by Orr Kelly
Phil Cochran, then a lieutenant colonel, had joined the Air Corps after graduating from Ohio State University in 1935. He became a fighter pilot and advanced to become a squadron commander before the war. Twice, he roomed with another young pilot, John Alison, and they became good friends.
When the United States entered the war, Cochran was assigned to take thirty-five pilots into North Africa as replacements for pilots lost in the Allied invasion. They were ordered to deliver their planes and themselves by catapulting their P-40s off the deck of a British carrier. Neither Cochran nor his pilots—many of them barely out of flying school—had ever seen a catapult, let alone been launched by one. Four planes and two pilots were lost in the operation.
Cochran fought in North Africa until June of 1943, sometimes flying as many as five missions a day against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tanks and supply lines. When he returned to the States, he was badly worn out. He was also a public hero. A fellow Ohio State graduate, Milton Caniff, had become a popular cartoonist. He made Cochran—or Flip Corkin, as he called him—the hero of his comic strip, Terry and the Pirates.
After a brief rest, Cochran got what he wanted most: orders to Europe, where the new P-47 fighters were being introduced into the “real war.” Then he received a telegram ordering him to report to General Arnold. When he arrived in Washington, he learned for the first time that he was under consideration to command a new air force unit in Burma.
“If ever I was going to shoot myself, it was then, because I just couldn’t see it,” he recalled later. “I just couldn’t stomach it. I rebelled so strongly against that thing. I probably made a damn fool of myself, but I no longer wanted to go to Burma than anything.… I screamed like a stuck hog right off the bat when I heard what they had in mind.”
Cochran went to the Pentagon and was escorted in to see Arnold—“the rankingest person I ever would get to see.” He came as close as he could to outright defiance.
Arnold let him blow off steam and then dismissed him: “That’s enough for now. I’ll see you later.”
As he headed for the door, Cochran recalled a chance meeting earlier. He had run into his old friend Alison and rightly surmised that he was one of the five other officers rumored to be under consideration for the Burma post.
“I’m not supposed to know who the other five are,” he told Arnold, “but I ran into a guy in the Pentagon yesterday, and I know he is here for the same thing. That’s the guy you ought to take. He is a grand person, and that’s Johnny Alison.”
The next day, Cochran saw Alison after he had had his own interview with Arnold.
“We walked down the hall together, and he was as close to crying as any tough little fighter pilot I ever saw in my life,” Cochran recalled. “He was just terribly discouraged, and he had refused it, too. But he was afraid that he was going to get it. I told him that I told Arnold to give it to him.”
Alison had had a distinguished and unusual wartime career. A veteran of the prewar Air Corps, he was sent to England in 1941, before the United States entered the war. He then went on to Russia with Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s personal representative, and remained to test-fly P-40 fighters being delivered under the lend-lease program. With that job completed, he received a promise from Lt. Col. Townsend Griffiss, who was returning to Washington. He said he would arrange a combat command for Alison as soon as he arrived back in the States.
Alison started home but stopped over in Teheran, Iran, expecting word from Washington any day. While waiting, he helped assemble A-20 light bombers being shipped to the Russians through Iran.
He ended up remaining there for six months. Only later did he learn that Griffiss’s plane had been misidentified while crossing the English Channel and shot down by Spitfire fighters, with the loss of all aboard.
Finally, in the spring of 1942, Alison received the combat assignment he had been seeking. He was ordered to fly directly from Teheran to China. He flew the “hump” from India into China and became deputy commander of the 75th Squadron—part of what, before the war, had been the “volunteer” Flying Tigers—American pilots supporting the Chinese. Alison distinguished himself in combat, shooting down six Japanese planes to become an ace and destroying another Japanese plane on the ground.
When Arnold called Alison in, he reacted just as negatively to the Burma assignment as Cochran had. Both he and Cochran understood the job to be primarily providing a force of light planes to carry supplies and evacuate the casualties for Wingate’s operation. Both wanted command assignments with real airplanes in a real war. Alison told Arnold he had just the man for him: Phil Cochran.
Arnold settled the matter by choosing both men, making them cocommanders of the project.
He told them: “To hell with the paperwork; go out and fight.” Cochran and Alison took him much more literally than he probably imagined. At one point, when Cochran saw a dozen typewriters among the items to be shipped to their new headquarters in India, he simply crossed them off the list.
Quickly realizing that having two heads for a military organization was a dumb idea, Cochran and Alison agreed that Cochran would be the commander and Alison his deputy. But they were so closely attuned that decisions made by one man were almost automatically backed by the other. Together, they set out to build a force unique in Air Force history, in the process enlarging it far beyond what Wingate, Churchill, Roosevelt, and, probably, Arnold, had envisioned.
CHAPTER 3
A “Grandiose Scheme”
Cochran and Alison set up shop with offices in the Pentagon and in the Hay Adams House, a hotel just across Lafayette Square from the White House.
