Art by Romain Hugault

The loss of Burma drove a Texas-sized wedge between China
and India. Japanese forces inside the salient threatened offensives into both
countries and severed the Middle Kingdom from overland supply. American
leadership feared China would quit the war. Time and again in recent years,
they’d been told what China could accomplish given modern means, often in
personal letters from Madame Chiang Kai-shek written on “Headquarters of the
Generalissimo” stationery, and a steady flood of Kuomintang propaganda sold the
public the same story. China was America’s darling, the favorite ally—the
United States’ intrinsic anti-European resentment always tempered its
pro-British feelings—and popular opinion demanded action to help China
immediately. Much civilian sentiment believed Chinese manpower wedded to
American matériel and know-how was the easiest, fastest, and least expensive
manner to hit Japan. Not surprisingly, considering their sensitivity to public
opinion, China enthusiasm ran hotter in Congress, the White House, and the
State Department than it did in the Department of War. Vermont senator Warren
Robinson Austin publicly demanded that more be done to support China’s war
effort.

Chief of naval operations Admiral King, the Navy’s top
officer, deplored Senator Austin’s pronouncements. “If such conception [as
Senator Austin’s] is seriously held by those controlling high strategy it is
fatally defective.… China’s [lack of] offensive spirit, physical and political,
and difficulties of transportation were continuously reported before the fall
of Rangoon. The simple truth is that we will be well on [our] way toward
defeating Japan by the time [meaningful] lines [of supply] can be opened.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General George C.
Marshall concurred with the Navy’s assessment. The U.S. ambassador to China,
Clarence Gauss, had been sending home sobering evaluations of Chinese
capabilities and intentions, and an Army officer on a liaison mission in China
had presciently surmised that the Nationalist Chinese would “shun offensive
action, wait until their allies had won the war, and then use their jealously
husbanded supplies for the solution to the Communist problem.” Despite their
uneasy public alliance in the United Front, for both Kuomintang and Communists,
the fight to control China was the paramount conflict.

However, the American people lacked such a subtle
understanding. They believed in China, and so did President Roosevelt. A
self-admitted Sinophile due to Delano family roots in the China trade, he and
many influential members of the State Department expected China to play an
important role in Japan’s defeat and, as a strong, stable nation, to help
guarantee peace in postwar Asia. Besides, on the eve of Rangoon’s loss two
months before, President Roosevelt had specifically promised Chiang Kai-shek
that American support would continue to reach China regardless of whether or
not Japan closed the overland route, and as recently as April 28, President
Roosevelt had assured the “gallant people of China that … ways will
be found to deliver airplanes and munitions of war to the armies of
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.”

Burma’s loss left airlift as the only means by which aid
could be delivered, but considering the horrendous intervening topography and
the impending monsoon, it wasn’t clear whether an airlift to China was
feasible. Given unlimited resources, no professional air officer would have
shied from the challenge, but the same shortage of transport aircraft that had
hampered the China National Aviation Corporation since 1939 dogged Allied
logisticians in the middle of 1942. Transport aircraft were extremely valuable
assets that significantly enhanced the combat power of the units they
supported, and there simply were not enough of them to satisfy the demands of
every theater. Committing to China a major portion of those projected to come
available meant shorting the fight against Hitler, the most dangerous enemy.

President Roosevelt made his position clear in a May 5
memorandum that he wrote to Lieutenant General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of
the U.S. Army Air Corps: “It is essential that our route [to China] be kept
open, no matter how difficult.”

The memo stayed in the White House overnight. It was
delivered to General Arnold with a note appended by Harry Hopkins on May 6:
“The President is very anxious that you see Soong today sometime.”

