Art by Romain Hugault

In service the Curtiss C-46 Commando proved reliable and able to carry much greater loads than the Douglas C-47 Skytrain, and the large-diameter cabin allowed awkward items to be carried. The cabin floor was strengthened to allow the airlift of light vehicles and artillery, The C-46 entered service in mid-1942 and was used initially on local duties, Its operations were soon extended to cover the South Atlantic routes supplying the Allied troops in North Africa but it was in Europe and the Far East that the aircraft was used extensively, its most famous route being over the ‘Hump’ between India and China. This consisted of mountainous passes and treacherous makeshift airfields, the cargoes often consisting of ammunition and fuel.

The American Volunteer Group disbanded on July 4, 1942,
having compiled one of the best combat records of any fighter group in history.
They’d “raised hell on a shoestring,” as one AVG pilot boasted to Life
magazine, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek honored the volunteers with a party on the
last night of their official existence. Bond attended, and he greatly amused
Her Eminence by taking two turns through the receiving line, joking on his
second pass that he “couldn’t resist the opportunity to pay his respects
twice.” Inside, Bond dipped into Madame’s nonalcoholic punch, the stiffest
tipple she served, and glad-handed among the AVG personnel. Madame Chiang made
her guests play musical chairs, an unanticipated diversion for hard-carousing
fighter pilots on bellies full of virgin fruit juice, and she made a formal
ceremony of presenting Chennault with an oil portrait of himself standing with
the Chiangs. The party ended early, its only mercy. At 11 P.M., Bond’s
chauffeur drove him through steady rain to the Methodist compound.

Predictably, the Air Corps wasn’t yet prepared to assume the
AVG’s responsibility for the air defense of China. Chennault asked for
volunteers from among his volunteers to hold the fort for the two additional
weeks it would take the Air Corps to get a pursuit group combat-ready. Eighteen
AVG pilots agreed to serve the extra time, including Camille Joseph “Joe”
Rosbert, a black-haired, blue-eyed, middleweight Philadelphian who’d signed on
with Chennault in 1941 to escape the tedium of flying Navy patrol planes. It
wasn’t light duty: One of the holdovers died in action over central China on
July 10. When Rosbert finished his extended service, he went to talk to CNAC in
Calcutta. Unlike the Air Corps, Bond, Sharp, and Woods pitched it straight and
level. Starting salary would be eight hundred dollars per month, for sixty
hours of flying, they said, with ten dollars an hour for hours between sixty
and seventy, and twenty per for hours above seventy. He would stay in Calcutta
for a week or two, then go up-country and fly until he got his hours in, then
back to Calcutta. One of the things that had really stuck in the AVG men’s craw
was that the Army wouldn’t give them the home leave promised in their
contracts. The airline couldn’t send them home right away, either, but it was
receiving an average of two DC-3 types a month in the States and needed people
to fly them to Asia. Based on the delivery schedule, the company promised to
send the AVG men home two at a time for three months’ leave and have them each
fly a plane back at the end of their furloughs.

Good pay, continued flying, home leave, organizational
competence, freedom from uniformed annoyances, luxury living in Calcutta, the
hope of postwar employment with Pan Am, and, most important of all, an
honorable and important way to contribute to the war effort: Joe Rosbert had
heard enough. “Give me the papers,” he said. “I’ll fly for you.”

For Joe Rosbert, it was a fateful decision, one that would
cost him untold agony, and very nearly his life, but the airline was hard to
resist, and when the dust of disbandment settled, the Army Air Corps got five
pilots from the American Volunteer Group. The China National Aviation
Corporation got sixteen.

The tussle did nothing to ease relations between the U.S.
Army and the airline, and considering how closely his company was working with
the military, and the perils of the relationship’s becoming overtly
adversarial, Bond wanted to cultivate a favorable impression with Lieutenant
General Joseph Stilwell, the Army’s top man in Asia. There were a number of
operational questions he hoped Stilwell could resolve, and Bond arranged to
meet him at the general’s Chungking headquarters, a flat-topped, modernist
villa overlooking the Chialing River originally built for T. V. Soong that in
its ascetic design meshed well with Stilwell’s Spartan proclivities.

Stilwell had walked out of Burma five weeks before, and he
looked as thin as barbed wire, and about as spiny, tinged pale yellow by
jaundice he’d contracted from defective yellow fever serum. The day before, his
doctor had diagnosed blood worms, and his debilitating physical ailments
compounded the grinding frustrations of his job. Although the airline’s
allotment of Lend-Lease airplanes came from the highest echelons of the
American government, Stilwell wasn’t pleased, feeling that all military
equipment sent to the area should be subject to his command. He demanded that
Bond justify the allocation.

