President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been in office for a little more than a year, and facing the Depression, the last thing he wanted was to hurt the profitable trade with Japan. American citizens, Hornbeck argued, should be ordered to stop aiding China’s military. Sales of military hardware should be halted, too. China, Hornbeck wrote, should “stand on its own feet.” With that, America’s flyboys left China, Colonel Jouett’s mission ended, and even Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s American pilot had to return home.
