Hunter’s Fountain
Some 85 years ago this week, the 10,000-ton Dutch Java-Pacific Lijn/VNS passenger steamer SS Jaegersfontaine pulled out of San Francisco on 10 July and, steaming West across a wide and nervous ocean, arrived a little over 8,000 miles away at Rangoon in British Burma on the 28th, making it in a handy 18-knot average.
Built in 1934 at Nederlandsche Scheepsbouw Mij NV, Amsterdam, Jagersfontein means “Hunter’s fountain.” She was a lucky ship, but it was a quirky kind of luck.
Among the accumulated cargo and passengers aboard Jagersfontein on her July 1941 trip to Rangoon were 300 young American men, most slim with sharp eyes and short hair, all civilian employees of the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, or CAMCO. Among them were 99 pilots and 201 assorted ground crewmen and support personnel. Nine of the latter were Chinese-American mechanics specifically recruited from New York and San Francisco’s Chinatowns and rushed through a quick school at Allison Engine Works in Indianapolis on one particular powerplant: Allison’s liquid-cooled V-1710-33 twelve-cylinder V-type 1,040 hp piston engine.
You know, the one in the P-40B Warhawk/Tomahawk IIA
Soon after making Burma, Claire Chennault’s 1st American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers, was becoming the stuff of legend.
Claire Chennault Flying Tiger P-40 Artist Darrell Lum USAF DF-SC-84-04112
However, as it is with every irregular group on the fringes of institutionalized military logic, they soon were disbanded and absorbed by the regulars, and on 4 July 1942 the crumbs that were left became the USAAF’s 14th Air Force’s brand new 23rd Fighter Group, which, all these years later, is still around as part of the now USAF.
Based at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, they have flown the A-10 Warthog since 1992, and recently painted one of their birds in the livery of White 48, the Panda Squadron P-40B flown by Army Air Corps Brig. Gen. David Lee “Tex” Hill, an original Flying Tiger (originally a Naval Aviator) who rolled over to the 23rd as a major in 1942 and would finish WWII with 18.25 confirmed victories, 12.25 of those carried over from the AVG.
The A-10C includes the iconic shark teeth nose art and a literal flying tiger over olive drab, a big departure from the rest of the 23rd’s gray-on-gray Compass Ghost schemes.
A heritage A-10C Thunderbolt II is positioned on the flight line at Moody Air Force Base, Ga., April 28, 2026. The aircraft now displays the distinctive Flying Tigers-inspired paint scheme applied by airmen assigned to the 23rd Maintenance Squadron. (Air Force Senior Airman Savannah Carpenter)
A heritage A-10C Thunderbolt II is positioned on the flight line at Moody Air Force Base, Ga., April 28, 2026. The aircraft now displays the distinctive Flying Tigers-inspired paint scheme applied by airmen assigned to the 23rd Maintenance Squadron. (Air Force Senior Airman Savannah Carpenter)
Ever heard a for real strafing run from a P-40?
In related news, the Soaring by the Sea Foundation jumped through a year’s worth of FAA and ATF hoops required to re-install six working M2 .50 cal machine guns into a restored Curtiss P-40N Warhawk in Flying Tigers’ Adam & Eve Squadron livery and, well, did the thing with live ammo, expending approximately 7,000 rounds across ground testing and two days of airborne firing while under the control of Lt. Col. Ray “Hollywood” Fowler, an F-16 pilot with combat tours in the sandbox.
You better believe there is video.