CNAC was a Chinese company, explained Bond, organized under
Chinese law, and most of its officers were Chinese. Lend-Leasing those planes to
the airline told China it hadn’t been forgotten when most Allied decisions sent
the opposite message.

Military considerations outweighed diplomatic ones, Stilwell
countered.

“General, I’m going to be frank. You’re a West Pointer and
you’re not going to like my explanations, but I can back everything I say with
facts. Point-blank, there is no officer of any rank, nor any unit in the United
States Army, capable of operating over the Hump as well as the China National
Aviation Corporation. None of the Air Corps officers in the Far East think it’s
feasible. They won’t attempt it wholeheartedly unless they’re forced. You need
us to have those airplanes so we can prove it’s possible.”

Bond left the meeting without having gotten his operational
questions answered.

The rains of the southwest monsoon soaked Assam and Burma
through the summer, as they’d done since the middle of May, and the steady
downpours turned unimproved roads and runways into quagmires. Water condensed
in fuel tanks and carburetors, and it was instrument flying most of the way
from Dinjan to Kunming. The vile weather near-grounded the Tenth Air Force’s
newly formed India–China Ferry Command—the unit with which it intended to
prosecute the Hump airlift. CNAC flew regardless, carrying much heavier payloads.
General Stilwell noted the difference in his diary: “No attention to capacity.
CNAC 4,700 lbs., USA, 3,500 lbs. CNAC flying regularly when weather keeps us
grounded.” Ferry Command had 35 planes, and it flew 73 tons into China in July;
CNAC flew 136 tons, using 9 aircraft.

Despite the initial efforts of the airlift, a few hundred
tons delivered were but a drop in the ocean of Free China’s need. Hemmed into
poor western provinces and juggling for power, prestige, and position with
Mao’s Communists and various regional warlords, Nationalist China was under
immense pressure, and the stress manifested in the value of its currency.
Prices in September of 1942 were running thirty to sixty times higher than
they’d been in mid-1937, and the inflationary pace was quickening, accelerated
by the monetary policies of His Excellency Dr. H. H. Kung, Kuomintang minister
of finance, whose primary answer to paucity of revenue, fiscal deficits, and
the arbitrary, enormous, unbudgeted sums the Generalissimo lavished around
China was to print more paper money to cover the shortfalls—which, of course,
did little but devalue the paper and render increasingly worthless bank
deposits, bonds, and the small quantities of cash squirreled into the walls of
peasants’ hovels. In distant Chinese history, the Sung dynasty and the Mongol
Empire had collapsed in inflationary whirlwinds. By the summer of 1942, another
such storm was beginning to batter the supports of Nationalist China. Practical
Chinese saw two ways to safeguard their wealth: hoard commodities and own
gold—the Central Government made both illegal. Regardless, black markets sprang
up like weeds: for medicines, clothing, rice, milk powder, and other
foodstuffs, cosmetics, toothpaste, jewelry, cigarettes, nylon stockings,
perfume, flashlights, Parker pens, wristwatches, typewriter ribbons, envelopes,
gasoline, tires, spark plugs, and scrap metal—any tangible commodity seemed
certain to hold value better than Nationalist currency. CNAC had about thirty
qualified or soon-to-be-qualified pilot-captains on its roster in September
1942, by far the most it had had in its thirteen-year history, and with their
unique ability to get in and out of China, the company’s flight crews and
mechanics were the men in Asia most perfectly positioned to exploit
extracurricular fund-raising opportunities. The corporate leadership hoped its
generous salaries were sufficient to dissuade employees from smuggling, and
sometimes they were. There were less scrupulous men who reached for ever more
lucrative opportunities, however, and for them, the excellent pay provided a
tidy amount of venture capital. In the late summer of 1942, an intrepid airman
could buy an ounce of gold in Calcutta for 180 rupees, fly it over the Hump,
sell it to a Kunming gold bug for 6,300 Chinese dollars, and use that wad to
purchase 406 rupees from any black-market currency trader. In simple financial
terms, an airman buying gold in India and selling it in China earned a 125
percent return on invested capital per successful trip, a market inefficiency
with the power to quickly turn small fortunes into large ones.

