Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  Sevareid had first encountered Lee and Davies at Khartoum Airport. Under the burning sun he had spotted Davies squatting “in the narrow shaft of shade under the wing of the waiting plane,” at peace with the world and with himself:

  He was a man of medium size, with thinning, sandy hair, an obvious civilian, hatless, and dressed in khaki trousers and a cotton army shirt open at the neck. With complete self-possession he continued to sit there, reading a book, oblivious to the activity around him. Here, I thought, is a superior man, who has mastered this nerve-shredding business of doing a civilian job under army routines. I noticed that the book was Laski’s Reflections, and then I recognized the face. He was John Davies of the State Department, political advisor to General Stilwell. . . . I was traveling in good company. . . . A time was coming when Davies’s intelligence, humor, and coolheadedness were to be important factors for personal salvation in a common crisis.

  When he first set eyes on Dumbastapur, Eric Sevareid was appalled—it was hardly a fit place for young Americans to live and work, particularly when they were sacrificing so much to support the unscrupulous Kuomintang. The bodies of young American air crew scattered across the roof of the world testified to that.

  Save for a few officers who could enjoy the comfort of tea-garden bungalows, they were living in shocking conditions. There were at this time absolutely no amenities of life—no lounging places, no Red Cross girls, nothing cool and refreshing to eat and drink, no near-by rest resort to visit on leave. It was a dread and dismal place where dysentery was frequent and malaria certain, where haggard, sweating men dragged their feverish bodies through the day, ate execrable food, and shivered on cramped cots through nights often made unbearable by the mosquitoes. Men collapsed under the strain, and officers were frequently broken by distant superiors when the statistics of their performance fell short.

  Sevareid was keen to leave India. At Dumbastapur he had had the comfort of a tea planter’s bungalow but been irritated by the complacency of an imperial system in which British administrators would spend their lives “in lonely and correct preparation for a lonely and correct death.” His frustration at the apparent British nonchalance toward the US war effort would have been tempered if he had known that the training of the Chinese Army at Ramgargh had actually been funded by Britain. Ignorant of the finer points of the combined Allied war effort but incisive in his judgments about crumbling imperial edifices, Eric Sevareid was relieved that morning to be climbing aboard the C-46 and getting out of the place. Declining British global power was contrasted with the energy of young Americans taking on the world. He wrote in lyrical terms of the youthful men of the ATC who daily sustained the Hump:

  They measured the far horizons and calculated the heavens with their stubby schoolroom pencils. They peered through the majestic avenues of castellated cloud and wiped their dime-store colored spectacles. Their young eyes looked into the depths of mysterious seas and regarded the unfolding of the vast continents which showed on their faces the laboring of God’s time and the hands of men, while they munched a wad of Wrigley’s Spearmint, fingered the newly sprouted mustache, and wondered about its effect in Lauterbach’s drugstore back in Des Moines. They knew the lines and corrugations of the ancient earth as they knew the palm of their hands, and took them equally for granted.

  Theodore White agreed, observing that these youngsters were doing a man’s job but did not have the experience to “qualify them for a co-pilot’s job on an American airline.”

  Low cloud had been forecast in the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra Valley that morning but was due to disperse as the day warmed up. Importantly, no higher formations of cumulus were predicted. Despite this, Harry Neveu had carefully studied the sky before boarding, trying to spot telltale signs of the towering white accumulations that could shear the wings off an aircraft. There had been enough pilots’ stories of terrifying journeys over the Hump and the 8,000 square miles of green mountains stretching deep into Manipur and beyond to make crews acutely cloud conscious—not just at the start of the three-and-a-half-hour flight but throughout the perilous 700-mile journey across northern Burma into Kunming. Aircraft caught in clouds that could rise from 2,000 to 40,000 feet had been violently tossed around and sometimes destroyed. Pilots exited cloud formations to find themselves flying upside down; others entered at one altitude to emerge facing completely different directions at wildly differing heights. For pilot Eric Forsdike, flying twin-engine transport aircraft through these monstrous cloud formations was an occupational hazard: “If we could not find a way between the cumuli-nimbus clouds, developing into huge mushroom shapes we reduced speed, sunglasses on to reduce the glare of the lightning flashes which were almost continuous, and hoped for the best.” And if the weather didn’t get them, Japanese Zeros flying from Myitkyina in north-central Burma routinely fell on the transports as they lumbered toward China.

