Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  The mules, as the farm boy had predicted, walked docilely into the glider and took their places. When the glider trundled down the runway and became airborne, they seemed unconcerned. And when the glider banked, the mules banked, too, just as though they were veteran frequent fliers.

  As the time for the Chindits’ foray into Burma approached, the air force supporting them grew to impressive proportions.

  Worried they would not get the air support they needed from the British, the American commanders requested—and got—twelve B-25H bombers from the United States Tenth Air Force. In reality, the twin-engine B-25 in this configuration was a combination fighter-bomber. It carried six .50-caliber machine guns and a forward-firing 75mm cannon. It carried a crew of five. But only one of them was a pilot, and he flew it like a fighter plane, aiming through the same kind of gunsight used in fighters for air-to-air combat and squeezing a trigger on the control wheel to fire his guns. In fact, many of the bomber pilots were fighter pilots, and they switched back and forth, flying one mission in a bomber and then strapping into a fighter for the afternoon sortie.

  At its peak, the unit had 346 aircraft: 150 CG-4A troop gliders; 25 TG-5 training gliders; 100 L-1 and L-5 light planes; 30 P-51A fighters; 13 C-47 transports; 12 UC-64 small transports; 12 B-25H bombers; and 4 YR-4 helicopters.

  While the glider and transport crews trained with the Chindits, the bomber, fighter, and light-plane crews pitched in to help out in the war.

  On 3 February 1944, Cochran took a flight of five Mustangs into combat for the first time, and on 12 February, the newly arrived B-25s went to war. Wingate flew along in one plane and was visibly impressed when the pilot fired his 75mm cannon and blew the roof off a large building. The pilot didn’t tell Wingate he was aiming at a railway switch two hundred yards from the building he had hit.

  From 3 February until 4 March, the day before Operation Thursday, the unit flew fifty-four fighter-bomber missions.

  On one mission, Cochran led a flight of sixteen Mustangs in an attack on a Japanese supply depot in Mandalay. As they began their attack, they got careless and were surprised by what Cochran described as “a horde” of Japanese Zero fighters. Because the Japanese had the jump on them, Cochran shouted orders by radio to his men to get “down and out”—dive for the ground and run for home. He stayed over the target to make sure his men had broken off the engagement. When he headed for home, he ran into the Zeros that had been chasing the other American fighters.

  One of the Americans had been shot down. It was mistakenly reported that the downed pilot was Cochran. Before he could clarify the report, his hometown newspaper had printed a headline reporting his death in action.

  When Cochran returned to his base, he was grounded. It had belatedly occurred to Wingate and others that he knew too much about the forthcoming operation to risk having him taken prisoner by the Japanese.

  The light-plane pilots also got the opportunity to practice exactly the kind of operations they were slated to perform as they supported the Chindits in their foray into Burma. A British army, attacking the Japanese on the Arakan front, along the Burma-India border, suffered a number of casualties. Within three weeks, seven hundred wounded or sick British troops were flown by the American light-plane pilots from the Arakan front to airfields in the rear, where they could be transferred to C-47s and moved back to hospitals in India.

  Even the gliders got a chance at on-the-job training. One glider was called upon to insert a British patrol behind Japanese lines. They landed safely, but the glider was damaged, so the crew had to walk back to India. In another instance, on 29 February, two gliders carried folding boats, outboard motors, and gasoline to British troops preparing to cross the Chindwin River. They landed on a sandbar. The gliders were later snatched off the sandbar and flown back to Lalaghat.

  By this time, the “snatch” technique had been improved to the point where it was possible for a C-47, flying at twenty feet altitude at night, to pick up a fully loaded glider. This was done through the use of a boom, with a hook attachment, extending from the plane. As it flew overhead, the hook caught the glider tow rope, which was suspended in a frame about twelve feet off the ground. Wingate was so intrigued that he insisted on being one of the passengers in the first test of this technique.

