Every historian has his personal theories and perceptions. Most would likely agree, however, that there were three turning points in World War II: Midway, the Second Battle of El Alamein, and Stalingrad. There was also a fourth, a generally underappreciated, overlooked, and virtually forgotten pivotal engagement because it happened in the remote China-Burma-India Theater.
When a handful of American mercenary pilots, the famed Flying Tigers, halted the Japanese advance at the Salween River Gorge in May of 1942, their heroics saved China. Had China fallen, nearly a million Japanese troops would have been freed up to fight against the Americans on the islands of the Pacific and likely extended the war by several years and cost tens of thousands more American lives.
“The Gorge” is a novel about that obscure but crucial four-day battle and the events of the months leading up to it as seen primarily through the eyes of four pilots and close friends: Hicks Carlyle, Socrates “Socko” Kyricos, Bert “Scorchy” Christman, and Charlie Bond. Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers not only had to constantly battle the Japanese Air Force that outnumbered them more than 10-to-1 in the air, but also a jealous and vindictive American military hierarchy back in Washington that was determined to wreck Chennault’s mercenary group without regard to the damage it would cause to the Allied war effort. Half a century would pass before the US Army and Air Force finally acknowledged the critical contributions of these few courageous pilots to the Allied victory.
