The Flying Tigers were American pilots who volunteered to fly for China before the United States had even entered the Second World War, operating from bases in western China under the command of Claire Chennault. This episode covers their six months of combat from December 1941 to June 1942, the stretch in which they provided nearly the only air defense China had against Japanese bombers. Archival footage, photographs of the shark-mouthed P-40 fighters, and historian interviews trace how a scattered group of mercenary flyers became one of the more mythologized units of the Pacific war, and the film weighs the claim that their presence in the region factored into Japan's decision to strike Pearl Harbor. It sets the unit's small numbers against the outsized reputation, asking how much of the Flying Tigers story is documented fact and how much is wartime propaganda that outlived the war itself. Part two of a four-part series, it fills in a stretch of the campaign usually reduced to a footnote in broader Pacific War accounts.