100 Books Like The Lady and the Tigers

Like the Tigers themselves, their granite-faced commander was much glorified during the war and afterward, but he was a man with flaws. Claire Chennault lied about his age, among other things, and it wasn’t until Martha Byrd thought to examine the family bible that the record was corrected. Hers is the only reliable biography of the man who forged the fighter group that defended Burma and China in the early days of the Pacific War.

R. T. Smith was a Flying Tiger ace, credited with a fraction less than nine Japanese planes shot down. He also took some remarkable photos. Postwar he tried many things, including freelance publishing, and he had the happy inspiration of reproducing his wartime diary just as he wrote the words in 1941-1942, making it the only first-person account that hasn’t been edited for publication. Hard to find but very much worth looking for.

Charlie Bond was a career aviator and retired as a two-star general, so his account is discreet and clearly edited for publication. But he was more serious than most of the buccaneers who joined the American Volunteer Group; he paid attention to what was going on at headquarters high and low, and he had a keen eye for his fellow pilots. History professor Terry Anderson provided the background, and R. T. Smith some of the photographs.

Greg Boyington was a Flying Tiger before he took command of the famous “Black Sheep” fighter squadron and recipient of the Medal of Honor. He may have been Olga’s lover, and he certainly was Chennault’s most troublesome pilot. The two men despised one another, and Tonya was Boyington’s revenge. The novel is a thinly disguised and highly improbable account of the “Flying Sharks” in Chinese service. Great literature it’s not, but those who know something about the AVG will have a lark matching his characters with their real-life counterparts. 

This is a well-written book about one of America's most famous fighter aces, a Flying Tiger. Flying Tiger is an endearment for the American Volunteer Group—a group of American pilots who fought the Japanese in WWII in China and changed the course of Chinese history through unparalleled valor.

As an author of three historical novels about the Flying Tigers, I read almost all the books on this subject.“Tex” Hill: Flying Tiger touched me the most. It inspired me to write my novels. Danny Hardy, an American pilot, a Flying Tiger, was created because of my love and admiration for Tex Hill, a man of courage and integrity, a true American hero.

Bertil Lintner’s many books on Myanmar were essential background material for me when I lived there doing my own research on the country’s never-ending civil war. Land of Jade is a vivid and insightful study of Myanmar’s conflicts, and my favorite of his works. In 1985, he struck out to walk on foot from India, across northern Myanmar (then Burma), and eventually into southwestern China. The journey was the first (and likely only) time a journalist would undertake such an arduous, dangerous, and unforgettable trek.

His hosts along the way were a bewildering array of rebel groups at war against Myanmar’s despotic authoritarian regime. Accompanying Lintner on the journey was his pregnant wife Hseng Noung, whose photographs of Myanmar’s rugged northern terrain further enhance this incredible travelogue. 

In my bookshelf alone I count eight unit histories of the American Volunteer Group, the storied band of American pilots and technicians who fought for China in the first seven months of America’s involvement in World War II. I’m sure there are more. But when I need to check a fact about the AVG, the first book I turn to is Daniel Ford’s 1991 work. Ford was the first author to research Japanese sources to tell the full story of the Flying Tigers, and for that he was roundly criticized by AVG veterans who felt he had denigrated them by revealing that Japanese records did not support all of the AVG claims of combat success. In my view, however, the important contribution of the AVG was not the number of enemy planes its pilots did or didn’t shoot down but instead was the morale boost its successes gave to an… show more.

This is a ground-breaking book because in telling the extraordinary story of the Indian Army during the Second World War, Professor Raghavan rightly places it firmly at the center of the great victories the Allies achieved over the Japanese in 1945. This book traces the transformation of the Indian Army from a largely domestically focused constabulary of 200,000 in 1939 to a victorious all-arms combat force of well over 2 million men and women in 1945. This army for the first time reflected India as a whole, rather than the pre-war Indian Army which recruited selectively from across India. 

This story, written in 1949, describes the escape of a small group of British and Burmese civilians from the invading Japanese during WW2 and seems perfect material for one of those British 1950s black and white films, showing the British temperament when facing total war – courage, resilience, snobbery, the perpetuation of the class system and petty rivalries even with the threat of a demanding landscape, and a brutal enemy closing in on them. As far as I know it never made the silver screen but you can have fun slotting actors of the time into the different characters.

The writer captures the vivid Burmese country, its taste and smell, its appalling heat and humidity from his own personal experiences and involves the reader in the hopes and fears of the escapees, urging them all on to safety. But who will make it? Who deserves to make it? Who doesn’t?… show more.

This is the latest book in Boczar’s Eric Ketch series, which follows the adventures of an American international man of mystery across Hong Kong, Macao, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Burma, in the pursuit of rubies, exotic women, and ruthless assassins.

Boczar himself knows the region very well, having lived in Hong Kong for over three decades, and worked as a war correspondent, on the porous borders of the golden triangle and in Lebanon during the civil war.

The descriptions, whether of cities, weapons, smugglers, or guerilla fighters, all feel true, and Boczar knows only too well how to tell a convincing and edge-of-your-seat story that is difficult to put down.