by Robert Lyman
PRIVATE WILLIAM SCHRANDT USAAF, headquarters, Services of Supply, Delhi.
ERIC SEVAREID Sevareid was one of a group of elite war correspondents hired by pioneering CBS news journalist Edward Murrow at the outset of the war in Europe. He was the first to report the fall of Paris when it was captured by the Germans in 1940.
CORPORAL LLOYD J. SHERRILL USAAF, Air Transport Command.
SERGEANT FRANCIS W. SIGNER USAAF, Air Transport Command.
WILLIAM (“BILL”) T. STANTON A representative in the CBI theater of the Board of Economic Warfare, which collected and analyzed economic information about the enemy. A banker in Hong Kong before the war, he was in his forties at the time of the crash.
COLONEL WANG PAE CHAE Chinese Army.
CORPORAL STANLEY WATERBURY USAAF, Air Transport Command.
TECHNICAL SERGEANT EVAN WILDER USAAF, headquarters, Twelfth Air Force.
Persons of the Kuomintang
CHIANG KAI-SHEK The Kuomintang warlord who effectively governed the Republic of China beginning in 1928 (succeeding Sun Yat-sen) and led its military endeavors against both Japan and the Communist Party under Mao Zedong.
MADAME KAI-SHEK Soong Mei-ling, the American-educated wife of Chiang Kai-shek.
GENERAL DAI (TAI) LI The Kuomintang’s secretive spy chief.
T. V. SOONG The Harvard-educated brother of Madame Kai-shek.
Persons of the US Government and Military
BRIGADIER GENERAL EDWARD ALEXANDER Alexander, Stilwell’s air commander, was appointed head of the Air Transport Command, based at Chabua, in December 1942.
MAJOR GENERAL CLAIRE LEE CHENNAULT Born in 1893, Chennault was a military pilot who, retiring from the US Army in 1937, began to work as an aviation adviser and trainer in China. He started in early 1941 with funding and control by the US government. He commanded the First American Volunteer Group (known as the Flying Tigers) before being given command of the US Army Air Forces in the CBI. He feuded constantly with General Joseph Stilwell and helped Chiang Kai-shek to convince FDR to remove Stilwell in 1944.
MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM (“WILD BILL”) DONOVAN A World War I soldier of some repute, postwar lawyer, and founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, during 1942–1946.
CAPTAIN MILTON “MARY” MILES USN US Navy; the de facto commander of SACO and deputy to Dai Li.
GENERAL “VINEGAR JOE” STILWELL General Marshall’s representative to Chiang Kai-shek, to which post he was appointed in January 1942. He was also Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff and, in due course, the deputy supreme allied commander of the South East Asia Command (SEAC).
Persons of the US Rescue Group
STAFF SERGEANT JOHN LEE DECHAINE A member of the air warning scheme in the Naga Hills overlooking the Chindwin farther south (100 miles southeast of Kohima), DeChaine marched from Mokokchung with the rescue party led by Philip Adams in 1943.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL DON FLICKINGER The thirty-six-year-old ATC wing surgeon who parachuted into Pangsha after the crash to tend to Oswalt’s injuries. He had been duty medical officer at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941.
CAPTAIN GEORGE E. KATZMAN One of the two pilots of the Chabua-based C-47 that found the wreckage of Flight 12420 and provided immediate support to the survivors. Katzman was an experienced rescue pilot, having conducted dozens of searches for downed aircraft in the region since late 1942.
COLONEL RICHARD KNIGHT The ATC wing operations officer who used Oswalt’s radio signals to determine the approximate site of the crash, enabling Hugh Wild to find the downed aircraft.
FIRST LIEUTENANT ANDREW “BUDDY” LABONTE Leader of the Air Warning Station, LaBonte—a radio operator—marched from Mokokchung with the rescue party led by Philip Adams in 1943. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his part in the rescue.
MAJOR ST. CLAIR MCKELWAY The ATC wing intelligence officer based at Chabua, McKelway was a well-known journalist for the New Yorker who knew Sevareid well. It was he who contacted Philip Adams at the first news of the air crash and warned the survivors of the dangers they faced from the Nagas.
CORPORAL WILLIAM G. MCKENZIE A member of the rescue team who parachuted into Pangsha with Don Flickinger after the crash.
SERGEANT RICHARD PASSEY A member of the rescue team who parachuted into Pangsha with Don Flickinger after the crash. A fine athlete, he nearly defeated the Pangsha Nagas at their own game in a spear-throwing contest.
