Blood ties

The year was 1944 and the war had already claimed millions of lives. As a member of the US Army Air Corps' Flying Tigers, Chester Denney was charged with escorting B-25 bombers on a raid over Japanese-occupied Hong Kong.

But the American pilot's first mission out of his base in Guilin, in Guangxi, also threatened to be his last, when enemy fire hit his P-40 aircraft. With fuel pouring from his plane and a Japanese fighter on his tail, Denney knew his time was running out. And if he was shot down in hostile territory, the consequences would be grim. But he was saved by local resistance fighters operating under a Kuomintang general named Mo Xiong.

More than six decades later, the 86-year-old former pilot has finally had the chance to convey his gratitude to his rescuers following a 10-year quest by the family of General Mo to track him down.

At an extraordinary get-together at his home in Florida just over a week ago, Denney met the general's son, Mo Sanqiu, 84, who travelled from his home in Guangzhou to meet the man his father helped to rescue.

'General Mo saved my life,' says Denney, leafing through black and white photographs of the general in a scrapbook. 'I never thought I would get to meet his family all this time later.'

Denney joined the US Army Air Corps in 1943 and was posted to China the following year. There he flew under the command of US general Claire Chennault, who founded the elite Flying Tigers, an all-volunteer squadron of US pilots contracted to help China fight the Japanese before the US officially entered the war. The Flying Tigers guarded the port of Rangoon (now Yangon) and the Burma Road, through which foreign supplies for Chinese forces were sent, and other locations vital to the Chinese. In 1942, they were absorbed into the US Army's 23rd Fighter Group, to which Denney was assigned at the age of 23.