Stephen Bonner, an ace US fighter pilot and one of the last surviving members of the swashbuckling “Flying Tigers” who fought the Japanese for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) during World War II, has died, friends and colleagues announced on Thursday.
He was 103.
The Flying Tigers, an assembly of US volunteer fighter pilots forming the Aviation Volunteer Group based in Kunming, China, operated out of what was then Burma in the early 1940s in support of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) against the Japanese, conducting dangerous missions over Japanese-occupied China and shooting down hundreds of enemy bombers.
They initially operated as mercenaries with the tacit support of the US government, given Washington’s official neutrality toward imperial Japan before the attacks on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in late 1941.
Serving under US Army lieutenant general Claire Chennault — who led the Republic of China (ROC) Air Force during the war before the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan in the Chinese Civil War — in 1943 and 1944, Bonner flew “five confirmed and five probable aerial victories, and additionally was credited with damaging two more fighters and bombers,” Sino-American Aviation Heritage Foundation chairman Jeff Green said.
“With his remarkable longevity, Steve would become the last living ‘Fighter Ace’ to have flown in China during the Second World War,” Green said, describing him as a “gallant soldier and a Christian gentleman.”
Later in life, Bonner became an advocate for the commemoration of the Flying Tigers’ legacy and US-China dialogue, founding the Sino-American Aviation Heritage Foundation and receiving the Congressional Gold Medal.
He also visited China with fellow veterans in 2005, where they were named honorary citizens of Kunming.
Public Television Service produced a documentary series on the Flying Tigers, which operated in the Chinese-Burma-India region — known as the CBI Theater — during World War II.
“The Flying Tigers squadron forms a very important chapter in Taiwan’s wartime history, where the Republic of China and the US air forces worked together with outstanding camaraderie, spirit and cooperative fellowship,” then-ROC Air Force chief of staff Liu Shou-jen (劉守仁) said when the series was first aired in 2014.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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