World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF CHINA: Ferry to Chungking

The dripping hand of the monsoon lay heavy on northern India and Burma, but the U.S. Ferrying Command flew on, up to Kunming, to Chungking, to many another secret China base.

There was dire need for the risks they ran, and for the trickle of supplies that was slowly becoming a tiny but continuous stream. China was desperate for all they could carry, and for the combat planes and ground crews that other pilots were ferrying over northern Burma. The Chinese still had 50 miles of railroad in east China, which denied the Japanese the use of the line between Shanghai and the south. But the Jap had taken the last of three fine airfields prepared by the Chinese in Chekiang and Kiangsi Provinces against the day when the Americans would come with bombers. Now in Chungking, China’s leaders looked to Burma and the clammy cloud of the monsoon.

Pilots of the Chungking Ferry—regulars, veterans of U.S. airlines, reserve officers—had never seen such incredible, sloshing weather. No longer did they sound the old pilots’ wheeze, that even the crows were walking. The new one was that the fish were drowning. Near one Ferrying Command base the skies bucket down 500 inches of rain in the five months of the monsoon (average New York City annual rainfall, 43 in.), and up to now the rainmaker was on schedule.

All the trimmings of tough flying went with the water—hail, sleet, air that was rougher than an Oklahoma line squall, terrain on which (said the pilots) a bird would break his legs in a forced landing. Yet the Chungking Ferry ran almost daily, riding instruments, dodging the Jap, who came up when there were holes in the weather.

Slight, sleek-haired Brigadier General Earl Naiden, boss of the Chungking Ferry (and Chief of Staff to India Air Commander Lewis H. Brereton), was one man who was not surprised at the results. He had picked his men with care and an eye to their ability on instruments. He had flown the line himself and had had the daylights shaken out of him. Now he was ironing out operational procedures, shaking the last kinks out of the line that must supplant the last Burma road and then step up deliveries beyond any maximum that the trucks could have reached. But that time is not yet. Unless a great many more planes are put on the ferry hop China will continue to be virtually cut off from all U.S. supplies and help.

The Chungking Ferry carries everything: bombs, guns, ammo, medical supplies, even gasoline for the thin stores of China, even though the quantity carried is only a drop in the bucket. Its planes fly unarmed, crawl into clouds or hedgehop through the valleys when the Jap jumps them up, hoping the A.V.G. will come out to rescue them. When the A.V.G. is busy elsewhere, they manage to get through anyhow.

Occasionally they have intimate contact with the Jap, who sets his radios on the same frequency the Ferry uses. The Jap speaks English, hisses his bitterness at the freighters as he chases them, promises wrathfully to give them a tea party, meaning that he will soon visit one of their India bases, which are surrounded by tea plantations. But the routine the U.S. pilots like best is the patter they use when they have outlegged the Jap and come within range of their destination.

Then the U.S. pilot picks up his mike and gets off the best insult he knows. Sample opening: “Your Emperor is a son of a turtle.” Jap reply: “You are son of bitch and never go to heaven.”

So far the Jap has been half right. No Chungking Ferryman has yet gone to heaven. Not a plane has been lost.