Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  The men of the Hump airlift daily defied the threat of falling into the hands of the Japanese. To do so would mean a death sentence.

  4

  THE CRASH

  Eric Sevareid hadn’t detected any change in tone from the engine or the aircraft’s smooth vibration as it made its way through the still blue skies. Perhaps the young corporal was mistaken? Looking around, he saw the two Chinese officers sitting with their eyes closed. A few months earlier American crews had dubbed the airlift of 14,000 Chinese troops from Kunming to Ramgargh the “vomit trail,” as virtually all of the passengers, taking their first flight, had been airsick during the journey. The journalist contemplated the pilots’ backs through the cockpit door—which periodically opened and closed—reflecting that he hadn’t even seen their faces, let alone heard their names. He wrote, “I was on the left side of the plane, and I squeezed my cheek against the window to look at the engine. I rather expected to see the propeller blades hanging motionless. They seemed to be going around all right, though I knew that didn’t mean anything. Sunlight flashed in from another angle, and I realized that we had turned, which must mean that the pilot was making back for India. A day wasted, at least, and I was already long overdue in Chungking.”

  In the cockpit the first sign that anything was amiss was an oscillating oil-pressure gauge for the port engine. The needle was moving rapidly from full to zero and back again. Neveu and Felix initially thought it might be a faulty dial but kept a wary eye on it. If an engine ran out of oil, a lockup could wrench it from its mounting and send the aircraft plummeting to earth. Minutes went by while the dial danced manically. Then Neveu noticed further evidence of a problem with the engine. Slowly, inexorably, the temperature gauge was rising. The two pilots quickly agreed that the port engine must be shut down to avoid disaster. With half of the power of the heavily laden C-46 gone, they now had no prospect of rising above their current height of 12,000 feet and zero chance of making it to Kunming. Their only option was to bank right and head for home.

  At this point they were 200 miles from Chabua, over territory dominated in the sky by Japanese Zeros and on the ground by the Japanese Army. The natural escape route was to turn due west and fly back over the Patkois toward Chabua’s sister air base at Jorhat, farther down the Brahmaputra. The altitude they would need to maintain was slightly lower than the route flown that morning. Neveu and Felix quickly decided to make for this emergency destination. As Neveu turned the aircraft slowly onto its western course, however, he struggled to maintain altitude. It was clear that the C-46 was too heavily laden for a single engine, and the altimeter needle continued moving counterclockwise. Every minute was costing them a hundred feet. The C-46 needed at least 10,000 feet to clear the mountains blocking the route to Jorhat. If their descent continued, it was only a matter of time before they collided with the hills separating them from safety. The truth began to dawn on them: the Curtiss-Wright was sinking as the remaining engine strained to keep the plane aloft. Even worse, they were entering the cloud base on top of the mountains. The situation looked grim as they had to navigate solely with instruments; Neveu later admitted that he was “expecting the side of a mountain to come into the windshield at any second.”

  The young pilot’s primary task was to keep the plane flying straight, preventing it from corkscrewing into the ground. His mind racing, desperately thinking of ways to stave off catastrophe, Neveu realized that they had to jettison baggage—and as quickly as possible. Fifteen minutes had now passed, and Neveu gave instructions to Staff Sergeant Miller to chuck the cargo. Miller rushed down the fuselage, co-opting passengers to throw out luggage. “I watched my flight bag go over the side with some regret,” recalled Jack Davies, “for it contained an assortment of presents for Chinese friends and acquaintances, including for Madame Sun Yat-sen a bottle of fine cognac and a couple of bottles of the brown ink she fancied.”

  It was now that calamity nearly struck. In his eagerness Miller had forgotten the basic premise that to remain airborne and flying forward—especially now that it had only one engine—the C-46 needed to maintain its center of gravity. With the crowd of panicked men clustering around the open rear cargo door, the C-46 began falling onto its tail, nose rising, the one good engine clawing the thin air. No power from the single remaining engine would be able to overcome this. Neveu desperately worked to control the aircraft as, in slow motion, the C-46 tilted upward. A fatal stall seemed inevitable.

  Realizing what was happening, Miller screamed at the passengers to get away from the rear of the plane, and, by a miracle, disaster was averted. The reluctant aircraft was persuaded to slip sideways, allowing the nose to regain level flight. The sweating Neveu was amazed—he had never heard of a fully laden aircraft recovering from a near stall—and later recalled it as “one of the most frightening experiences I think I ever had.”

