The exhibition is a salute to the American airmen and other soldiers who fought alongside the Chinese against Japanese invaders during the Second World War and to the Chinese who risked their lives to help and rescue the Americans.

"Morgan Johnson is not able to come, and how much I want to meet him again," said Luo, 76, a farmer from Shanyang Township of Yongping County in Southwest China's Yunnan Province.

Luo remembers Johnson as a young and tall American pilot who lay wounded on the ground, tangled in his parachute.

The day was August 4, 1945. "I heard people shouting about an American fighter plane catching fire in the sky and that the flyers bailed out," Luo recalled.

He and other villagers rushed to the crash site and found Johnson, along with his co-pilot Robert D. Roller and radio-operator John T. Carroll. They were on a Hump Airlift mission.

"They were Americans and they were our friends, we told each other," Luo said.

The villagers immediately set out to retrieve the American airmen and take them to the Chinese base.

This required a 50-kilometre trek in a mountainous area and the villagers had to take turns carrying Johnson and Roller, who had been wounded during the bailout and who were both much bigger than young Luo and the other villagers.

"We fed them corn or rice porridge," Luo said.

Two days passed before they safely arrived at the base.

For Luo and the villagers, Johnson and the other airmen were American "Flying Tigers" who came to help the Chinese fight the Japanese invaders, even though Johnson would have argued that he was with the 14th US Air Force.

Whatever Morgan Johnson called his unit, the Americans' help in China's struggle against Japanese aggression began with General Claire Lee Chennault, according to Anna C. Chennault, a Chinese reporter who married General Chennault in 1947.

Flying Tigers

General Claire Lee Chennault was in China training young Chinese pilots when Japan launched its all-out invasion in 1937.

"He was the one who recognized that we (the Americans) had to fight the Japanese," said Madam Chennault, whose Chinese name is Chen Xiangmei. "The China Theatre had been forgotten and was considered not so important."

But in 1941, General Chennault won permission from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to recruit a volunteer force of 100 pilots from the American army, navy and marine corps to fly for China and to defend the Burma (Myanmar) Road, according to Jeff Greene, executive director of the Sino-American Aviation Heritage Foundation.

These American service people, who formed the American Volunteers' Group (AVG), were to help defend the Burma Road, China's vital supply link to the outside world, protect Chinese cities in unoccupied south and central China, and allow time for China's own air force to be properly trained and equipped.

The AVG was reconstituted as the foundation of the US Army Air Force's China Air Task Force on July 4, 1942, and General Chennault returned to active service.

The volunteers, along with the other American airmen, joined hands with their Chinese colleagues. In fighting the Japanese Air Force and in the Hump Airlift operation, thousands of American and Chinese airmen lost their young lives. Over two-thirds of them were American.

"These courageous people, the Americans and Chinese alike, joined hands to fight aggression, helped bring the war to an end and worked for peace. We need to honour them and remember them," Madam Chennault said.

Generous Help

Meanwhile, the Chinese people, like Luo Guangfu, lent generous help to the Americans.

Navigator Tom Griffin, 87, and a number of other crew members with the group of airlift pilots known as the Doolittle Raiders, parachuted from their crippled planes and found themselves deep in the mountains of Jiangxi Province in East China.

"It took us a week to get together in a little village," Griffin recalled.

The villagers and guerrillas built a stretcher for the wounded and it took them two days to lead Griffin, the wounded and others to the nearest road.

"We received wonderful treatment from the Chinese but it turned out to be a terrible price they had to pay. They paid with their lives, as the Japanese wiped out the whole village when they learned that the villagers gave help to the US pilots," Griffin said.

From May 15 to mid-August in 1942, the Japanese waged the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Campaign. In the towns of Changtai and Qinghu in Jiangshan County, East China's Zhejiang Province, where American airmen had bailed out, 27 villagers were killed and their houses were burned down.

"But the Chinese never stopped helping American pilots who landed in China's Japanese-occupied territory," General Chennault wrote in his memoir. And "they never complained."

"I was rescued twice by the Chinese," said Mel McMullen, an air crewman with a bomb group in Yunnan at that time.

Through such experiences, the bonds of friendship were formed.

In 1996, when news reached Johnson that the wreckage of a C-53 was found in Yunnan, he wrote a letter to Ge Shuya, known for his research into the history of the Second World War in Yunnan.

"I have been missing Shanyang and the kind people in the village for over 50 years," Johnson wrote. "I am eager to see the village and the bridge where we left Shanyang."

With Ge's help, Johnson was able to send a C-46 model plane to Luo Guangfu and the villagers in Shanyang as a sign of his gratitude to them for having saved his life.

Although Luo didn't get a chance to meet with Johnson during his week-long stay in the United States, the fond memory lingers.

(China Daily October 22, 2002)