I picked up a copy of the book
The Flying Tigers by Sam Kleiner at
Costco yesterday. It is very readable, very smooth (like good whiskey). It starts with some background on
Claire Chennault who eventually becomes the head of
The Flying Tigers. We follow him to China where he goes to work for the Chinese Air Force.
His first job is assessing the current state of that Air Force, which is very bad. He delivers this report to
Chiang Kai-shek. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. There's a brief overview of the internal politics of China. Chiang's wife,
Soong Mei-ling, is force of her own.
Sun Yat-sen gets mentioned. That's another name I haven't heard in a coon's age.
Anyway, the Japanese have been raising hell in China for years, but now we have the
Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and the war begins in earnest.
The name "Marco Polo Bridge" derives from its appearance in Marco Polo's book of travels, where he praised it highly. - Wikipedia
So the current bridge isn't the one that Marco Polo saw, but it's in the same place, and it's the one where the Chinese and Japanese clashed.
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