One could toss a coin to determine Cathay Pacific’s exact place of birth. There are two obvious choices. Shanghai in 1946 is one possibility – that is where Roy Farrell, the godfather of Cathay, began commercial air operations with his DC-3, ‘Betsy’ (‘my baby’ as he calls her), the pigmy ancestor of today’s family of flying Titans. Hong Kong is the other – there Farrell’s first handful of aircraft achieved adulthood as ‘Cathay Pacific Airways’, and there the airline first drew the attention of rich and important suitors. In a dilapidated Hong Kong painfully recuperating from Japanese occupation and the Second World War, Cathay was ‘discovered’ and launched to fame and fortune rather as Lana Turner was ‘spotted’ and shot to stardom from Schwab’s drugstore in Hollywood – although in Cathay’s case fortune did not come overnight.
Even so, the airline began as a gleam in Roy Farrell’s eye in a remoter place and at an earlier time. The place was Dinjan in British India; and at the time, 1942, the Second World War had reached a point when circumstances were at their bleakest. Indeed, it might be said that one of the world’s greatest international airlines emerged from the steamy confusion of a makeshift Assamese wartime airstrip rather as Life itself crawled out of the world’s primeval swamps. Dinjan: who has heard of it? Yet for a while, from 1942, it achieved a certain fame.
That year, 1942, was the worst of times. The unstoppable Japanese army had rolled through Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, had pursued the British out of Burma and arrived at a gallop on the eastern borders of India, driving a wedge of mountain and jungle between, on the one hand, the demoralized British and Indian forces in India and, on the other, the Chinese Nationalists and their American allies. Moreover, on their way the Japanese had closed the Burma Road, the most important Allied supply route into China – in fact, the only remaining lifeline. For already Japanese forces, battling since 1937 with the ill-coordinated Nationalist Chinese units of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, had occupied China’s coastal cities and in a series of relentless offensives had pushed Chiang back into the remote upland regions of the country’s centre and west. Japan was now poised to knock Nationalist China out of the war.
On the upper reaches of the Yangtze River at Chungking Chiang made an emergency capital. By now he urgently needed any help he could get from his allies. But with the Burma Road closed and the only other land supply route, from Hanoi to Kunming, sealed off by the surrender in 1941 of French Indo-China, how could help be delivered? Yet to deliver it became a priority for the Allied High Command. The reason for that was not simply altruistic love of Chiang Kai-shek. The fervent hope was that with the active support of China-based United States Air Force bombers and fighters under General Claire Chennault, Chiang’s men would manage to tie down thousands of Japanese troops while the Americans’ knockout effort against the Japanese fatherland got under way in the Pacific. ‘Keep China in the war’ – that was the cry in Washington and London. ‘Keep the Japanese busy’ was what that cry really meant. But to be kept in the war Chiang’s China needed arms, ammunition, and an expensive spectrum of supplies from clothing to paper clips, or resistance to the Japanese might collapse. How on earth were these supplies to be delivered to the mountains of central China?
The Allied commanders saw only one possibility: by air from India – admittedly no ordinary route. This one would have to cross one of the world’s natural wonders – the uncharted barrier of formidable mountains at the eastern end of the Himalayas, a region of soaring walls of dark or snow-covered rock that soon came to be known to the world as ‘the Hump’. But was it feasible? At what times of the year could heavily laden piston-engined transports operate over it? At what height? What were the risks from Japanese fighters based in Burma? Could they operate at night? A swift reconnaissance led to a report, on the basis of which the planners in Washington and Chungking gave the go-ahead and the largest and most successful air transport operation of the war began, under the command of the irascible American commander-in-chief of the China–India–Burma theatre, Lieutenant-General Joseph Stilwell – ‘Vinegar’ by nickname, pure vinegar by nature.
At the Indian end of the Hump, British and Americans set up their headquarters in Calcutta, the largest port in eastern India, and looked for airfields. The Dinjan field was a mere pinprick on a general’s wall map but it happened to be particularly well situated in Upper Assam for the launching of transports across the Hump. And it was already the operational base for two RAF squadrons. Dinjan it would be, and by the time Roy Farrell was posted there it had become a noisy, overcrowded home-from-home for aircraft and aircrews from both the American Army Air Corps’ Transport Command (ATC) and the hybrid China National Aviation Company (CNAC).