CAPTAIN JOHN (“BLACKIE”) PORTER Porter set up a nascent air-rescue team at Chabua after the loss of Flight 12420. After a very successful series of rescues, he was killed on December 10, 1943, when his B-25 and another rescue plane were lost to enemy action.
CAPTAIN HUGH ELDON WILD One of the two pilots of the Chabua-based C-47 that found the wreckage of Flight 12420 and provided immediate support to the survivors.
Persons of the Nagas
CHINGMAK (OF CHINGMEI) Gaonbura of the Chang village of Chingmei and great friend of Philip Mills. His two sons were Sangbah and Tangbang. Mills had a photograph of Chingmak at Mokokchung as early as 1920, which demonstrated the longevity of their friendship.
EMLONG (OF MOKOKCHUNG) A gaonbura and noted tiger hunter who accompanied the 1936 expedition and acted as Philip Adams’s factotum during the 1943 rescue.
MATCHE (OF YIMPANG) A Kalyo-Kengyu from Yimpang, ally of Pangsha, who fled to Chingmei in 1936 for fear of his life after falling afoul of his erstwhile comrades. Chingmak urged that he provide information to the British to allow Pangsha and its allies to be punished for their constant raiding, and he became Mills and Williams’s chief scout. Fürer-Haimendorf believed that without Matche, success against Pangsha would have been impossible.
MONGSEN (OF PANGSHA) A famous warrior and leader of one of Pangsha’s three khels who’d taken fourteen heads in the recent sacking of Saochu village, Mongsen led the counterattack against Major Williams at Wenshoyl on November 28, 1936, attacking repeatedly with spears against the disciplined Lee-Enfield fire of the Assam Rifles despite suffering from a badly burned foot. He negotiated a settlement with Mills at Chingmei a few days after this deadly skirmish. The survivors of Flight 12420 in 1943 called him “Moon-face” and recorded his calm acceptance of their presence in his village. Colonel Flickinger saved his baby’s life by giving him antibiotics for an abscess that would otherwise have killed the child.
MONGU (OF PANGSHA) A notorious local bully and slaver, he and Mongsen were the two headmen of Pangsha in 1936.
NATCHE (AO GAONBURA) A noted gaonbura who accompanied the 1936 expedition. Well known for his skill at languages, he acted as an elder statesman and interpreter for Philip Mills.
SANGBAH (OF CHINGMEI) Chingmak’s son and friend of Philip Mills, Sangbah attended school in Mokokchung. He accompanied Mills and Williams in the 1936 attack on Pangsha. In 1943 he provided immediate protection for the survivors of Flight 12420 by positioning himself with them in Pangsha and thus asserting vicarious British protection over them.
SANTING (OF PANGSHA) One of Pangsha’s most famous warriors, he and Mongsen led the Pangsha raid against Saochu, the two men rivaling each other in the taking of heads. Santing was killed by rifle fire from British sepoys during the battle of Wenshoyl on November 28, 1936.
TANGBANG (OF CHINGMEI) Chingmak’s son and Sangbah’s brother, who arranged the unseen Chingmei “security detail” for the survivors at Pangsha, placing his warriors in the hills around Pangsha as protection, as much from the predatory Nagas as from the Japanese. Tangbang wore a leopard skin, had seventeen heads to his credit, and clearly impressed the survivors of Flight 12420 by demonstrating his prowess with the cross-bow. He too had accompanied his father and brother into battle with Mills and Williams on November 27–28, 1936, against their mortal enemies at Pangsha during the first punitive expedition.
WANG-DO (OF CHINGMEI) A khel leader from Chingmei and friend of Sangbah and Tangbang who assisted in the protection of the survivors in 1943. Sevareid believed
that Wang-do had supplanted Chingmak as gaonbura of Chingmei.
1
“DUMBASTAPUR”
Harry Neveu looked up at the vast silver bird above him. It was dawn on Monday, August 2, 1943. The ramshackle US Army Air Forces (USAAF) air base at Chabua in northeastern India prepared for another busy day of activity. About eighty aircraft of various types, including C-47 Skytrains (nicknamed “Gooney Bird”), C-87 Liberators, C-54 Skymasters, B-25 Mitchells, and new C-46 Commandos, crowded the dirty concrete apron. Aircraft of the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) mixed with those of the USAAF and a few of the Royal Air Force (RAF), although for the most part the CNAC and RAF operated from Dinjan, a few miles farther up the Brahmaputra Valley. As the preflight bustle readied the Curtiss-Wright “Commando” transport, the young pilot walked methodically around the huge plane, checking that everything was in order before climbing into the hold. Making his way forward, Flight Officer Harry Neveu, pilot that morning of Air Transport Command (ATC) Flight 12420, adjusted his parachute before carefully placing it just behind the cockpit. This was where the crew always placed parachutes, ready to be grabbed if they were needed.