  But the struggle to regain control of the C-46 had cost them irrecoverable altitude. At 7,000 feet the crew confirmed that they were heading on a westerly track but were horrified to realize that they had no chance of rising above the mountain barrier blocking the route to Jorhat. A crash into the green void below was now inevitable, and Oswalt began sending distress signals on the emergency frequency, giving estimates of their position. Their intense fear was that they would collide with a mountain as they flew in dense cloud, but the Curtiss-Wright suddenly broke free from the cloud layer, and at 6,500 feet they saw, to their relief, that they were in the middle of a wide valley, bisected by a river far below. Neveu followed the line of the valley floor, which ended at a V-shaped ridge five miles ahead. He knew he couldn’t rise above the ridge because the C-46 was still losing height and had no space to turn around. The decision was made: they would have to bail out. Both pilots agreed that they had only a few minutes before hitting the ridge.

  In the meantime Davies had walked forward into the cockpit to see what was going on. He could see Oswalt working the radio, sending emergency calls to Chabua; Neveu and Felix were “staring at their instruments with blanched, silent concentration. I got no reply to my questions as to where we were.” The pilots’ headphones prevented them from hearing Davies behind them, and the din from the open cargo door made conversation impossible. Davies ran back to the fuselage, convinced that the only thing to do was parachute. He had never jumped before in his life—no one on this plane had—but it was obvious that the aircraft was doomed.

  Men struggled to move through the crowded cabin while others remained fixed to their seats in mute horror. Neveu commanded Miller to tell everyone to jump, but the noise made it difficult to understand what had to be done. To make things worse, no instructions had been given as to how to parachute safely. Davies stared around him:

  Each of us aboard the stricken aircraft was preoccupied with his own little preparations for disaster, his own private terrors. We were a distracted, atomized group; no one took command to pull us together. Word was babbled down from the pilot that we should jump, depart the plane without further ado. Loath to leave the cold aluminum womb of the C-46 and plunge into the steaming primordial jungle some 3,000 feet below, I hesitated to venture forth. But no one else stepped forward and out the door, and as time was wasting, I decided to get the inevitable over with. In a letter to my wife days later, I wrote, “I stood in the open door of that miserable Commando and declared, ‘Well, if nobody else is going to jump, I’ll jump. Somebody has to break the ice.’” Clutching my dispatch case and kukria to my chest and with my right hand grasping the parachute release ring, I waddled out into the wild blue yonder.

  The famous Gurkha fighting knife.

  Eric Sevareid was also in shock, the whole experience surreal. He watched as Jack Davies “crouched by the door staring down into space. There was a curious half-smile on his face just before he leaped, froglike, and vanished with a whistling sound.” He couldn’t rationalize what was happening; his mind rebelled against what his eyes were telling him. The C-46 was still flying; this was all a bad dream.
He remembered thinking that at least they were flying away from the Japanese and that every mile placed between them and the enemy was good. Sevareid looked at the other passengers:

  Two or three were pale. The younger Chinese was staring at the door, his jaw muscles puking rapidly. Several minutes passed, and the plane seemed to be flying much lower. I thought we were following a valley, but then a peak or ridge would pass very close beneath. More minutes went by, and the suspense was unbearable. I found myself opening the notebook again and absurdly scrawling sentences: “Nine fifteen a.m. Baggage out. Left engine not working,” etc. I closed the notebook, carefully inserted it in the brief case, snapped it shut—and threw it out of the door. Then I realized that I had not buckled my ’chute.

  A further five men jumped in sequence just after Jack Davies, lightening the aircraft and slightly reducing the rate of descent. But the inexorable downward direction continued. Despite this, several men still lingered, paralyzed by fear. It was only when Neveu and Oswalt rushed from the cockpit, looking for their parachutes—with Felix bravely remaining at the controls—that a final panicked exodus from the stricken plane began. Harry Neveu could not find his parachute:

  My first reaction was just stark fear that somebody had thrown my chute out. In their confusion I thought they had thrown it out with the cargo. I couldn’t find it anywhere. The cabin was completely bare: about all there was on the floor was a couple of candy wrappers. And the doorway was jammed with passengers that still hadn’t jumped. And I yelled at them to jump, to get going and I asked where my chute was—where in the hell was my chute—got no response from anybody—so I started searching around and I spotted a chute under the navigator’s table. . . . With a sigh of relief I grabbed it and started putting it on.