  As the date neared for the beginning of Operation Thursday, it was only five months since the American aircrews had begun their training back in North Carolina and little more than three months since they had begun working with the Chindits. But, despite the brief time for preparations and training, everyone was ready to go—except for one thing. Wingate had insisted that it would be foolhardy to send his men into combat unless there was a major offensive to draw attention away from his small force. Despite many aborted plans, there was no Allied offensive ready to go.

  The entire operation might have been called off. But the Japanese obliged by launching an offensive of their own, known as U-Go. Wingate gave the go-ahead for Operation Thursday.

  CHAPTER 4

  Deep in Enemy Territory

  In the first hours of the landing at Broadway, the officers waiting back in India became convinced that the Japanese knew about the operation and had attacked the troops as they glided down to a rough landing. But the Japanese had not discovered the landing at Broadway—in fact, were not even aware of the Allies’ effort to insert a powerful military force deep in territory they thought was theirs.

  The Japanese knew that something was up, but they were badly mistaken in their assumption about what was going on.

  What had happened was this:

  As they boarded the gliders for Operation Thursday, the Chindit veterans of the Longcloth disaster the year before were determined not to be stranded again deep in enemy territory. Each man packed a little extra—extra food, extra ammunition. Somehow, even an extra horse was carried along. The gliders were supposed to take off carrying seventy-five hundred pounds—and that was stretching it. Instead, Cochran later estimated in a note to General Arnold, they were badly overloaded, carrying nine thousand pounds.

  Almost as soon as they took off, the extra weight made itself felt. Two gliders crashed shortly after takeoff. Four more broke loose and landed in India without even crossing into Burma. As the tow planes struggled up over the Chin Hills, the glider pilots had difficulty maintaining the proper tension on the tow ropes. Even though there was a bright moon, haze in the air gave the sky a silvery glow that made it difficult for the pilots to see the tow planes. When word of the problems reached him, Cochran ordered the tow planes to turn on their lights and told the glider pilots to move up into the high tow station, where it would be easier to maintain the proper position.

  By the time the new orders went into effect, nine gliders had broken loose and descended into Japanese-held territory on the eastern side of the Chindwin River.

  The survivors of one of the gliders that landed in Japanese territory set out for India on foot. As they crossed the Chindwin River, Cpl. Estil I. Nienaber, who could not swim, was swept away in the swift current. He didn’t call for help. Instead, he went silently to his death, avoiding a sound that might have alerted Japanese patrols. He is still remembered as one of the earliest air commando heroes. Most of the crews and passengers of the gliders that went down in enemy territory managed to return to India or make it on to Broadway.

  Almost as though it had been planned that way, seven of the gliders landed close to various Japanese command posts. Two came down near the 31st Division headquarters. Two more landed near the 15th Division headquarters, and three were near regimental headquarters. The Japanese understandably assumed these landings were part of a small commando force assigned to knock out the Japanese leadership rather than part of a full-scale airborne invasion. They thus focused all their attention on defending their bastions of strength against this phantom threat rather than going out to look for the something bigger that was really going on. At least partially because of this unplanned diversion, it was a week or mo
re before the Japanese understood the situation.

  This diversion of the enemy’s attention gave Alison and the men at Broadway the respite they needed to prepare their defenses and turn their rough clearing in the jungle into an airstrip that would soon become the busiest airport in the world. They had a big job ahead of them.

  One of the two gliders that had crashed in the jungle carried the leader of the engineering team that was supposed to prepare the airstrip. He and all the others in the glider were killed. Alison turned to the senior surviving engineer officer, an inexperienced young second lieutenant.

  When Alison asked how long it would take to make the airfield usable, he replied: “If I have it done by this afternoon, will that be too late?”

  With help from the Chindits, the Americans set about clearing the wreckage of the gliders and, using bulldozers and mules, to smoothing the grassy field and turning it into a strip capable of handling C-47 transports.