Tentatively, they called their operation Project 9. To learn just what it was they were getting into, Cochran flew to London to meet with Wingate and Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was preparing to take over as the new supreme Allied commander in Southeast Asia. It quickly became apparent to Cochran that what was required was a substantially bigger and more capable force than the relatively modest air arm that Wingate had in mind.
Barely a month after getting their orders from Arnold, Cochran and Alison had put together the outline of the force they thought was needed to do the job and had it approved by both Arnold and his boss, Gen. George C. Marshall. Not only did it include the transport planes, bombers, and light aircraft desired by Wingate, but it also called for fighter planes and gliders. Project 9 even included some experimental helicopters Alison had obtained over the objections of everyone involved in their development.
The two young officers presented their plan to Arnold at the Pentagon with some trepidation. They had gone far beyond the original concept of a small force of light planes to evacuate wounded Chindits and built it into what Cochran admitted was a “grandiose scheme.”
Arnold read the plan, gave Cochran and Alison a sly look, initialed the plan, and said: “All right, do it!”
There was only one major modification to their plan. They asked for P-38 Lightning fighters. When they were not available, they substituted P-47 Thunderbolts. Those were not available either, so they finally settled for the P-51 Mustang.
Instead of limiting themselves to supporting Wingate’s Chindits once they had marched through the jungles and set up bases in Burma, they planned to bring the commandos themselves in by air and plunk them down far behind the enemy’s front lines.
While Cochran was sketching out the broad outlines of the force to support Wingate, Alison was busy rounding up the men and equipment they would need. With the authority given them by Arnold and their wide circle of acquaintances in the Air Corps, they were able to reach out and bring in the best people they could find to get the job done.
Members of the new organization were all volunteers. They were not told where they were going or what they were going to do. They were simply told that the operation would involve combat, that it would last no more than six months—and that they shouldn’t expect any promotions.
Training began on 1 October 1943 at tw
o North Carolina air-fields. The fighters and gliders were based at Seymour-Johnson field, the light planes at Raleigh-Durham. The force was rapidly growing to its eventual size of 346 aircraft. That was as many aircraft as one would normally find in a full air force wing. But the ground and aircrews totalled only 523 men—far fewer than the 2,000 normally found in a wing.
The light planes were the older L-1 Vigilant and the more modern L-5 Sentinel. Although the L-5 was newer and faster, the L-1 was in some ways more desirable because it could carry more wounded and operate from a shorter field than the L-5. Both were single-engine, high-wing monoplanes.
The L-1 had a fixed, rather than a variable-pitch, propeller, limiting the control the pilot had over the plane. It also had an unorthodox combination flap-aileron system that permitted the plane to fly very slowly. But it also made the plane awkward to handle. One pilot likened it to “dancing with a fat lady.”
From the first, training focused on low-level flying. When residents of Raleigh-Durham complained that the planes were buzzing their rooftops at one hundred feet, their commander ordered them to fly lower.
For the American Army, the use of gliders as troop carriers was an untested concept. What was known about their use was not very encouraging. The Germans had used gliders in the invasion of Crete with disastrous results. But the United States Army was still feeling its way along.
The Waco gliders assembled at Seymour-Johnson were equipped with a special new gyro towing device, similar to an autopilot, to make it easier for the pilot to maintain the proper position behind the tow plane. To recover the gliders for reuse, the C-47 tow planes were fitted out with a reel designed to “snatch” a glider from the ground—a maneuver in which the transport plane flew slowly overhead, snagged a line attached to the glider, and plucked it off the ground.
Crews practiced both day and night with both single and double tows. Emphasis was placed on nighttime operations because the plan was to deliver Wingate’s Chindits at night, with no lights on the planes or gliders.
The pilots had a difficult choice: If they flew in the high tow position, behind and above the tow plane, the air was smoother and it was easier to maintain tension on the tow line. But, at night, it was almost impossible to see the unlighted tow plane against the dark earth.
If they flew in the low tow position, behind and slightly below the tow plane, they could see the glow of the plane’s exhaust, but there was more turbulence and it was much more difficult to maintain the proper tension on the tow line. If the glider pilot overtook the tow plane, the line could get tangled up. If he took up the slack too abruptly, he could tear the cable attachment loose.
Gliders were not the only unorthodox flying machines to capture the attention of the Project 9 leaders. Through their connections in the Air Corps, Cochran and Alison learned that a few experimental helicopters were being tested at Wright-Patterson field near Dayton, Ohio. To the fledgling air commandos, the helicopter—if it worked as promised—seemed ideal as a way of plucking wounded or sick Chindits out of the jungle, from spots where even a light plane could not land and take off again.
They asked for the helicopters, but at every step, they were turned down. Finally, they appealed to Arnold himself.
“All right,” Arnold replied, “I got you everything. Now, I did what I promised you guys, but there is no way you can get those helicopters. I just can’t do it.… They are all taken.”
A short time later, Alison ran into Harry Hopkins, with whom he had traveled to Russia before the United States entry into the war. He mentioned the helicopter problem to Hopkins. A few days later, word came through that they would get four helicopters to try out in the jungle operation.
Arnold asked Cochran how they had done it.