General Arnold duly summoned the Chinese foreign minister.
To balance Arnold’s experience, T. V. Soong wanted his own aviation expert at
the meeting, and later that day, in carefully tailored suits, William Langhorne
Bond and the rotund foreign minister presented themselves in the “temporary
buildings” lining the National Mall that had been built to house the War
Department during the Great War, twenty-five years before.† Uniformed aides
escorted Bond and Soong to a situation room. Chairs semi-circled a wall-mounted
map of Asia and the Pacific that illustrated a dismal story—the enemy had won a
hemisphere in six months. Capping the gloomy mood, banner headlines across the
morning’s New York Times and Washington Post announced the surrender of
Corregidor, America’s last toehold in the Philippines. A flock of officers
milled about at the back of the room, waiting to begin a staff meeting once
General Arnold dispensed with T. V. Soong, which Bond interpreted as a
reflection of the relative importance the Air Corps assigned China. General
Arnold appeared, his remaining white hair sheared so close it made his ears
protrude beyond stern, fleshy cheeks. Without pleasantries, Arnold hoisted two
chairs over to the map, keeping one for himself and motioning Soong into the
other. Bond hesitated, then took another chair forward and settled himself off
the minister’s shoulder as Arnold began a lecture on the difficulties of
getting war matériel to China, citing the lengthy voyage to India at a time
when an agonizing shipping shortage was the single biggest damper on America’s
ability to deploy combat power. Each round-trip to India occupied a ship for
four months. Matériel unloaded in Calcutta, Bombay, or Karachi spent weeks
mired in the Indian rail network before reaching Assam, and those were only
some of the more serious frictions wearing at the logistic chain before
supplies reached the beginning of an airlift. Arnold then sank his teeth into
that topic, lamenting aircraft shortages, un- and underdeveloped airfields and
facilities in India and China, and the region’s atrocious geography and
meteorology. The highest summits of the eastern Himalayas soared into the
middle reaches of the stratosphere, past twenty-three thousand feet, altitudes
unattainable by loaded transports. Hundreds of peaks towered over fifteen
thousand feet, none of the passes dipped below ten thousand, and the southwest
monsoon blanketed South Asia from mid-May until mid-October, dumping constant
rain. Violent thunderstorms plagued the area in the months before the monsoon.
Only in late autumn and winter was the weather predictably clear, and those
conditions were hardly benign—the cold at altitude was paralytic, invisible
winds tearing over the mountains could actually move a plane backward, and
there were no clouds in which to hide from marauding Japanese pursuit
squadrons.

Bond found General Arnold remarkably well versed in reasons
the airlift wouldn’t succeed, considering he’d never visited the area or flown
the route. When Arnold railed on about how impossible it would be to fly across
a region washed by five hundred inches of annual rainfall, Bond couldn’t
contain himself any longer. “Sir, I’ve heard about these five hundred inches
from lots of people, but I’ve never actually met anyone with direct knowledge.
Supposedly, it’s just one place. We keep schedules in the monsoon without undue
difficulty.”

General Arnold plowed ahead, deploring the state of radio
navigation facilities on the Asian mainland. Bond noted that his airline was
installing three-hundred-foot radio navigation towers at Kunming, Calcutta, and
Dinjan, all of which would be in operation within ninety days.

Undaunted, the general soldiered forward. His discourse was
generally accurate, but in Bond’s mind the data didn’t support the conclusion
Arnold had obviously already reached—that flying a strategically significant
quantity of supplies to China wasn’t worth the effort it would entail. Arnold
seemed devoid of sympathy for China’s predicament, and his brusque
condescension embarrassed Bond on Soong’s behalf. The Chinese foreign minister
sat through it in stony silence, until Arnold stood and terminated the meeting.
Soong barely spoke until they were outside the War Department. “You did your
best, Bondy, and you were wise not to persist.”

“It’s depressing. He should realize we know more about
flying over there than anybody else.”

“The interest isn’t there.”

After extensive lobbying in the War Department, the State
Department, the White House, and the Lend-Lease Administration, which was
headed by Edward Stettinius, father of Juan Trippe’s wife Betty, Bond, Bixby,
and Soong had received assurances of airplanes for CNAC. The initial deliveries
were to be DC-3 passenger liners stripped from domestic service and converted
to cargo use, officially making them C-53s. Later would come C-47s, the
military version of the DC-3 constructed specifically for carrying freight.
“Dr. Soong, if you make sure we get those Lend-Lease planes, we’ll demonstrate
so clearly the route can be flown he’ll have to do it,” Bond vowed.

The first of the promised planes had already begun arriving
in eastern India, along with increasing numbers of Army airplanes, personnel,
and equipment, but as the Army Air Corps stepped up its operational pace, its
general level of competence failed to impress the professional aviators of the
China National Aviation Corporation. There were scores of examples. Moon Chin
had had trouble flying into Lashio because a raw Army radio operator could
handle only one incoming flight. The airline’s Chinese radio operators, vastly
more experienced men, routinely handled multiple aircraft simultaneously. An
Air Corps pilot flying passengers from Chungking to Kunming had gotten so badly
lost that he ran out of fuel and crashed 150 miles from Canton, closer to
Japanese lines than to his intended destination. Chuck Sharp rescued one of the
eight B-17 heavy bombers the Air Corps had managed to get to India after it
made an emergency landing on a Hooghly River sandbar because the Air Corps was
unwilling to undertake a high-risk, short-field takeoff from the soft surface,
and AVG ground crews had had a series of near disasters attempting takeoff from
Kunming in an Air Corps Douglas piloted by an inexperienced lieutenant.
Finally—and barely—aloft, the volunteers demanded to return to Kunming and
insisted that CNAC fly them instead.