  From Chabua’s runway it was impossible to see beyond the mountains reaching high into the sky to the east, north, and west, the dark mass of tangled green hills providing a formidable barrier to the endless Burmese jungle beyond. This remote terrain offered sanctuary to the scattered Naga population, whose exposure to Westerners had increased since the Japanese war had lapped against their shores in 1942. Only those Nagas who had come down from the hills to live in the river valley maintained any contact with the new influx of foreigners—primarily Chinese and Americans who were there to sustain the US support to China over the Hump and, later, via the tortuous land route over the Burma Road from Ledo. Few visitors were allowed to venture into the remote territories that ran east for 200 miles down to the Chindwin and Burma. After subduing Naga head-hunting raids into the Assamese tea plantations in the 1880s, the British had applied a light dusting of imperial paternalism across most of the Naga territories, trying to protect the ethnological purity of the region by controlling visitors through an “inner line” system: only those with a legitimate reason to visit the hills could secure a restricted-area permit from the deputy commissioner in Kohima.a

  A process that didn’t end until 2010.

  To the west the hills rose sharply from the wide river valley, the lower reaches of massive mountain ranges originating right up to the roof of the world. Like a great bottleneck, the valley floor to the northeast was hemmed in on three sides by mountains that seemed to punch into the sky. To reach Kunming in China’s Yunnan Province, the standard route was across the 10,000-foot-high Patkoi Hills immediately to the east of Chabua, then over the northernmost reaches of Burma—first the Hukawng Valley, followed by Fort Hertz, then the 15,000-foot-high Kaolikung Range, then the Salween River, after which the massive range separating the Salween from the Mekong, with some peaks over 20,000 feet high, appeared—before dropping to the Yunnanese plateau, 6,000 feet above sea level.

  Flying the Hump was one of the scariest things a pilot ever had to do. It repeatedly exposed men to very high levels of risk, as the journey, crossing the upper reaches of Burma, was one of the most dangerous imaginable. This was partly because of the extreme heights at which the unpressurized aircraft had to fly above the complex tangle of snow-covered Himalayan peaks on Burma’s northern and eastern borders. It was also because the Japanese were close by, with fighter planes based in the northern Burmese town of Myitkyina sweeping out daily in pursuit of the lumbering American transport planes making their way to and from China. The word Hump was one “that made men afraid,” observed the Australian journalist Ronald McKie, who visited India in 1943. It was also because so little was known about much of the unmapped green vastness that stretched for hundreds of miles far beneath the thin aluminum air frames making their bumpy way to China. What fierce tribesmen inhabited the wastelands below, far from the comforting certainties of Western civilization?

  The first question every pilot involuntarily asked himself when setting out on a journey over the Hump was “What are my chances of getting to Kunming?” The second was “What are my chances of survival if I have to
bail out?” There were hundreds of hazards for pilots to face. White listed a few:

  Ice can build up so rapidly on the wings that within five minutes a plane loses all flying capacity and drops like a rock into the jungle. In summer there are monsoons—black, solid masses of rain and wind that flick a plane about as if it were a feather. There are convection and thermal currents that send the instruments into crazy spins. The indicated rate of descent may be 1,500 feet a minute going down when the altitude meter shows 1,500 feet going up. A pilot may be putting his plane down as hard as he can and the wind and clouds will be sending it up twice as fast as he is descending; or vice versa, which is worse.

