CHINA> Profiles
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CHINA> Profiles
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Tribute to the Tigers
By Wang Ying (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-12-15 07:39
US pilot Glen Beneda's P-51 fighter was shot down by several enemy aircraft during an attack on a large Japanese base in Hubei province in 1944. The 20-year-old lieutenant bailed out and landed in a rice paddy while his aircraft sank in a nearby lake. Local people saved him and helped him return to his squadron two months later. Beneda, who became a firefighter in Los Angeles after the war, was recently stunned to learn that local people had started excavating his crashed aircraft and want to repair and display it in a memorial hall at the crash site in Hankou.
"I often dreamed about my former fighter being brought back - I still cannot believe that my dream will soon come true," Beneda said in a letter to the China Cultural Links Project Organization, which is in charge of the excavation project. "If my health allows, I will go back to China to see my former aircraft with my own eyes," says Beneda who is now 84 and will soon undergo heart surgery. The excavation was approved in May by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and the memorial hall is expected to be built early next year. Beneda's son Edward, 62, recently came to China to say thanks on behalf of his father and discuss the project with Chinese officials. "My father's thrilling tales in China during the war have been told within and beyond my family many times and will be retold even more in the future because he is a hero to me, my children and my grandchildren," Edward says. "My father had just enrolled in college and had a very bright future ahead of him when Pearl Harbor happened and he immediately joined the air force. He knew the danger ahead of him yet he discarded that for the protection of not only the US but China also." His father came to China in 1943 to join the Chinese people's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1938-45) and his unit, the 1st American Volunteer Group, was famously known as The Flying Tigers. When his plane was shot down during the May 6, 1944, his right leg was badly injured as he landed in the rice paddy. Local farmers rescued him and hid him from the Japanese. They also tied heavy stones to the aircraft so it sank to the bottom of the lake and Japanese soldiers found nothing the next day.
"Local people gave me their best food - rice and eggs, and risked their own lives in hiding me," Beneda recalls. Rescuing US pilots was very dangerous because Japanese troops would wreak revenge on anyone caught doing it. Just a few months before Beneda's rescue, more than 200 people in a nearby village were slaughtered by the Japanese soldiers after farmers were caught saving several US pilots. With the help of his Pointe Talkie, an English-Chinese phrase booklet, Beneda asked the village leader to take him to the Chinese guerrillas, who later sent him to the Red Army. "The Red Army treated me very well. We had several encounters with Japanese patrols but we evaded most of them," he recalls in his memoirs. "Local people would inform us of the location of the Japanese and if they were close, we traveled at night. "The Red Army gave me various gifts, including a Nambi pistol and a Japanese ceremonial sword they said had belonged to a Japanese major general. They asked me to present it to General Chennault, which I did. "When I rejoined my squadron in Kunming after being missing for two months, I was given a really rousing greeting on my miraculous return as they thought I was dead." Beneda came back to China with his wife and son in 2002 to attend a symposium for Chinese and American veterans who had fought the Japanese in World War II. The veterans took turns telling their experiences. A few days later, a Chinese woman visited him at his hotel after hearing about his trip through local media. She said she was from the village where Beneda had landed in the rice paddy and the man who had helped him was her grandfather. "We had tears in our eyes and I felt like it was the reunion of a long-lost family," Beneda recalls. The Flying Tigers are still revered in China more than six decades later. Beneda's touching reunion was last month echoed by Stephen Bonner, a Flying Tiger ace pilot who shot down about 10 Japanese planes during his year-long war service in China. Now 91, Bonner was with a group of US veterans attending a World War II veteran seminar organized by the Sino-American Aviation Heritage Foundation. Passing through a store in Beijing, Bonner, who was wearing a Flying Tigers hat, was stopped by a Chinese girl in her 20s. The girl thanked and hugged him, saying she knew about the Flying Tigers. She even called over her workmates to tell them they were in his debt for what he did more than 60 years ago. "I felt so happy. That hug, so many years after my service, reaffirmed me that what I did was never taken in vain," Bonner says. "I am not a hero, I just did the job six decades ago." Bonner says he has never forgotten China and its people. When he first arrived here in 1943 he was met by an 18-year-old named Chen, who was fresh out of high school and spoke broken English. "Chen, who helped me get to know China, left a deep impression on me as he was very eager to learn," Bonner recalls. "He borrowed all the books I brought with me - a book on civil law and another on algebra. Two months later, when I moved on and we had to part, he had finished half of each book and his English improved greatly. "The quarrymen also left a deep impression on me - they were in rags and lived a miserable life but were very cheerful and made others happy, too. "Actually, I took a lot from China, more than that I gave to China. Its people's spirit has encouraged me every day because of their courage and determination to gain a better life." Even at 91, the country may not have seen the last of him. "I hope to come back and visit China again in the near future, and to see Beneda's aircraft," says Bonner, who is one of Beneda's best friends. "It will be a very happy reunion of two Flying Tigers." |