Since Pearl Harbor, Chennault’s AVG—the Flying Tigers—had
spent more time in combat than any other American pilots in the world, by far,
and they’d been phenomenally successful, but they were also an extremely
awkward outfit to fit into the overall war effort. Air Corps enterprises would
soon dwarf the AVG, and Army morale couldn’t tolerate fighting alongside a band
of highly paid civilians. However, Chennault, his fliers, and the Chinese
government wanted to keep the volunteers operating as currently constituted,
extolling their motivation, skill, and flexibility. What to do with the
volunteer group, how to support and employ it, and whether or not to induct it
into the U.S. military had been subjects of lively debate in China and
Washington from the moment America entered the war.

Heading the Army’s aviation efforts on the Asian mainland
was forty-six-year-old Brigadier General Clayton L. Bissell, commander of the
Tenth Air Force, and one of Bissell’s many responsibilities was implementing,
executing, and managing the China airlift, which President Roosevelt had
required the Air Corps to undertake. A War Department favorite who’d compiled
an excellent record as a staff officer, Bissell was expert in unglamorous but
essential logistics. Chennault coveted his job, but Generals Marshall, Arnold,
and Stilwell worried that Chennault’s extremely close, long-running
relationship with China compromised his ability to act in U.S. interests, nor
did any of them think he could handle the required staff work. On paper,
Bissell and Chennault seemed an excellent combination: expert logistician and
cunning tactician. In reality, it was an unfortunate pairing, because Claire
Chennault loathed Clayton Bissell. Nor was Chennault’s opinion unique. Most
people found Bissell extraordinarily unpleasant, but since he had
responsibility for airlifting supplies to China, he was one of the officers
with whom CNAC was required to work most closely.

Bond had promised that an airlift to China was possible; he
hadn’t promised that it would be easy. A host of problems hampered initial
efforts: shortages of airplanes, personnel, and spare parts; difficulties
getting supplies to Assam for transport to China; muddy, underdeveloped
airfields—Dinjan was improving rapidly, but its condition still dragged on performance;
and the monsoon rains that had dogged the region since mid-May grounded Air
Corps transports for eight days in late May and for thirteen days of June.
Complicating everything was the terrain of the route itself—leaving India, the
planes had to climb over the 10,000- to 12,000-foot summits of the Patkai Range
on the Burma-India border, cross the trackless jungles of north Burma, and then
surmount the 15,000-foot summits of the Three Gorges country, high, rugged
mountains that had acquired a fearsome reputation, and a nickname—pilots were
calling them “the Hump.”

Arthur Young was covering Bond’s responsibilities while Bond
was in Washington, and Bissell summoned him to a meeting in Chungking because
Bissell didn’t think the airline was using its airplanes efficiently or doing
its best against the monsoon weather, and he implied CNAC was making no effort
to fly out a large quantity of tin and tungsten waiting in Kunming for outward
shipment. He demanded an explanation as to why two of the airline’s nine
Lend-Lease airplanes were grounded. Young received the dressing-down with
consternation, not expert enough to parry the attacks and, back at his office,
Young wrote a letter to Chuck Sharp loaded with Bissell’s criticisms.

Sharp didn’t appreciate the condescension from a bookish
economist, not one bit, nor the relay of criticism from General Bissell, the
head of an organization that Sharp regarded as barely competent. In Sharp’s
judgment, the Army had made very few flights into China relative to the quantity
of equipment it had on hand. To him, it looked like the Air Corps was in over
its head, which, in his eyes, was demonstrated conclusively—and tragically—in
early June, when, intending to add an offensive nucleus to Allied airpower in
China, the Air Corps sent a batch of B-25s to the Orient to replace those lost
in the Doolittle raid. The first six had reached Calcutta as May turned into
June, commanded by Major Gordon Leland. The major planned to fly to Dinjan on
June 2 and then over the Hump to Kunming the next day, announcing his presence
in-theater by bombing Lashio en route.

Chuck Sharp was at the airport while the Air Corps readied
the crossing, and he offered to brief the Army pilots and navigators regarding
terrain, charts, radio stations, routes, and procedures, sharing the wisdom of
his ten years of Asian flying. Major Leland rejected Sharp’s advance, adamant
that he and his fliers had all the information they needed.