Following flying training in America, the draft for India had put the twenty-year-old as far from Coleman, Wisconsin, as he could imagine. Early morning at Chabua was always cold, but the fur-lined flying jacket warmed him as he surveyed his checklist. He would need the jacket when he was flying at 15,000 feet later in the day on his way to China. The only way to combat the cold was layering: “Underwear, wool work pants and shirt, issue sweater, zippered flight coverall and leather A-2 flight jacket,” recalled Hump veteran Peyton Walmsley, “with the ‘blood chit’ sewn on the back, later transferred inside, left side.” A blood chit was a square piece of cloth on which was printed the nationalist flag of the Republic of China together with, in Mandarin Chinese characters, promises of a reward for downed air crew to proffer to anyone who found them and kept them alive.
Neveu, who had flown the route several times, worked his way through the checklist automatically—crossover valve (down), emergency brake valve (down), wing flaps (up), glider release (down), tail wheel (locked)—on and on they went. The checks seemed endless. There were thirty-one in all before he was allowed to start the C-46’s twin engines. Beside him copilot First Lieutenant Charles Felix tested the ailerons, throttle, and steering yoke while radio operator Sergeant Walter Oswalt worked the frequencies and established contact with Chabua tower.
Across the vast concrete taxiway ground crew examined the engine cowlings, oil and fuel caps, propellers, and external fittings of scores of C-46’s—the USAAF’s most modern, but insufficiently tested, transport aircraft. Rows of them stretched out beside the apron, awaiting duty in the dangerous skies of the Assam-to-Yunnan air-ferry route, known to everyone as the “Hump.”
The “deuce-and-a-half” truck raised a dusty wake as it ferried the C-46’s passengers from their canvas billets a mile away. The air crew were billeted in dormitories built of the ubiquitous bamboo, with walls made of woven nipa mats and a roof constructed from bamboo fronds. The floors were made of dirt. Showering took place quite satisfactorily underneath a fifty-five-gallon drum sitting atop a bamboo tower and heated by a wood-burning stove. They had breakfasted on fried eggs flown in on planes returning from China along with fried potatoes, ketchup, and coffee.
Today was unusual. They rarely carried passengers nowadays: “Most loads to China were gasoline only,” recalled Walmsley. “Fifty-five gallon drums, standing on end in a row starboard side each lashed with 3/8 inch sisal [rope] to ring bolts recessed in the floor. Boarding inspection verified the manifest, satisfactory tie-down and absence of leaks or vapor. ‘Leakers’ were removed. Then we queued for takeoff, the first plane down the strip, west to east, as soon as it was light enough to ‘recognize’ the runway.”
Separated by piles of luggage and parachutes, the two rows of men in the truck remained lost in thought. It was too noisy, and too early, to talk anyway. The truck backed up to the fuselage, and each man stood up, collected his hand gear, and stepped directly into the belly of the plane, with Staff Sergeant Ned Miller, from Ottumwa, Iowa, directing them to their seats. Ground staff chucked the eighteen passenger parachutes into the craft, and Miller laid them between the rows of aluminum seats running along each side of the fuselage. Calling for the passengers’ attention, the forty-year-old crew chief demonstrated how to don a parachute. The passengers watched him, but hardly alertly. Surely they would never have cause to use the ungainly canvas-wrapped packs? They didn’t check the contents of the survival pouches on the parachute packs, assuming that everything was present and correct. Each pouch should have contained a range of items that would be helpful during the first few hours or days of survival in an alien environment: fishhooks and line; pocketknife with can opener; Hershey bar; vitamin capsules; iodine to purify drinking water taken from jungle streams; polished-metal signaling mirror; maps; pocket compass; waterproof matches; atabrine tablets to ward off malaria; a clip of .45-caliber ammunition; and several messages written in Urdu, Hindustani, and Burmese asking for help from friendly natives. Don Downie recalled the advice he was given soon after arrival at Chabua: “A ground officer spent perhaps thirty minutes explaining what we might expect following a bail-out. In a capsule: walk downhill, downstream, find friendly natives, follow them to the nearest village, and expect a hand-off to more friendly natives who would see that you were eventually returned to a military outpost. That was, unless they turned you over to Jap patrols for a higher reward of rice, cocaine, or money.”