“Well, General, you just have to know the right people,” Cochran replied.
The schedule called for two and a half months of intensive training—a dauntingly short period for such a pioneering endeavor. But in late October, the training period was abruptly cut short by forty-five days. The crews were ordered to pack up and head for India.
Cochran left on 3 November 1943 while Alison remained behind to manage the move. The C-47s and most of the men followed quickly behind Cochran. Their route took them from Miami to Puerto Rico, Trinidad, British Guiana, Brazil, Ascension Island, the Gold Coast of Africa, Nigeria, Sudan, Aden, Masirah Island, and thence to Karachi, India.
The light planes, fighters, and gliders were packaged up and sent by sea. Cochran commandeered a dirigible hangar at the Karachi airport to assemble the fighters. He was disappointed to find that the first load of P-51s, which had been lashed to the deck of the transport ship, were so badly damaged by the seas and salt corrosion that they had to be replaced. A similar assembly operation for the gliders was set up at Barrackpore field near Calcutta.
For a brief time after the planes and men of Project 9 arrived in India, the unit was known as the 5318th Provisional Unit (Air). But General Arnold had taken to calling them air commandos, and on 29 March 1944, the designation was changed once more, to the 1st Air Commando Group. From the beginning, this unorthodox military unit was viewed with a mixture of envy, distrust, and covetousness by the commanders of other military units in the area. Their first inclination was to absorb the new unit into their existing organizations. And, if they couldn’t do that, they certainly wanted to strip the new outfit of its new planes and equipment. With strong support from Arnold, Cochran fended them off. As his ace in the hole, he carried a “Dear Dickie” personal note from Arnold to Mountbatten urging him to support this unusual outfit and let it do its job.
Late in December 1943, Alison joined Cochran in India, and on Christmas Eve, they flew to the Assam region, on the eastern border of India, adjoining Burma, to look for a base of operations. They chose two sites. The field at Lalaghat, with a sixty-three-hundred-foot runway, was chosen for the transports and gliders. The field at nearby Hailakandi, with its forty-five-hundred-foot runway, was chosen for the fighters and the bombers later added to the force. The light planes were divided between the two fields. Both had grass airstrips that would turn into lakes, or at least swamps, when the monsoon rains came. The few buildings at each field were bamboo huts.
On 29 December, the American glider and transport crews began training with the Chindits. Ten days later they conducted a twenty-glider operation in which four hundred men were landed on a mud field near Lalitpur. The operation was successful, but when it was over, the gliders remained where they had landed, stuck in the mud. One by one, two planes swooped down low over the field and “snatched” the gliders out of the mud and into the air. It was very much a case of on-the-job training.
For the Chindits, the glider-borne operation was a daunting challenge. It was probably better than walking for days through the jungle with heavy packs, hacking away at vines and always on the alert for an enemy ambush. But the idea of dropping out of the night sky into a rough clearing in the jungle in a powerless balsa-wood glider was not much better. If anything went wrong, there was no chance to pull up and go around again. If the craft went down in the jungle, it meant almost certain death for all aboard.
On 15 February 1944, such an accident occurred during a night towing operation. Four of the British troops and three Americans were killed. The Americans feared the Chindits might decide it was better to walk after all. But a message came from Wingate’s headquarters: “Please be assured that we will go with your boys any place, any time, any where.” Even if redundant, that vote of confidence was seized on by the Americans, and the phrase “Any Place, Any Time, Any Where” remains a motto of the air commandos today.
Even though the Americans were in the process of making aviation history, they faced a problem as old as armies: how do you get a mule to do what you want him to? In this case, the question was how to get a big British army mule into a glider and keep him from kicking the craft apart. Once the Chindits arrived at their forward bases behind Japanese lines, they would need the mul
es to help them carry the food, ammunition, light artillery, and other supplies for their hit-and-run attacks on the enemy’s lines of communications. The mules had already been de-brayed so they would not give the Chindits’ position away as they sneaked through the jungle.
The glider floors were reinforced to carry the weight of the mules. Their legs were hobbled to keep them from kicking. Their heads were tied down to keep their long ears out of the control cables, and they were confined in slings to keep them from moving around.
The question still remained: how do you coax a mule into something as unfamiliar as a glider?
Cochran recalled how they attacked the problem as a terrible, insurmountable thing and had “all manner of wild schemes of how we were going to do this.”
But then it occurred to them to see if there were any farm boys who knew anything about mules.
“One of these kids, not from his experience, but just from his plain, practical mind, set us all on our ear,” Cochran said. “This kid just … said, ‘Why don’t we just try walking them in and see what they do?’ Lo and behold, that’s what we did, and the mules took to it just like they take to everything else. It didn’t concern them one bit. It amazed us, the wisdom of this youngster, after all our planning, that the simplest thing was, ‘Well, why don’t you ask the mule, really?’ So we asked the mule, and we asked him to go in the glider.”
The first test mule-lift occurred on the night of 10 January. The mule handlers were told that, if a mule acted up, they were to shoot him.