  Unable to pluck up courage to jump, Sevareid remained on board. The sheer injustice of losing his life and family horrified him—it was as if a disembodied self were watching his human form hurtling toward oblivion: “Blood was pounding in my head and it was hard to breathe. For a moment there was utter suspension of thought, and I existed in a vacuum. There were no articulated thoughts, only emotional protest ‘Oh, no, no! Oh, no! This can’t happen to me, not to me!’ The mind did not accept it, but the numb body moved toward the door. There was a jam of bodies around the door, and somebody was shoving from behind.” He watched as Bill Stanton galvanized himself, barging his way to the door, shouting above the din of the rushing air, “For Christ’s sake, if you’re not going to jump, get out of the way!”

  Parachute secured, Neveu returned to the cockpit to make one final check to see if he could save the aircraft, but he was turned around by Oswalt, who yelled that their remaining engine was on fire. Seconds remained before they would be incinerated. Oswalt hoped that Felix would be able to follow him from the cockpit. Returning to the cabin, he was appalled to see men still clinging to the plane: “I headed to the door and they were jammed in there, hesitating, afraid to jump, some of them clinging to the side—had to pry their hand loose—hands loose—I shoved one out . . . and about this time the plane started to go into its death roll—started to roll into its dive and the cargo door rolled down facing the earth.”

  As Neveu ran toward him, Sevareid finally staggered to the cargo door, crouching on the right side of the opening. As he did so, a dark green mountain peak passed close by. They were now just above 500 feet, seconds from death, the last point when anyone could jump. Sevareid felt his “knees buckle slightly as the plane tipped abruptly to the left. There was no interval between the realization that the pilotless plane was going into a dive and the action of my body. I closed my eyes and leapt head first into space.” Neveu and the others jumped almost simultaneously as the C-46 began its death roll, Felix sprinting back to jump last. The aircraft seemed to roll over them. “It was damn near,” said Neveu. “Two more seconds and anybody in front of the door would have gone out whether they wanted to or not.”

  For Eric Sevareid, eyes closed tight, the noise of the wind and sudden jolt of the parachute were followed by the realization that he was safe. Somehow he had had the wit to pull the ripcord. He heard someone yell, “My God, I’m going to live!” and realized it was his own voice. Swinging under the silk canopy, he saw the C-46 plow into the mountainside terrifyingly close below and three hours’ worth of aviation fuel erupt into a fireball. He realized that he was frighteningly close to the burning wreck as a sea of trees and scrub rushed up to meet him. Three other parachutes were coming down nearby. “Dear God, don’t let the fire get me. Please!” Sevareid heard himself shout before he crashed through foliage into the bushes of a steep incline, sliding until the parachute caught the undergrowth, arresting his descent.

  Harry Neveu’s jump, likewise, was a new and frightening experience. He felt a rush of air, “a sensation like a violent windstorm,” and immediately pulled his ripcord. Suddenly the noise stopped, and he was swinging in the quiet stillness of the sky. It seemed as though someone had just “turned a strong fan off. Just real quiet.”

  I realized my chute had opened—it was such a relief to know that, as far as I was concerned, I had made it. . . . Then I was halfway anxious over the fact that I was drifting toward the plane, I was afraid I was going to land in it. So I oscillated—really only oscillated once or twice and I started to try to control my ’chute cords to make me drift away from the burning wreckage. Though I didn’t want to do that too much, I figured I’d overdo it and be in danger of spilling the chute, but by this time I was almost to the ground.

  Sevareid stood up, struggling to get his bearings. He was surrounded by dense jungle, panicked by a near-death experience. Hysteria threatened to overwhelm him. But he was alive.

