American Volunteer Group

To aid the Nationalist government of China and to put pressure on Japan, President Franklin Roosevelt in April 1941 authorized the creation of a clandestine "Special Air Unit" consisting of three combat groups equipped with American aircraft and staffed by aviators and technicians to be recruited from the U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps for service in China.

The program was fleshed out in the winter of 1940–1941 by Claire Lee Chennault, then an air advisor to the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, and Lauchlin Currie, a young economist in the Roosevelt White House.

[1] The 1st American Volunteer Group were recruited starting on 15 April 1941, when an unpublished executive order was signed by President Roosevelt.

[4] In the fall of 1941, the 2nd American Volunteer Group was equipped with 33 Lockheed Hudson (A-28) and 33 Douglas DB-7 (A-20) bombers originally built for Britain but acquired by the U.S. Army as part of the Lend-Lease program passed earlier in the year.

The Douglas DB-7s were to have gone by freighter to Africa, to be assembled and ferried to China but the 7 December 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor caused the program to be aborted.

Claire Lee Chennault (1893–1958) was instrumental in the implementation of the AVGs
Douglas A-20 Havoc of the United States Army Air Forces
The Lockheed Hudson (seen in RAF use) was an American-built light bomber and coastal reconnaissance aircraft