Retired Air National Guard Brig. Gen. David Lee "Tex" Hill, a renowned leader of the Flying Tigers, a small volunteer force recruited to defend China in the early years of World War II, died Thursday afternoon at his home in Terrell Hills.
Hill, 92, died of congestive heart failure. His wife, Mazie, and his two surviving children, Shannon Hill Schaupp and Loma Skinner, both of South Carolina, were at his bedside. Before he died, his wife told him, "You're free to go."
"Daddy made a safe landing at 5 o'clock," said Shannon Schaupp, who is 58.
Services have not been set, but Hill will be buried next week at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.
"We're going to miss him a lot, and he's definitely in a better place now," said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Reagan Schaupp, Hill's grandson. "He was a hero to us and certainly to a lot of people."
Hill was "a giant figure in heroic aviation," said T.R. Fehrenbach, author of "This Kind of War," a history of the Korean conflict. "We don't have heroes in aviation anymore. We don't have people who fly by the seat of their pants in rickety airplanes. They go up in great machines that do much of the work."
Gov. Rick Perry, in a statement, called Hill a "genuine American hero and a Texan of the highest caliber.
"Whether he was flying from the decks of a carrier as a naval aviator, fighting with the legendary Flying Tigers of the American Volunteer Group, winning a Distinguished Service Cross, or commanding the first jet unit in the Army Air Forces, he always led from the front," Perry said.
Made up of volunteers flying Curtiss P-40 fighters, the Flying Tigers first tangled with Japanese pilots about two weeks after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. They had flown as U.S. military aviators until being secretly recruited to fight as mercenaries over China.
The Flying Tigers came to Asia carrying passports that identified them as farmers, traders, vaudeville entertainers and missionaries. Some of the real missionaries on board their Java-bound ocean liner, the Bloemfontein, sang hymns each morning as the pilots slept off their hangovers. The pilots retaliated each night by playing swing music on a phonograph.
Hill's passport said he was a Texas rancher but the Japanese weren't fooled. Radio Tokyo reported that "American bandits" were off to China and vowed to sink the ship before they made landfall, according to the book "'Tex' Hill: Flying Tiger," co-written by Hill and Schaupp, his grandson.
"They were the only air units of the Allies, British, Dutch or Americans who came out ahead against the Japanese air force on almost every occasion they met," said Daniel Ford, author of "Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942." "It was a legend that people could hold on to ... that and the Doolittle raid on Tokyo were bright spots in a very dark time."
More important, Ford said in his book, the Flying Tigers "provided heroes at a time when we needed heroes as never before in our history, and never since."
"He's been a role model for a whole lot of fighter pilots," said famed flier Chuck Yeager, a retired Air Force one-star general. "He was in the right place and the right time, and also was able to take advantage of the situation."
A humble but direct and sometimes blunt man, Hill was the proverbial preacher's son who closed the bar "and held (his liquor) better than anyone I've ever seen, too," Schaupp said. Deeply loyal to his comrades in arms, Hill defied orders to make pilots fly who had logged more than 100 missions in China . He also held great affection for his ground crews, who worked long hours in difficult conditions and often were forced to scrounge for spare parts.
In a few years, Hill logged more than 3,500hours in the air, including 150 combat missions over Burma, Indochina and China. He was a Navy dive-bomber and torpedo plane pilot when recruited in early 1941 to join Claire Chennault's First American Volunteer Group.
Because America wasn't yet at war and the mission to keep China and the Burma Road safe from Japanese attack was covert, the volunteers had to resign their commissions and sign a contract with Central Aircraft Manufacturing Co. in China.
Hill served as flight leader and then squadron leader of the 2nd Squadron, the Panda Bears, until the Flying Tigers were disbanded in July 1942.In seven months with the squadron, the young Texan, described by Ford as a "raw-boned, shambling dispenser of one-liners that could be side-splittingly funny," shot down a dozen enemy planes.
Flying a single-engine Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter, Hill recorded his first aerial victory on Jan. 3, 1942, by shooting down two Japanese fighters over their base in Thailand.
"We went in string," Hill told Air Force Magazine in 2002. "The first thing I knew was there were more than three of us in that pattern. Then this guy came in between me and Jim Howard and got on his tail. I pulled up behind him; I was so damn excited I didn't even think about looking at those damn gun sights. Just flew right up on his tail and hosed the tracers on to him. He just flat blew up."
With 12.25 victories, Hill became the second highest-ranking ace in the Flying Tigers. They were the first Americans to defeat the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, and in time racked up a 15-to-1 kill ratio .
"They had a very big impact on both American and Chinese morale," Fehrenbach said. "Up to the time they got there, the Japanese air force could just go bomb at will, anywhere. ."
Returning to the United States in late 1942, he was given command of the Proving Ground Group at Eglin Field in Florida's panhandle. Two weeks after taking the job, Hill flew a P-40 to Victoria to see his parents.
While his brother, Sam, gave a sermon at First Presbyterian Church, he noticed Mazie Sale sitting across from him.
"I have to meet that girl!" he told his brother that night.
Sale had read of Hill's exploits in Time magazine and had the same reaction upon meeting him at her home.
"If he asked me to marry him right now," she thought, "I'd say yes."
Thirteen days later they were married.
Hill returned to China in October 1943 to lead the 23rd Fighter Group. Before he returned to the United States, he scored six more aerial victories, becoming a triple ace with 18.25 confirmed kills. Home again in 1944, he was named to command the 412th Fighter Group, the U.S. Army Air Forces' first operational jet fighter group.
Hill left active duty in 1946 and took up ranching in Mountain Home. But at the behest of Gov. Coke Stevenson, Hill joined the newly formed Texas Air National Guard and assumed command of the 58th Fighter Wing.
At 31, he was the youngest one-star general in the Guard's history. In 1947, he resigned his commission to travel to Africa to trap gorillas for the 1949 movie "Mighty Joe Young."
Hill met actor John Wayne on a visit to Hollywood around that time. Wayne told Hill he'd based his character in the 1942 movie "The Flying Tigers" on him. The Duke became a lifelong buddy, making occasional hunting, fishing and golf expeditions with him in California.
"'He was the most real person he had ever known in his life,'" Mazie Hill, 81, quoted Wayne as saying.
In two combat tours in China, Hill received more than 20 medals. His decorations include the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross.The Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor, was given to Hill at a ceremony in San Antonio in 2002.
The youngest of four children of missionary parents, the Rev. Pierre Bernard Hill, a Presbyterian minister, and wife Ella, Hill was born in Korea, on July 13, 1915. They returned to the United States in 1916, settling in Virginia for a while, and then moved to Louisville, Ky., where Pierre Hill hoped to work.
Offered the post of pastor at First Presbyterian Church in San Antonio, the city's oldest Protestant church, in 1921, the Hill family moved again.
Bent on a military career, Hill took a battery of tests in 1938 at Randolph Field for the Army Air Corps, but failed to qualify. Hill never learned why, but it didn't matter. He tried for the Navy's aviation program and passed.
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