On September 2, 1942, the Kunming Airport Inspectorate
stormed aboard a flight piloted by Captain J. A. Porter and found 410.8 ounces
of gold—twenty-five and a half pounds—stashed under his seat, worth more than
two and a half million Chinese dollars on the black market. For the single
flight, Porter stood to profit approximately 14,500 U.S. dollars, a year and a
half’s salary (worth about $180,000 in modern dollars). Customs confiscated
Porter’s gold; Hugh Woods terminated his services. Three Chinese mechanics had
exposed his scheme—Porter must have treated them badly, or else refused to cut
them into his profits, both dangerous courses of action, considering mechanics
controlled the flightworthiness of the airplanes.

Later in the month, inspectors found twenty-two pounds of
gold hidden under a C-53’s washbasin in the lavatory at the rear of the
airplane. The crew denied knowledge of it. The gold probably belonged to Dinjan
mechanics sending it across to Kunming coworkers. Attempting to stifle the
smuggling, William Bond prohibited his flight crews from wearing new clothes,
more than one watch per man, or any gold jewelry besides wedding rings. He
barred them from taking bedrolls, sleeping bags, or blankets on ordinary
flights, and no crew member other than the flight captain was allowed to carry
a fountain pen.

There were other irregularities. Left behind in a Hong Kong
bank, the airline had 148,000 U.S. dollars that Bond hadn’t been able to
evacuate (worth about $1.85 million in modern dollars). He presumed it lost for
the duration. Much to his amazement, the money “turned up” in Chungking in
mid-September. Obviously, it suited the company to have access to the cash, but
its return stank like a Chungking sewer—someone, somewhere in the upper
echelons of the Nationalist government, was doing business in enemy territory.
Bond wondered what quid pro quo had been provided.

In continuation of the tungsten freight-flying business
conducted from Namyung prior to Pearl Harbor, minister of economic affairs and
chairman of the National Resource Commission Wong Wen-hao had pledged to supply
fifteen thousand tons of tungsten to the United States in 1942—a point of
leverage applied to the United States government when the Chinese were trying
to persuade it to commit airplanes to the China airlift. At the time, America’s
tungsten shortage was so acute that the U.S. Army was detailing soldiers to
work in stateside tungsten mines. Bond had helped deliver the message. But in
mid-August the National Resources Commission claimed that tungsten supplies
were “temporarily exhausted,” and pressed the Americans to fly out tin instead.
Bolivia supplied the bulk of American tin, however, a much less logistically
complicated source that didn’t bamboozle the United States into buying metal at
an artificially inflated price by insisting on a twenty-to-one “official”
exchange rate while actual currency values fluctuated from eighty to one
hundred to one. Not wanting to set a precedent, the U.S. Metals Reserve
Company, a quasi-corporate government entity established to coordinate the
supply of metals to the American war machine, didn’t want to fly tin in
tungsten’s stead. Only a handful of Americans realized what caused the tungsten
shortfall. Colonel Frank Dorn, one of General Stilwell’s closest associates,
considered it indicative of the state of China’s belligerency—or lack thereof.
“There exists what amounts to an undeclared peace,” Dorn wrote, “with mail and
a considerable trade going back and forth between occupied and unoccupied
China. That is why tungsten shipments have not been as large as had been
expected. The Japs pay a little better.” The Metals Reserve Company solved the
shortage by raising the price it paid for tungsten.

Most Americans operated under the mistaken assumption that
ridding their country of invaders topped Chinese priorities. Only extreme
realists like Stilwell, Dorn, and Ambassador Gauss perceived that expelling the
Japanese didn’t head the policy agendas of either the Nationalist or the
Communist factions vying to control China, no matter how loudly they each
rattled the anti-Japanese saber. Japan’s bid for Far Eastern hegemony had given
China powerful proxies. Both Communists and Nationalists were quite content to
allow the United States to crush Japan. They were already looking beyond
Japan’s defeat, maneuvering to amass the military, economic, and political
capital for the fight for what was, to them, the greatest prize—the right to
unify and rule China.