CNAC is important to this story. It had been a Sino-American organization since 1933, when Pan American Airways acquired a 45 per cent share against the Chinese Government’s 55 per cent. Prewar, Pan American had begun to fly passengers across the Pacific from San Francisco to Manila via Honolulu; later that route extended as far as Hong Kong, where CNAC’s DC-2s and DC-3s, based in Shanghai, were waiting to shuttle Pan American’s passengers into China. That link-up was a milestone in aviation pioneering, for in effect Pan American had built an air bridge spanning 8,000 miles of Pacific Ocean to join America to Asia.
The Second World War put paid to that. With the fall of Shanghai to the Japanese, CNAC’s headquarters were moved perforce to Hong Kong, and when that fell, to Kunming. By 1942 Japanese soldiers were inside the borders of India, Japanese aircraft controlled the skies of Burma, administrative and organizational muddle and shortages of airstrips, supplies, roads and labour were the order of the day – but the men of CNAC rose to the occasion. Indeed, CNAC’s pilots, engineers and radio operators became the human backbone of the Hump story. Roy Farrell and Sydney de Kantzow, an Australian, were only two of many experienced Pan American fliers to put on air force uniform. Engineers, air controllers and administrators did so too, and their experience made things work.
In the semi-chaos of Dinjan, Roy Farrell began to fly the aircraft that would shape his future. He and other young pilots, flying ten Douglas DC-3s (Dakotas) and three C-47s, the Dakota’s military version, inaugurated the route to Kunming and Chungking – 550 miles to Kunming plus an additional 450 miles to Chungking on the Yangtze River. Another twenty-five aircraft in Calcutta completed the fleet. Dinjan airstrip took its name from a nearby tea plantation in the valley of the holy Brahmaputra River. A long way inland, it stood only 90 feet above sea level. To the north rose the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world, a petrified tidal wave; to the east were the wild, razor-backed Naga Hill tracts where a tribal people, once head-hunters and only quite recently converted to Baptism by British and American missionaries, cultivated rice on precipitous hillsides to which their thatched huts clung like ticks to a dog’s back. Beyond them were Japanese-occupied Burma, more mountains, more ravines, and – China.
Little backwoods Dinjan was far from ready for anything as considerable as the Hump operation, and the priority task of lengthening its runways and improving its primitive accommodation was hampered by the airfield’s inaccessibility and by the fearful weather conditions that prevailed in Upper Assam for at least half the year. Between May and October there could be 200 inches of monsoon rain. Despite this, flying had to go on, and did so at considerable risk to aircraft and crews. Only when the water lay nine inches on the runway were operations suspended and the runway drained. At other times heavy fogs closed everything down.
The living conditions were poor and the food worse. The crews lived in dank huts half-hidden in tall grass. The first Americans to arrive were housed ten miles from the airfield, and each day faced the torture of a drive to the airstrip in ramshackle trucks over muddy roads and through a miasma of heat and dust. There was wildlife to contend with. Nights were shattered by the sudden trumpeting of inquisitive elephants. Screams of ‘Cobra! Cobra!’ halted operations as chalk-faced ground staff bolted from their DC-3s. Snakes took to the cool, dry metal floors of the Dakotas as men take to feather beds; coiled behind shady bulkheads, they had only to raise their sleepy heads to start a small stampede. As for mosquitoes, there were so many that it was rumoured that the devilish Japs were dropping them at night in camouflaged canisters.
Reminiscing years later in Dallas, Farrell told me, ‘The things to avoid were malaria and dengue fever.’
‘You got them?’
‘Neither one. Although once, when I was drinking too much, I gave the grog up for six months.’ He laughed. ‘And then, of course, I got everything from leprosy down.’
As for the actual flying over the Hump – one wonders how for three years or so the Allied commanders could find enough men sufficiently bold or foolhardy to continue doing it. ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’ and ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer’ were both Second World War hit songs from Tin Pan Alley, the lyrics of which would have sounded highly appropriate on the lips of the CNAC and ATC flyers (and probably did). One of them (not Farrell) wrote long afterwards, ‘There was the army saying, “You don’t find any atheists in infantry foxholes”. We adapted to “You won’t find any atheists in an airplane cockpit over the Hump”. All pilots were fatalists. It couldn’t happen to them.’ Unfortunately, it happened to a great many.
