On a late November evening in 1936, Brad Harper, and three other airmail pilots, depart the Newark, NJ airport with contaminated fuel. Three of them crash, and two are killed. In early December 1940, Brad Harper, now a member of a jazz group, embarks on a steamship in Philadelphia for a two week working cruise, promising his family to be home for Christmas. When the ship docks in San Francisco, he unexpectedly encounters his uncle Jack, who is traveling to China to help operate a flying school. Jack tries to entice Brad into joining him, but Brad declines. However, while disembarking the ship, he meets a young doctor, Dorothy Lee Devereux (Dolly) and, like Jack, she is also traveling to the orient. It's love at first sight for both and Brad follows her to China. As luck would have it, both she and Jack are traveling to the same city. Arriving in Kunming, Brad's airmail experience puts him in good stead at the flying school and he soon becomes a flight instructor while Dolly works at Kunming General Hospital. With war looming, he is reluctantly drawn into Clare Chennault's Flying Tigers and becomes a squadron commander. As the war unfolds, he flies several missions against the Japanese, extracts vengeance when he murders a treacherous Chinese colonel, is involved in a midair collision, and faces courts-martial for a mercy killing. Soon after, he and Dolly marry, he is injured and they return home with an adopted daughter. Recovered, he is assigned to deliver aircraft to operational squadrons. On one such trip to England, he is Shanghaied into the Eight Air Force and detailed to a fighter squadron. On one mission he so distinguishes himself, he comes to the attention of General Doolittle, and is awarded a very high honor. Reluctant to return home, he convinces General Doolittle to allow him to remain in theater and is given positions of increasing responsibility. Meanwhile, his wife remains with his family in a small sea shore town to practice medicine. When the underworld attempts to take over the fishing industry, she is raped by gangsters. Before long an opportunity presents itself, and she extracts a brutal revenge. Discovered to have euthanized a patient, she finds others share her values. Returning home at war's end, circumstances have Brad departing the Newark, NJ airport in a P-51 fighter with no parachute. The plane, having been serviced from an old gas truck, has been contaminated.