  The luggage lay in piles between the passengers, dispersed along the fuselage to ensure that the center of gravity remained just forward of the wing main spar and secured by rope netting to the floor. The men had been searched (a “severe examination,” according to Sevareid) for the alcohol and cigarettes that servicemen routinely smuggled into China, though the searchers missed the bottle of gin that Lee had secreted on his person. Such was Davies’s authority that the rare cognac he carried was deemed a “gift” and waved through. The C-46’s hold luggage weight amounted to less than 7,000 pounds, but when added to the twenty-one passengers and crew (3,150 pounds) it was the maximum that could be carried by the twin-engine plane. Neveu’s primary concern was that the weight of the aircraft be accurately calculated and carefully distributed so that the plane was neutrally balanced, that is, neither front- nor rear-heavy. “If you had something heavy towards the back it could be dangerous, you had to keep the center of gravity,” he recalled. “And as you use your fuel up, your center of gravity changes too, so you had to be concerned with that too. Although with passengers you could move them around too to adjust for it.”

  It is almost certain that none of the passengers were aware that they were embarking in an aircraft that had had its license to carry passengers temporarily revoked. The demands of war had resulted in its rushed introduction into service long before all its testing was complete. It therefore arrived in the theater full of niggling faults that gave it a poor reputation for reliability. The first thirty aircraft arrived at Chabua in April 1943, and the crews—inherently suspicious of military equipment produced for the lowest tender—quickly dubbed them “the Curtiss Calamity,” “the Plumber’s Nightmare,” and “the Flying Coffin.” Stilwell—the American whom Roosevelt had loaned to Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the nationalist Kuomintang—testily noted in his diary that “the C-46 is full of bugs. Carburetor ices up. We have lost six over the Hump and the boys’ morale is lower and lower.” Theodore White described the problem of the C-46 in LIFE magazine when reporting that restrictions on ATC operations across the Hump had been lifted in 1945:

  The early runs had been made in DC-3s, whose normal ceiling was 12,000 feet and which had to be flown at 17,000 and 18,000. The C-87 had trouble with icing, and maintenance of its four engines was a drain on limited repair facilities. [Brigadier General] Alexander [ATC commander] chose as his ship the new Curtiss C-46—a twin-engine, big-bellied, ugly work-ship. It was just beginning to come from the assembly lines in the U.S., but the need for it was so great that it was rushed to Assam before the bugs had been taken out. There was no time for routine test flying to build up a backlog of pilot experience and knowledge of spare part requirements. The planes came out factory-fresh and were test flown in actual operation under conditions no other plane in aviation history has had to meet. They were subjected to all the climatic conditions of India and the Hump—dust, excessive heat, flight with maximum loads at higher than maximum serviceable altitudes, at maximum rates of climb, through turbulent winds and storms. . . . Critical parts began to give way all at once, at rates which no previous experience could have forecast. Men died in the air and on the ground learning about the ship, ironing out its weaknesses, beating out a body of experience in the presence of overpowering military emergency.

  When they arrived in India the C-46’s had been accompanied by Curtiss-Wright test crews, including Chief Test Pilot Herbert Fisher, who completed ninety-six missions into China to remove bugs. Sevareid knew of the aircraft’s reputation—nearly refusing to enter when it dawned on him that this was a C-46—but admitted that he lacked the moral courage to protest. “That’s something one just doesn’t do,” he later observed. With a journalist’s instinct he had discovered that the aircraft had arrived in theater “with 196 alterations still to be made” to make it airworthy.

  Like Sevareid, most passengers would have been all too aware of the dreadful attrition rate of the aircraft flying the Hump. Between June and December 1943 the official history of the ATC recorded “135 major aircraft accidents on the Hump route” with 168 fatalities. ATC officials at Washington, New Delhi, and Chabua regretted the casualties but felt obliged “to push the job for all it is worth.” As ATC chief of staff General Cyrus Smith put it, “We are paying for it in men and airplanes. The kids here are flying over their head at night and in daytime and they bust them up for reasons that sometimes seem silly. They are not silly, however, for we are asking boys to do what would be most difficult for men to accomplish; with the experience level here we are going to pay dearly for the tonnage moved across the Hump. . . . With the men available, there is nothing else to do.” The USAAF described the route between India and Yunnan Province as “the most dangerous ever assigned to air transport.” During the second half of 1943, 155 aircraft came down, a rate of nearly one a day.