Within two hours the temperature would climb to 88 degrees. August was the wet season in the upper reaches of Assam—106 inches of rain fell there every year, three times more than the average US rainfall. On either side of the broad valley created by the Brahmaputra River, hills rose in the first stages of their relentless climb toward the sky. Chabua was a combination of two words: “Cha’a” from the Chinese name for tea and “bua”—Assamese for plantation. The British East India Company had been growing tea here since 1826, and, seventy years later, Assam was the world’s leading tea producer. Now Chabua was a concrete megalith, the sprawling air base sustaining massive aerial operations into China, with eighty heavy transports calling it home. Its sister base at Jorhat lay a hundred miles down the Brahmaputra, and similar airfields were dotted across the remote region at various stages of construction, all built on old tea plantations. But only Chabua and Jorhat had the hard, all-weather runways usable during the monsoon.
Existence at Chabua for those who had to work and fly from there was primitive. In early 1942 the difficult job of keeping in touch with China had been achieved by flying over the toughest mountain ranges in the world, day in, day out. The men who flew this route were pioneers of a new age, their work reminiscent of the old ’49ers, or those who had opened up the West, requiring gallon loads of pluck, grit, and personal sacrifice. A legend of their exploits began to build. They sang a ballad about themselves that was self-consciously based on the legend of railway hero Casey Jones:
It was Sunday morning and it looked like rain,
Around the mountain came an airplane,
Her carburetor busted and her manifold split,
The copilot gulped and the captain spit.
Cockpit Joe was comin’ round the mountain,
Cockpit Joe was goin’ to town,
Cockpit Joe was comin’ round the mountain
When the starboard engine she done let him down.
In an article in LIFE magazine the journalist Theodore White recorded that in the early days the ferry pilots
flew without weather reports, navigation aids, adequate fields, ground transportation or radio. They took off on instruments, flew by compass, let down by calculated flying time. . . . The officers and men ate together in one mud basha with a dirt floor; there were no lights, native cooks served bully beef and British biscuits. [The days began at 3:30 each morning.] There was just one shi
ft—a 16-hour shift—broken only by sandwiches and hot drinks. The Japs were in the air constantly. The only protection the Hump had was two P-40s loaned by Chennault and two P-43s loaned by the Chinese Air Force.
Chabua got the nickname “Dumbastapur” because on one occasion in 1943, during a Japanese air raid, the men stood around, hands in pockets, watching the spectacle. The shouted encouragement to take cover—from Colonel Gerry Mason—was “Take cover, you dumb bastards!” From that moment the name stuck.
The flight that morning was not one of Neveu’s usual jaunts across the roof of the world. In the first place it was carrying passengers rather than gas, and there were lots of them—eighteen. In addition to nine members of the ATC traveling to join the Tenth Air Force in Kunming were two officers of the Chinese Army returning home after training at the Indian Army training center at Ramgargh. Also on board were four senior figures. John (“Jack”) Paton Davies Jr., Lieutenant General Joe Stilwell’s political adviser from the State Department, was charged with ensuring that political relationships were maintained between Stilwell’s headquarters across the China, Burma, and India (CBI) theater. Eric Sevareid, the hugely popular Columbia Broadcasting Service (CBS) journalist who had broken the news of the German occupation of Paris in June 1940 via live broadcast, had been sent by the White House to take a firsthand look at the issue of China. The third VIP was Bill Stanton, a senior civil servant from the Board of Economic Warfare (described by Sevareid as a “tall American of forty with close-cropped hair and a lilting British accent” picked up during long years spent in Hong Kong) whose task in the CBI theater was to analyze economic information as part of the war effort against the Japanese. The fourth VIP to climb aboard that morning was Captain Duncan C. Lee from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). A distant descendant of General Robert E. Lee, he was also—unknown to his fellow passengers—the most senior Soviet spy to penetrate this predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Jack Davies was later to record that Lee was “the son of missionary parents in China. He had been a Rhodes Scholar, then one of the bright young lawyers recruited by General ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan for his Office of Strategic Services. Duncan belonged to OSS headquarters in Washington. . . . We had travelled together from Washington via London, Algiers and Cairo, to the CBI Theater where he was now on an inspection tour.” One of Lee’s tasks was to interrogate General Dai Li, Chiang Kai-shek’s secretive intelligence chief, about the paucity of usable intelligence reaching the OSS from China despite the cornucopia of hard-won supplies America was lavishing on the Kuomintang.