  At 4:30 P.M., they flashed word that a lighted, forty-three-hundred-foot runway would be ready to receive transport planes that night. An hour later, six planes took off from India, headed for Broadway. During that night, flying a virtual nonstop shuttle, the transports delivered sixty-two planeloads of men, mules, equipment, and supplies to Broadway.

  The whole operation went so well that an elated Wingate moved up, by two days, his plans to deliver the 111th Brigade to the clearing code-named Chowringhee. As with the operation at Broadway, a glider-borne force was sent in to secure the field and prepare it for the landing of transport planes. But the glider carrying the sole bulldozer destined for the operation crashed, destroying the bulldozer and killing all onboard.

  Another bulldozer was hurriedly flown over from Broadway, and a second was ordered flown in from Calcutta. Word came that the field would be cleared and lit late on the night of 7 March. At midnight, twenty-four planes took off, destined for Chowringhee. But then a radio message reported that only a twenty-seven-hundred-foot section of runway was lit—too short for the C-47s. The planes were recalled, although four of them didn’t get the word and managed to land safely at Chowringhee despite the short runway.

  Because of the problems with the Chowringhee operation, Cochran diverted all the transports to Broadway. During that night, Broadway received ninety-two planeloads—an average of sixteen planes an hour, or more than one every four minutes, all night long.

  While the buildup continued, the other half of the air force Cochran and Alison had assembled was also busy. On 8 March, intelligence reported that the Japanese were massing aircraft in the Shwebo area, north of Mandalay. Twenty-one Mustangs took off from Hailakandi, each armed with one five-hundred-pound bomb. They found seventeen fighters on the ground at the Japanese airfield at Anisakan. After dropping their bombs, they roared back and forth across the field, raking it with machine-gun fire.

  On the way home, the fighters passed over two other airfields, at Shwebo and Onbauk. At the two fields, they counted some sixty fighters, bombers, transports, and trainers, either landing or already on the ground. The Mustangs dove on the fields, firing their machine guns until their ammunition ran out. When they arrived back at Hailakandi, many of the same pilots climbed into the cockpits of the twelve B-25 bombers and headed back to the attack.

  When the series of attacks was over, the airfields were ablaze and fourty-eight Japanese aircraft had been destroyed. In that one day, the air commando pilots had accounted for more than forty percent of all the Japanese aircraft destroyed in the entire China-Burma-India theater of war during the month of March and severely crippled both the Japanese offensive and the enemy’s ability to strike back at the Chindits.

  As soon as their bases were secure, the Chindits of the 3d Indian Division fanned out from Broadway and Chowringhee to begin harassing the Japanese in their hit-and-run raids. Operation Thursday—the movement of Wingate’s force deep into Burma—officially ended on 11 March. But Broadway remained as a major staging area for the Chindits’ operations.

  It was in this phase of the operation that the light-plane force proved its worth. Flying from Broadway and a new base named Aberdeen (Wingate had closed down Chowringhee just before the Japanese hit it with a powerful force), small planes were able to land and take off from sandbars and tiny clearings in the jungle, delivering supplies and ferrying sick and wounded Chindits back to the jungle bases, where they were loaded into the bigger C-47s for evacuation to hospitals in India.

  The pilots of the little planes—all enlisted men—flew literally at treetop level.

  Stam Robertson of Plainville, Connecticut, who was a staff sergeant pilot, says, “I grin sometimes, what the FAA would think about me doing that. It got to the point when I came to a tree, I’d just raise one wing and go over it. One Brit I took out, he said: ‘Gee, mate, don’t these birds go any higher? I can see the bird nests down there.’ I said: ‘If we get higher, we’re a target. Down here, we’re hard to see.’”

  Flying at such low altitudes made it very difficult to navigate, especially in the early days before the pilots learned their way around the area in which they were operating.

  “It was hard to navigate,” Robertson says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a hunting dog; he’ll jump up to look around. I’d do the same thing: pull up to a hundred foot just to get a look around, and then I’d come right down again.”

