Dr. Nick Pitts is the host of today’s show. His first guest is historian, lawyer, and author, Sam Kleiner. Sam has an incredible new book: THE FLYING TIGERS: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan. His second guest is Ashkhen Kazaryan, the Director of Civil Liberties at TechFreedom. She’ll bring her insight into Technology and Freedom of Speech.
Give us a call at 800-351-1212 or post a question on facebook at www.facebook.com/pointofviewradio.
Sam's interest in World War II started when he was a kid and would listen to stories from his grandfather, who was a navigator on a B-25 in the Pacific during World War II. He read every book about World War II in his elementary school library. He went on to study American history at Northwestern University and then was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to continue his studies at the University of Oxford, where he completed a doctorate in International Relations, focusing on how the President makes the decision to go to war.
While attending law school at Yale, Sam stumbled across a collection of love letters between a nurse and a Flying Tigers pilots that were stored in the basement of an archive. The handwritten letters had faded over the decades, the paper almost crumbling but he knew that this was a story that needed to be told.
Inspired to learn everything he could about the Flying Tigers and their families, Sam was the only went to the Flying Tigers Association reunion in 2015, where he was the only outside historian. He became close with Frank Losonsky, who is now the last surviving Flying Tiger. Many of the family members supported his research, helping him find diaries and letters that had been tucked away for decades. In 2017, he was the keynote speaker at the Flying Tigers reunion. Sam interviewed Anna Chennault and the family gave him access to hundreds of original combat reports that had been sitting in a basement. These firsthand accounts of the pilots’ battles offer an unprecedented and intimate view on the Flying Tigers.
Sam Kleiner’s The Flying Tigers uncovers the hidden story of the group of young American men and women who crossed the Pacific before Pearl Harbor to risk their lives defending China. Led by legendary army pilot Claire Chennault, these men left behind an America still at peace in the summer of 1941 using false identities to travel across the Pacific to a run-down airbase in the jungles of Burma. In the wake of the disaster at Pearl Harbor this motley crew was the first group of Americans to take on the Japanese in combat, shooting down hundreds of Japanese aircraft in the skies over Burma, Thailand, and China. At a time when the Allies were being defeated across the globe, the Flying Tigers’ exploits gave hope to Americans and Chinese alike.
A dramatic story of a covert operation whose very existence would have scandalized an isolationist United States, The Flying Tigers is the unforgettable account of a group of Americans whose heroism changed the world, and who cemented an alliance between the United States and China as both nations fought against seemingly insurmountable odds.