The Flying Tigers and the U.S. Fourteenth will be thesubject of a huge upcoming film from IMAX and director JohnWoo. The film is scheduled to start shooting in spring 2011with no firm release date stated yet. The role of Chenault in thefilm is likely to be the role of a lifetime for a huge star.
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When a sickly, half-deaf, forty-seven-year-old retired U.S.Army Air Corps Captain went to China in 1937 to survey ChiangKai-shek’s Chinese Air Force, little did the world know this wouldbe the man to stem the Japanese tide in the Far East. Almost everymilitary expert predicted his handful of pilots of the AmericanVolunteer Group would not last three weeks. Yet in seven months in1942, the AVG, fighting a rear-guard action over Burma, China,Thailand, and French Indonesia, destroyed a confirmed 199 planes,with another 153 “probables” as well. They did this losing onlyfour pilots and twelve P-40s in air combat and sixty-one on theground.

In this definitive biography of General Claire Chennault, veteranreporter Jack Samson offers a rare and fascinating inside look atthis legendary man behind the Flying Tigers.

Unlike Eisenhower and MacArthur, Chennault was no saintly militaryleader. He was a chain-smoking, bourbon-drinking, womanizing man.He was the kind of leader his men knew could and did fly betterthan they--in any kind of plane. But first and last, he was afighter--a tough, single-minded warrior who was never confused bywho the enemy was in Asia, regardless of what the State Departmentthought.

Following Chennault from this command of the Fourteenth U.S. ArmyAir Force during World War II to the part of his life that is notwell known--the intriguing postwar years in China and Formosa,where his Civilian Air Transport (CAT) became the scourge of theRed Chinese--The Flying Tiger is an extraordinary portraitof one of America’s great military commanders.