  Since leaving the States in July Sevareid had been at the mercy of the USAAF, flying on hard, aluminum-framed seats across the world—from Washington to Ascension Island, the Gold Coast to Khartoum, Eritrea to Aden, and finally New Delhi to Ramgargh—to the point where, arriving in India, he and his colleagues had reached the limits of their endurance. They swore to draw up a charter for “The American Society of Airplane-Haters—under the rules no one would be eligible unless he had spent so many hours on ‘bucket seats’ with extra points for those who had passed their hours over Africa or Asia in midsummer.”

  But if the passengers hated it, air crews were all too aware of the risks they ran in flying each day. From what Sevareid could deduce, they knew they were doing far too much with far too little:

  Pilots were overworked, and when they had made the perilous flight to China and back the same day, having fought storm and fog and ice, they simply fell into their cots as they were, unshaved and unwashed, to catch a few hours of unrefreshing sleep before repeating the venture next day. Hardly a day passed that the operations radio did not hear the distress signal of a crew going down in the jungle valleys or among the forbidding peaks. Few at that time were ever found again, and there was a saying among the pilots that they could plot their course to China by the line of smoking wrecks upon the hillsides. It is not often that one sees fear in the faces of fliers, but I saw it here. Each one reckoned that it was only a matter of time before his turn would come; they had the feeling of men who know they have been condemned.

  The CBS journalist had arrived at Chabua at a point when the ATC was in crisis. Massive pressure on a limited number of aircraft to increase the tonnage of war materiel flown over the Hump; poor facilities at the airfield for air crews, passengers, and ground crews; the inexperience of pilots, mechanics, and navigators; the limited availability of spare parts for the C-46’s; and a paucity of radio and navigation aids made the high attrition rates a simple though depressing fact of life.

  With passengers and baggage safely stowed, the crew chief poked his head through the cockpit door and announced, “Ready to go.” Harry Neveu nodded his thanks and flicked the starter switches for the two Pratt & Whitney “Double Wasp” 2800s, throttling back to warm them before receiving permission—a flashing red light—from Chabua Tower for takeoff. They were slightly late, probably because of the time it had taken to marshal the passengers and parachutes on board, but at 8 he was able to taxi to the runway and take off. As he gradually increased the throttle,
the plane rapidly gained speed and, with tail rising off the ground, hurtled down the runway. Neveu gently drew back the wheel, and the plane became airborne.

  Circling the airfield, Neveu climbed gradually before setting a course for 115 degrees, taking them east to the new Burma Road being built from Ledo into China before turning southeast on the Burmese side of the Patkois for a hundred miles, then banking left across northern Burma, avoiding the Chinese border’s worst mountains. ATC pilots were allowed some route discretion but had to file flight plans with air traffic control at Chabua before departure so that their journey could be retraced in the event of the loss of the aircraft. Harry Neveu had often flown into Kunming, and with the C-46’s operating ceiling of 24,500 feet his route avoided the highest mountains and allowed the greatest distance from the Japanese combat patrols at Myitkyina. If he met one of the deadly Zeros, he knew that his only defense “was to climb and jump into the clouds. And then you had to worry about the mountains digging up into the clouds and running into them. It was pretty much a seat-of-the-pants navigational flight.”

  The morning was beautiful. The mist over the Naga Hills rolled westward like a waterfall. Climbing east through a thin layer of haze, the twin Pratt & Whitney radials drummed serenely away, the mist changing color from white to pink as the tops of the Patkois were reached and turning to gold as the sun appeared over the horizon. The vibrations through the aircraft made it too noisy for talk, and many passengers dropped off to sleep.