AIR WAR: The Hump to Kimpo

Said Air Force Major General William H. Tunner, a World War II commander of the India-China airlift: “We who worked the Hump always knew that what was done there could be picked up bodily, carried to any part of the world, and started up again.” Two years ago, as commander of the Berlin airlift, Tunner carried the Hump operation to Germany. Last week he started it up again at Korea’s Kimpo airfield.

Only a day after marines had driven the last North Koreans off the field, workhorse C-54s and C-119 “Flying Boxcars” were starting to set down at Kimpo at the rate of one every ten minutes during the daylight hours—almost half the average Berlin airlift rate.

On the first day of the Kimpo airlift Tunner’s newly formed Combat Cargo Command delivered 280 air-cargo specialists and 215 tons of supplies—bombs, ammunition, high-octane gasoline, equipment for stepping up the pace of the new job. In its first four days, the Kimpo airlift landed 1,337 tons of supplies and 604 passengers. On return flights it evacuated 313 wounded to Japan.

On its fifth day of operations the airlift flew into Kimpo about 2,400 paratroopers with trucks, trailers and weapons.

By week’s end Tunner’s men had installed landing lights and Ground Controlled Approach equipment at Kimpo. Soon they hoped to increase the landing rate to one plane every six minutes around the clock. The speed-up wouldn’t stop there. “The trouble with airplanes,” says hard-driving General Tunner, “is that they spend altogether too much time on the ground.”