Lt. Gen. Claire Lee Chennault

The Flying Tigers began as a recruiting drive. Chennault gathered about 300 American pilots and ground crew for the American Volunteer Group, which trained from August 1941 around Rangoon and Kunming and flew P-40 fighters; 99 of 100 ordered arrived before the war began. On December 20, 1941, they met ten Japanese planes heading for Kunming and shot down four. The group was folded into the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942, and Chennault, a major general by March 1943, went on to command the Fourteenth Air Force.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge — 25 mi
  Nearly 80,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and oxbow lakes, with the state's largest population of Louisiana black bears and Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 hunt nearby.
• Lake Bruin State Park — 28 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Macon Settlements — 2.1 mi
• Gene King — 4.9 mi
• Al "Puddler" Harris — 5.2 mi
• Franklin Parish — 8.5 mi