As for the DC-3s and C-47 Skytrains, as someone said of the Model Τ Ford, they were ‘hard-working, commonplace, heroic’. Their endurance soon became a legend, and it remains one. Still in service after more than fifty years – the first of them flew in December 1935 – the diminutive twin-engined DC-3 is the most widely used transport plane ever built; 10,000 of them left the assembly lines in the Second World War alone. The C-47 had wider doors, a strengthened fuselage and undercarriage, and could carry two jeeps or three aircraft engines or twenty-eight fully equipped men. It flew to a normal maximum of 12,000 unpressurized feet; in the special conditions of the Hump the American and British pilots habitually flew at 18,000 feet: there was little choice if you wanted to avoid prowling Japanese Zeros coming up at you from captured British airstrips in Burma.
As for the route itself, the Hump flight plan was simple and unvaried. You wrapped up warm and took off from Dinjan; you turned east towards the 10,000-foot Patkai Range; you climbed over the upper reaches of the Chindwin River to the 14,000-foot Kumon Mountains; you bumped gamely over three river valleys – the Irrawaddy, Salween and Mekong. And then, if all was well, you faced your Becher’s Brook: the 15,000–20,000-foot Santung Range. The Santung was the real Hump.
It was a very bleak place to die in, and you could die in a number of ways. Lack of pressurization was a serious drawback at Hump heights, but not a fatal one: you felt sick and dopey, but you lived. If a Japanese Zero fighter shot you down, of course you died. Engine failure in that wilderness would, at best, land you among freezing mountain ridges and ice-choked fissures which no one had mapped. There you froze to death unless by remote chance some friendly local tribesmen, Nagas or Kachins, led you to their huts and revived you with concoctions of stewed leaves and rice wine. Those flyers who did bale out over the Hump and managed to walk out alive eventually formed a club – the Walkers’ Club. It was very small and very exclusive.
The climate was the most successful killer of all. The absolute lack of weather forecasting was a terrible hazard. In those days electronic systems were primitive and the Hump weather was notorious. High-pressure masses were forever rolling up across Burma to the eastern Himalayas, to rendezvous there with violent blizzards sweeping down from the Gobi Desert and Siberia. Crosswinds of up to 125mph were commonplace. Several C-47s were flipped over by sudden down-draughts, which sometimes literally tore cargoes out through the bottom of aircraft. Wings were buckled and warped by severe icing, against which aircraft had little or no protection. The overcast could extend up to 29,000 feet, and on so broad a front that sometimes flights had to be made on instruments all the way from Dinjan to Kunming. It was all right for a light-hearted Roy Farrell, forty years later, cheerfully stirring his pint of iced tea in a Texan diner, to joke to me about driving his C-47 across the Hump without a glimpse of Mother Earth until he found his nose practically scraping the runway the other end, but what could it have been like to flog over those fearful mountains day after day – and often night after freezing night as well, because the CNAC crews decided to add night-flying over the Hump to their schedules? It was easier to lose the Japanese fighters in the dark.
Talking to Farrell in Dallas I said, ‘You must have lost many friends.’
‘Hell, yes. And, you know, now and again they went in a creepy way. One day, a guy, a friend called Cookie Cook, wanted my seat, the co-pilot’s seat. We were going off to Chungking: four planes. “Sure,” I said. Well, they got to Chungking. And it was overcast, see? What they didn’t know was, at the airfield the people down there had moved the beacon. They’d moved it but no one had been told a thing. So what happened? The leading plane went down through the overcast, and soon a column of smoke came up. Why? Who knew? Then Cookie’s plane went down through the cloud – well, hell, he thought he knew the place and no one had told him about that beacon. And so there was another column of smoke.’ Roy paused to shake his head. ‘As I said, Cookie had taken my place. That’s how things happened.’
Random facts cast a lurid light on the terrible cost in casualties. During Hump operations between June and December 1943 there were 135 major accidents and 168 men were killed or posted missing. A single Hump storm cost ATC nine planes and thirty-one crewmen; one day, no fewer than thirty transport aircraft were obliged to circle Upper Assam for hours, unable to land for the dense fog. As time (and fuel) ran out, the men in the airfield’s control tower had no alternative but to try to talk them down one by one, fearing the worst. Of the thirty, eighteen aircraft landed safely; seven crashed; and five planes ran out of fuel before they could get down and were abandoned in the air.
That’s the kind of thing that happened in those days.