  5

  VINEGAR JOE

  Jack Davies was the State Department’s representative to the CBI theater and hence Lieutenant General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s political adviser. The American presence in the upper reaches of Assam in 1943 came about in the first instance because officials in Washington had been persuaded by virtue of sophisticated and relentless lobbying by Chiang Kai-shek (through his plausible, American-educated wife and her brother, T. V. Soong, a banker and the Kuomintang’s smooth-talking ambassador to Washington) that the United States had a significant role to play in supporting Chinese efforts to engage and perhaps restrain Japanese ambitions in the region. American support of the Chinese, which had begun in 1941, had become formal Allied policy following the conference of Allied leaders at Tehran in May 1943. The conference decided on a strategy of supporting China through air supply while a new land route was built to replace the one that had been lost when Rangoon had fallen to the Japanese the previous year. This road would be pushed through from Ledo, in the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra Valley, 1,125 miles to Kunming. It was a masterpiece of civil engineering that was eventually completed in January 1945. In the meantime, logistical support would be provided to the Chinese by means of an unparalleled airlift of supplies across the daunting range of mountains, a dangerous route quickly dubbed the “Hump” by the pilots of the ATC.

  Stilwell was a Chinese-speaking infantryman whose clear-sightedness with regard to China’s future was ultimately undermined by a profound inability to influence and convince those in Washington (and Delhi) of the merit of his pronounced views. For most of 1943 China was a political battleground between Chiang Kai-shek, Britain, and the United States, and the struggle was almost as intense and protracted as that between these so-called Allies and the Japanese. Indeed, the very reason that Eric Sevareid was a passenger on Flight 12420 on August 2, 1943, was because Roosevelt’s White House team wanted an objective and hopefully unbiased view of what was going on in Chungking. Amid the fog of competing claims and prejudices, clarity was essential. Until now there had been conflicting reports and opinions of Kuomintang intentions and policies and the best strategies to deploy to maximize Chinese strengths in the common defeat of the Japanese. On one side was the sophisticated politicking by T. V. Soong, peddling half-truth
s in Washington to often-gullible politicians willing to believe that China’s single-minded focus was the defeat of the Japanese rather than the defeat of Mao Tse-tung’s communist insurgency or the propping up of the Kuomintang. Likewise, media moguls and pundits sought to distill the complexity of China into simplistic conceptions of black and white, “cowboy and Indian”–type explanations of who was “good” and who was “bad.” On the other side were the alarming reports from Stilwell that China was duping America, that the nationalist Chinese were not willing to do what they promised, and that American blood and treasure were being expended in a vast logistical effort that in actuality was keeping a bunch of corrupt clowns in power. Through the middle of all this came an ego-driven, single-minded American airman by the name of Claire Chennault, who believed that the best expenditure of American resources in this already fractious region was not on training Chinese peasants to fight in Burma under Stilwell but on building an air bridge into China in order to prosecute an aerial bombing campaign directly against Japan.

  Stilwell had in fact spent many years of his military service in China and knew the country, its people, and its politics better than perhaps any other American serviceman. A two-year posting in Shanghai starting in 1911 was followed by a second three-year tour beginning in 1920 and a further three years between 1926 and 1929, during which time he observed China’s breakup under the stresses of revolution. He served a further four years in China as the American military attaché between 1935 and 1939. A gifted linguist, he had traveled extensively and independently before the onset of war while observing the warlords of the Kuomintang coming to power and seeing at first hand the devastation wrought by the Japanese invasion with the consequences of internal revolution. He was thus ideally placed to serve as General George Marshall’s (the chief of staff of the US Army) representative to Chiang Kai-shek, to which post he was appointed in January 1942. The United States had agreed to dispatch lend-lease supplies to China through Burma in early 1941 to bolster Chinese defense efforts against the Japanese. Materiel was shipped into Rangoon port and traveled into the Chinese province of Yunnan by rail from Rangoon to Mandalay to Lashio, and thence by the famous Burma Road, which had been completed in 1938 and ran for 726 miles to Kunming. The road had been scratched, as one American engineer observed, by Chinese villagers along the route “out of the mountain with their fingernails.”a Stilwell was to serve both as Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff, with direct responsibility for training the Chinese Army for war, and as commander of all American forces in the CBI theater. He was expected simultaneously to serve the interests of the United States and China. But with the two sides following diametrically divergent strategies, it was not possible for him to find a way to serve two masters. Both Marshall and Stilwell believed that the Chinese should be forced to commit troops to fight the Japanese in Burma in exchange for US largesse, but until April 1944 Roosevelt refused to tie aid to any specific military demands, allowing Chiang Kai-shek to do what he willed with the thousands of tons of American supplies pouring in across the Hump and along the Burma Road. It didn’t help that with British and American grand strategy from 1942 focused primarily on the defeat of Germany, Stilwell would always be short of necessary supplies and adequate forces.