Grossly overloaded with personal equipment, extra
fifty-caliber ammunition, and full loads of ordnance—so much “essential” weight
that they opted to fly without much reserve fuel—the flight left Dinjan and
bombed the Lashio airfield, blowing up one Japanese plane. Two enemy pursuits
jumped the six bombers immediately afterward. Four of the B-25s fire-walled
their throttles and dashed for a cloud bank. The enemy mauled the two bombers
that kept to cruising speed in order to husband their fuel supply, killing a
radio operator. A few minutes after reaching the imagined safety of the clouds,
three of the four escaping bombers crashed full throttle into a mountainside.
The fourth was lost over unfamiliar, cloud-covered terrain. Panicked, the Army
tried to get CNAC’s Kunming direction-finding station to give bearings to the
disoriented plane—but with none of its own planes inbound, the airline’s
Kunming staff had gone off duty. The lost bomber ran out of gas, and its crew
bailed out near Changyi, where Foxie Kent had been killed in October 1940. Of
the six B-25s, only two badly shot-up planes reached Kunming. The Army lost
four bombers—and nineteen men.

Enraged, General Bissell blamed CNAC for the fiasco, at
least partly. Chuck Sharp refused to bear one iota of responsibility. He’d come
to China in 1933 because his one thousand hours of flying experience wasn’t
enough to land him a job as a copilot in a domestic airline, and since then,
he’d amassed some ten thousand hours of sky time. Most Air Corps higher-ups
hadn’t flown in years, and as for the junior ones, Sharp didn’t think many of
the three- or four-hundred-hour “experts” arriving in the Far East at the
controls of multi-engine aircraft could tell an elevator from an earflap. The
inexperience of the Army pilots was excusable considering the Air Corps’s
astonishing expansion; the attitude of their leadership was not. Most mid- and
upper-echelon Air Corps officers struck Sharp and the rest of the company’s
people as amateur blowhards, hell-bent on showing the civilians how things were
done, Army fashion—an extraordinarily unintelligent attitude, considering that
the airline had five years of wartime experience. Sharp dashed off a letter and
“jumped right down Bissell’s throat [wearing] hob-nailed boots and spurs,”
laying fault where it fairly belonged—on Air Corps arrogance and incompetence.

Wonderful as it was to be in Washington with his wife, their
two sons, and the extended relations, William Bond never felt completely
comfortable at Hayes Manor. Events in Asia and the Pacific worried him too
much. The complete loss of Burma made an airlift seem the only hope of keeping
China in the fight. With the exception of the four Japanese aircraft carriers
recently sunk in the waters off Midway Island, the war wasn’t going well, and
Midway was many thousands of miles from the regions of Asia that concerned his
airline. T. V. Soong had held Bond in the United States through April and May,
using Bond’s practical expertise to counterweigh the Air Corps’ “can’t do”
attitude with regard to a China airlift, but Washington’s commitment to the
project seemed to solidify in late May and early June, and Soong decided that
he could afford to let Bond return to Asia.

Bondy and Kitsi had dinner with Lauchlin Currie and his wife
as part of his predeparture round of social engagements, both business and
pleasure. The foursome had just sat down to dinner when they were interrupted
by a telephone call from Stanley Hornbeck, ordering Bond to a morning meeting
with General George C. Marshall, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the
de facto commander of the entire Allied war effort. At the War Department,
Marshall was upright and proper and immaculately uniformed, but he was also
scrupulously polite and considerate, the picture of professional courtesy and
mutual respect, all in marked contrast to the impression Bond had formed of
General Arnold a few weeks before. Inside his office, Marshall explained that
he needed an informal envoy to carry a message to the Generalissimo, and that
Stanley Hornbeck had recommended Bond. Of course, Bond agreed without
hesitation, flattered to have the confidence of the Allies’ top-ranking
military man. Marshall summarized what he needed conveyed, acknowledging that
the war hadn’t gone well since Pearl Harbor. Setbacks in the Middle and Far
East had forced Marshall to divert Lend-Lease resources intended for China to
help the British defend Burma, India, and Egypt. Burma and India had to be
given higher short-run priority, since China couldn’t contribute as an active
ally without India. Marshall knew that Chiang blamed Britain for those
decisions, although Marshall had made them with no goal in mind but the
quickest possible defeat of Japan. Marshall wanted his strategic thinking
explained to the Generalissimo, but he couldn’t do it through official channels
without provoking howls of formal Chinese protest and demands for return
concessions.

Soon after the meeting, Bond began the two-week odyssey back
to Asia, and he delivered Marshall’s message to Madame Chiang in Chungking.
Madame received it politely and assured Bond that the Generalissimo understood
entirely.

