University between 1909 and 1910 and received ROTC training.

The Flying Tigers were largely the creation of Chennault, who as a retired U.S. Army Air Corps officer had worked in China since August 1937, first as military aviation advisor to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in the early months of the Sino-Japanese War, then as director of a Chinese Air Force flight school centered in Kunming.

The Tigers' shark-faced fighters remain among the most recognizable of any individual combat aircraft of World War II, and they demonstrated innovative tactical victories when the news in the U.S. was filled with little more than stories of defeat at the hands of the Japanese forces.



Flying Tigers fighter aircraft were painted with a large shark face on the front of the aircraft. This was done after pilots saw a photograph of a P-40 of No. 112 Squadron RAF in North Africa, which in turn had adopted the shark face from German pilots of the Luftwaffe's ZG 76 heavy fighter wing, flying Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters in Crete.

(The Flying Tigers nose-art is variously credited to Charles Bond and Erik Shilling.) About the same time, the AVG was dubbed "The Flying Tigers" by its Washington support group, called China Defense Supplies.

Chennault was promoted to Lieutenant General in the U.S. Air Force, several days before his death on July 27, 1958 at the Ochsner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans.[18] He died of lung cancer. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Chennault is commemorated by a statue in the ROC capital of Taipei, as well as by monuments on the grounds of the Louisiana state capitol at Baton Rouge, and at the former Chennault Air Force Base, now the commercial Chennault International Airport in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

A vintage P-40 aircraft, nicknamed "Joy", is on display at the riverside war memorial in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, painted in the colors of the Flying Tigers.



In 2005, the "Flying Tigers Memorial" was built in Huaihua, Hunan Province, on one of the old airstrips used by the Flying Tigers in the 1940s. On the 65th anniversary of the Japanese surrender to China, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and PRC officials unveiled a statue of Chennault in Zhijiang County, Hunan, the site of the surrender of Japan.