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14th Naval Unit | 14th AAF | 4 theater-made insignia


walika
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14th Naval Unit | 14th AAF

 

An underlying American priority as the US entered WWII in the Pacific was the driving, gripping, insatiable need for intelligence on the Japanese and an arguably more important need for current weather information for the fleet at war in the Pacific. Most weather affecting the fleet came from China, but as the war started the farthest west the US had a weather station was Hawaii.

At the war’s beginning the intelligence Claire E. Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force received was inadequate. “Stilwell exhibited a striking lack of interest in the intelligence problems of the China sector of his command”, Chennault wrote in his memoir. By Chennault’s account, Stilwell was entirely satisfied with the intelligence the Chinese provided, although it was outdated, inaccurate, and useless to the bombers Chennault commanded. But, worse than his lack of interest, “Stilwell specifically prohibited the Fourteenth from any attempts to gather intelligence. Since the Fourteenth Air Force was the only American combat organization in China and needed fresh and accurate intelligence… I was again faced with the choice of obeying Stilwell’s orders literally…or finding some other method of getting the information so essential to our operations.”

The intelligence Chennault had to depend on came from the Chinese War Ministry via Stilwell’s headquarters in Chungking. By the time it reached the Fourteenth, the information was “third hand… generally three to six weeks old,” and useless for targeting the bombers. Another Chinese intelligence source that Chennault had rejected was the Chinese Secret Service, because its notorious KMT secret police was engaged in a ruthless manhunt for Communists which would prohibit Chennault’s intelligence and rescue relations with Communist armies in the field.

Cooperation between Miles and Chennault’s air force began October 1942 with the establishment of a liaison group that eventually became known as the 14th Naval Unit. This liaison group of SACO provided weather reports and intelligence on Japanese targets through radio interception, photograph interpretation, and field reports.

The Shipping Center of the 14th Naval Unit gathered information on the routes, cargoes, and sailing dates of Japanese ships for the Fourteenth Air Force to bomb. The unit’s homemade radio direction-finders also uncovered Japanese-recruited agents who were reporting the flight paths of Fourteenth Air Force planes from Kunming, and it coordinated efforts with Chinese guerrillas to rescue downed aircrew.

What was soon called the “14th Naval Unit” grew steadily — twenty men the first year and ninety-eight the second — doing jobs that included photo-intelligence (in conjunction with the Army’s 18th Photo-Interpretation Unit); planning the delivery of and charting minefields; providing radio intelligence, air combat intelligence, and air technical intelligence; and rescuing downed or imprisoned flyers. The last-mentioned operation was done with the Chinese under the auspices of the Navy SACO teams.

Some of the information that Miles’s people developed from this working arrangement, they passed to Navy agencies to support submarine attacks on Japanese shipping and the battles incident to the Allied campaign in the Philippines. In October 1943, a Navy-AAF mining raid (Miles’s mine experts were aboard the bombers) closed Haiphong harbor by sinking a fleeing ship in the entrance channel. The harbor remained at least partially closed for the remainder of the war.

In describing this activity, Miles provided the symbolism of the 14TH Naval Unit’s unique insigne: “Called Shipping News . . . we sent out mimeographed copies under a snappy cover that bore the Naval Unit’s new insignia which combined Chennault’s Flying Tiger with a twelve-pointed Chinese star and the Navy’s fouled anchor. The design was the same as the one used by SACO Headquarters except this one used the Flying Tiger instead of SACO’s ‘What-the-Hell?’ pennant. We were never actually given permission to wear a shoulder patch, but the SeaBees had one and Captain Jeff Metzel finally wrote that official permission seemed hard to get, so why didn’t we just go ahead and wear this one of ours?”

And here it is . . .

14th Naval Unit jacket patch | hand-painted on leather

14th%20Naval%20Unit%20-4c500.jpg

 

 

14th Naval Unit | on pilot scarf | Chinese hand-embroidery on silk

 

14th%20Naval%20Unit%20-3c500.JPG

 


14th Naval Unit jacket patch | Chinese hand embroidery on silk

14th%20Naval%20Unit%20-1c500.jpg

 

 

14th Naval Unit jacket patch | Chinese hand embroidery on silk

14th%20Naval%20Unit%20-2c500.jpg

 

 

 

Related posts:

 

Naval Group China

Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO)

 

 

Additional Reading:

 

Breithaupt, Rick. 14th Naval Unit of the Fourteenth Air Force SACO and Naval Group China. The Trading Post. Jul-Sep 2018 pp 51-54.
Breithaupt, Rick. Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) and Naval Group China. The Trading Post. Oct-Dec 2018. pp 53-58.
Breithaupt, Rick. Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) and Naval Group China. The Trading Post. Jan-Mar 2019. pp 53-56.

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