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'Flying Tigers' was the popular name of the 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force in 1941-1942. The pilots were United States Army (USAAF), Navy (USN), and Marine Corps (USMC) personnel, recruited under Presidential sanction and commanded by Claire Lee Chennault; the ground crew and headquarters staff were likewise mostly recruited from the U.S. military, along with some civilians.<br/><br/> The group consisted of three fighter squadrons with about 20 aircraft each. It trained in Burma before the American entry into World War II with the mission of defending China against Japanese forces. 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.
The Second Sino-Japanese War (July 7, 1937 – September 2, 1945), called so after the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan from 1937 to 1941.<br/><br/> China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany (until 1941), the Soviet Union (1937–1940) and the United States. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the war merged into the greater conflict of World War II as a major front of what is broadly known as the Pacific War. The Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the 20th century. It also made up more than 50% of the casualties in the Pacific War if the 1937–1941 period is taken into account.