  The maneuverability of the little planes and their ability to fly so low was their major protection against Japanese fighters. In a test before Operation Thursday began, a light plane was matched against a Mustang. The pilot of the speedy fighter never was able to get the little plane in his sights.

  Richard D. Snyder, of Cumming, Georgia, was one of the young light-plane pilots.

  “The first guy I flew out,” he recalls, “had both of his testicles shot off. I felt so sorry for that man. When I picked him up, he was sitting over there drinking a cup of tea. That guy got up and walked to my plane, with both of his testicles shot off.

  “When I was flying an L-1, if you put stretchers in it, you could only haul two. But I have hauled as many as seven if they were able to sit up. On one mission, I had a load of them in there; I had six or seven in there, and I thought they were Gurkha soldiers. When I got back to Broadway to unload ’em, this doctor said, ‘Why are you bringing me these Jap prisoners?’ I had a load of Japanese prisoners and didn’t know it. I had one sitting in there with his legs over my shoulders. Hell, I never saw any Japs before. I didn’t know they were Japs. Some of them were wounded, but some of them weren’t. I never could understand it. They just loaded ’em in there and said, ‘Take ’em out.’

  “I hauled one Japanese officer out one time. I tied his thumbs together with strings and then tied them to the top of the airplane. And I was talking to him in pidgin English: ‘No gun. You no shoot. I shoot you.’ I flew him back to the base, and when I let him out of the airplane, he turned around and said, ‘Thank you very much for the ride.’ He could speak English better than I could, but he never said a word until he got out of the airplane.”

  Flying through the trees, landing on sandbars and on tiny strips in the jungle, often overloaded, the small planes were responsible for evacuating as many as fifteen hundred casualties, providing an enormous boost to the morale of the Chindits.

  But there were some places that even the tiny planes couldn’t go. Late in April, one of the light planes crashed near a road in Japanese-controlled territory. The pilot and his three injured passengers hid in the jungle. If they could not be rescued, they would have to try to walk the thirty miles or so to Aberdeen, hoping to avoid capture along the way.

  James Phelan, a helicopter mechanic who had just arrived a few days before, recalls Cochran saying, “Let’s try the eggbeater.”

  Lieutenant Carter Harman loaded the cabin of his little YR-4 helicopter with five-gallon cans of gasoline and took off from Lalaghat on 21 April and flew by stages to Aberdeen. Light planes carrying fuel met him on sandbars along the way. On 23 Apr
il, with Stam Robertson, in his L-1, leading the way, he flew out to the downed plane and ferried the pilot and the three casualties—one at a time—back to Aberdeen.

  His exploit was the first use of a helicopter in combat. In the next few days, he flew another eighteen combat sorties. But the experimental craft was so badly underpowered that the engine finally failed, and the helicopter was taken out of service. The helicopter played a historic, but minor, role in these early days of the air commandos.

  The Japanese finally found Broadway, a bustling air base deep in their territory, on 11 March. On that day, fighter-bombers made thirteen attacks on the base, and ground forces also arrived to try to put Broadway out of commission.

  “When there was an attack going on, they’d call us on the radio and say, don’t come home, they were under attack,” Snyder recalls. “We’d fly out five or six miles, stay away from the base, and watch them while they were doing it, and when they’d leave, we’d go in and land.”

  The Japanese attacks did relatively little damage and never did succeed in knocking out Broadway.

  The enemy did cause the Allies considerably more trouble near the city of Mawlu. On 17 March, a brigade of Chindits fortified a hill north of the city in a position to block traffic on the main north-south rail and road link between Mandalay and Myitkyina. While setting up shop in a fixed position was a violation of the Chindits’ basic hit-and-run strategy, the fact that the air commandos were available to keep them supplied made it possible for them to remain there and deny the Japanese use of the road and rail lines.

  The base came under almost constant attack by the Japanese, but, with help from the air commandos, the soldiers on the ground were able to beat them off.

  So many bundles were dropped into the Chindit position that the hillside became covered with abandoned parachutes, and the pilots quickly nicknamed the position White City.