Unfortunately, Chuck Sharp had done much to sour the
airline’s relationship with General Bissell and the Air Corps while Bond was in
the United States. As Bond noted in a letter to Bixby after he’d reached Asia,
“There was some justification for his wanting to do this, but no justification
for him actually doing it.” Bond made General Bissell’s acquaintance,
discussing needs for direction-finding equipment, and before long, he too was
experiencing some of the aggravations that had unhinged Sharp. General Bissell
challenged his every statement, apparently on general principle. Bond thought
he enjoyed such conflict, and came to consider it typical of interactions with
Bissell in particular and the Army in general. “However, CNAC is and will
continue to cooperate one hundred percent,” he informed Bixby. “Whether it will
be because of or in spite of the General remains to be seen.”

Part of the Army’s resentment seemed due to the
statistically unarguable qualitative gap between the two organizations. The
Army flew 106 tons to China in June 1942; the China National Aviation
Corporation flew 91 tons, with one-third the number of aircraft. If the Army
had kept the airline consistently supplied with cargo, it could have flown much
more.

The two Chinese divisions retreating northwest from
Myitkyina had spent the last half of May and most of June thrashing
north-northwest through thick jungles and monsoon downpours toward the head of
the Chindwin Valley, from which they could escape over the Indian frontier to
Ledo, in Upper Assam. The increasingly wretched survivors were only fifty miles
from safety when the Generalissimo changed their orders. He allowed one
division to march out to Ledo, but he ordered the other to make a 90-degree
eastward turn back to China across the jungles of north Burma and the rugged
heart of the Three Gorges country, condemning the soldiers to months of
indescribable misery in some of the world’s most punishing terrain.

Intermittently, U.S. Army planes flying under the monsoon
cloud cover had dropped supplies to the unfortunate infantrymen, but not enough
food was getting through. Chiang Kai-shek wanted CNAC on the job. The minister
of communications passed the order to William Bond, and Bond went to see
General Bissell, who blew up when Bond explained his instructions. It was a
waste of effort, Bissell roared. The Chinese division was going to starve
walking out to China instead of taking the shorter route to India.

Bond said he could understand why the Generalissimo wanted
his army in China instead of India, even if the terrain was more difficult. All
he wanted to do was help the Chinese soldiers.

Daily, for the next four days, the minister of
communications telephoned Bond and asked why support wasn’t reaching the
starving infantrymen. Over the Hump in Dinjan, Hugh Woods had airplanes ready
to go, but the Army wasn’t supplying any food.

Bissell’s cussedness forced Bond into an untenable position:
Either lie to a ministry of the Chinese government with which he’d been
honorably conducting business for eleven years or tell the truth—that an
American general so disagreed with Chiang Kai-shek’s policy that he was willing
to let Chinese soldiers suffer when he had the means to alleviate their plight,
which was sure to damage Sino-American relations at the highest levels. To the
Chinese, Bond hemmed and hawed, citing imaginary operational difficulties.
After the fourth day, he at last confronted the general. “I can’t assume this
blame any longer. I’ve got to make an intelligent report to the minister. We’re
ready but can’t get food. What can I report?”

Food appeared the next day, CNAC began making airdrops, and
the Chinese infantry continued its awful journey to China. “That doesn’t sound
reasonable, and it isn’t,” Bond wrote to Bixby, describing the imbroglio, “but
it is far more reasonable than many things I see being done.”

Aside from the difficulties of dealing with the U.S. Army
Air Corps, Bond’s biggest problem in the middle months of 1942 was pilots.
Given the two-per-month rate of Lend-Lease airplane deliveries he and T. V.
Soong had secured, the airline needed to add four to six aircrews every month
in order to operate the new planes efficiently. Bond had lured a handful of
pilots to Asia while he was in the United States, but he needed far more, and
the Air Corps’ massive expansion was hoovering most qualified men into uniform.
The airline’s obvious short-run solution was to sign on the pilots and ground
technicians of Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group—Chennault had lost
his campaign to maintain his pursuit group’s civilian-flavored independence,
which the Army simply couldn’t tolerate, and the group was going to be
disbanded when their yearlong contracts started expiring in early July.
Ironically, the Air Corps needed the services of Chennault’s men, and it hoped
to entice them to uniformed service, but unfortunately for the Army’s suit,
General Bissell fronted its recruitment efforts, and his threats, bluster, and
bravado could hardly have been better calculated to offend the volunteers.
Aware of CNAC’s allure, the Army tried to prevent the airline from hiring any
AVG personnel. Messages from Bixby in New York and from Army commanders in
India and China expressly prohibited the airline from recruiting Chennault’s
people, but the messages contained no threats serious enough to dissuade Bond,
Sharp, and Woods from keeping quiet feelers out among them.