I'm writing a book about my grandpa (who is Chinese) and during a short period in 1944, he says he was a radio operator for the American Flying Tigers...except his job was to fly with cargo planes which usually transported petrol/gas from the Dinjan Airport (an airfield near/around India) and over the Himalaya Hump to Kunming, China. He remembers doing parachute drills before flying, and one time when an engine blew out, he, his Chinese pilot, and an American GI stowaway dumped all their petrol while circling the over the Himalaya mountains to get high enough to pass the Hump (I did read that dumping equipment/cargo was a tactic of the Flying Tigers to lighten an airplane if needed). He was employed by the Americans and paid ~$300 USD/month.
There is not a lot of information about the Flying Tigers that I could find, and usually they only talk about combat/fighter planes with the tiger painting. But my grandpa and aunt insist he was flying with the Flying Tigers during his stint as a radio operator on these planes in 1944. My grandpa is old (96) so I'm not sure if his memory is just shoddy, but there is also probably no other way he knew about the existence of the Flying Tigers other than through RL experience/memories (since he doesn't read American/English history books).
As for the American GI, this man was a stowaway and hid on the plane for a while before revealing himself, because he wanted to use his 2 weeks vacation to have fun in Kunming but didn't have permission from his superior (there was nothing to do in/around the Dinjan airfield area).
So yeah, I'm wondering how credible is it to say my grandpa was a Flying Tiger? I have never heard anything about cargo planes being part of that group, and usually websites/stories only talk about the Americans who were part of the fighter group, and very rarely ever mention the Chinese who were employed as well. I can only read/speak English so I can't look up Chinese history sources to see what information they have either.
Thanks for any insights. Feel free to tell me anything even if it is several months past this post. I am always looking for information :)
The term "Flying Tiger" is specific to a small group of pilots and planes who fought in China in 1940 and 1941 as the American Volunteer Group. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, this group withered away: Its equipment was needed in the American war effort, and the pilots and ground crews were absorbed into the growing American war effort.
If you're talking about 1944, that would have been part of the 20th Air Force's efforts to bomb Japan from bases in China. These bombing raids began in June 1944 and were a big deal because they were the first strategic bombing missions over Japan since the Doolittle Raid two years before.
The 20th Air Force was laboriously supplied via an air route over "The Hump" that claimed many pilots and aircraft. Former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) was a pilot on this route, and he later said that while flying those missions, he realized that it was his destiny to die in a plane crash. On Aug. 9, 2010, he did.