The monsoon began petering out in October. Solid overcast
and steady rain fragmented into broken skies and intermittent downpours,
becoming more widely scattered as the month progressed. Bond, Sharp, and Woods
knew the better weather would bring the return of the Japanese, and as far as
they could discern, the Army Air Corps and the Royal Air Force hadn’t made any
meaningful efforts to upgrade the Assam air-warning net while they’d had the
monsoon’s protection. Predictably, a Japanese raid caught Dinjan by surprise on
Sunday, October 25, but the airline took no damage because all of its eleven
Lend-Lease C-53s had left at daybreak and weren’t due back till dusk. On
Monday, Hugh Woods got ten of the planes away at dawn. One pilot was refreshing
his flying procedures in the eleventh, making practice landings on the Dinjan
runway, when he saw the gray-black plumes of bomb-burst eruptions on the field.
He hammered his throttles, hauled his wheels, and roared out of Dinjan at
minimum altitude, not having caught sight of the attacking planes, nor of the
three Japanese Zeros diving onto his tail.b An Army P-40 pilot swooped to his
aid and shot down the lead Zero, only to be shot down and killed by the other
attackers. The airline pilot escaped and flew his empty airplane over the Hump
to Kunming, where he learned how close he’d been to death.c An airline work
gang recovered the body of the P-40 pilot who’d died saving their pilot’s life
and returned it to the Air Corps. Although inexperienced, there was nothing
wrong with Army pilots. Most were uncommonly courageous. It was their
leadership that left so much to be desired.

CNAC suffered no losses in the three days of raids, but the
Air Corps lost two fighters shot down in the air and four other fighters and
ten transports destroyed on the ground, and the attacks rattled the Army
command in Delhi. They instructed their military mission in Chungking to
determine CNAC’s intentions. A telephone call summoned Bond to Army
headquarters, where a group of excited officers huddled around the airline
executive, eager to ascertain if his company intended to keep operating.

“Yes, I suppose so. Why do you ask?”

“Well, it looks like this war has finally started,” gabbed
their spokesperson, telling Bond to keep his chin up, to soldier on against the
difficulties, and assuring him they’d win through in the end.

“For us it started five years ago,” Bond monotoned icily. As
politely as he could manage, he thanked the Army officers for their concern.
Their breathless arrogance would have been so much easier to tolerate if they
were getting their jobs done.

Neither had the Army yet paid anything for the use of CNAC’s
Lend-Lease planes. Bond was negotiating an operating contract for their
services, and although he knew that his company would get paid eventually, the
Army’s glacial accounts payable were wreaking havoc with the airline’s cash
flow. The only thing keeping the Lend-Lease planes in the air was Standard Oil
Company’s very generous agreement not to make the airline pay for gas and oil
until the Army settled its bill. A reprieve came in the form of Mr. Kusminsky,
the Soviet Union’s trade representative, who’d bought eighty tons of mercury in
China. He asked Bond to fly it to India.

“Why don’t you have the Army fly it?” Bond asked. “They’ll
do it for free.”

“So they’ve been telling us for two weeks, but they haven’t
moved a ton.”

Sensing opportunity, Bond arranged to fly the quicksilver
for five hundred U.S. dollars per ton, and his airline got all of it to India
in four days. The Soviets immediately wired payment to New York. Two weeks
later, the airline flew three hundred tons of Russian tin, and the Communists
paid just as promptly, keeping the airline solvent while it waited for the Army
to make good on its promises.

On the other side of the Hump, in Assam, to house the pilots
serving their up-country rotations, the airline had established a hostel in a
tea planter’s bungalow a few miles from the Dinjan airfield. Like every other
structure in the region, it stood on eight-foot stilts to protect it from
monsoon floods. It was a hundred feet wide with a roof of steeply pitched thatch,
and steps rose to meet a wide veranda stretched across the building’s entire
front. Tall, leafy trees cast pleasing shade into the compound. Compared with
the atrocious living conditions to which the Army Air Corps subjected its
Assam-based personnel, the CNAC employees were living high on the hog, but the
airline was still dogged by the same pilot shortage that had hampered it since
the Lend-Lease planes started arriving early in the year. Trying to draw
experienced fliers to Asia, the airline had feelers out in all corners of the
aviation world.

One man who heard the whispers was Pete Goutiere, who, since
Pearl Harbor, had been flying for Pan American Airways–Africa, a Pan Am
subsidiary formed to ferry planes and supplies across that continent, which he’d
joined because the Air Corps considered twenty-seven-year-olds too venerable
for military flying. The Army had revised its opinion in the last eleven
months, but so had Pete Goutiere, and he’d spurned their ham-handed attempts to
recruit the Pan Africa pilots and traveled to Assam hoping to catch on with Pan
Am’s China partnership. An inch or two shorter than six feet, with a leather
flying jacket draped over an arm, and a studiously smushed flying cap perched
on his head when he pushed through the hostel’s rough wooden gate in late
October or early November, Goutiere positively dripped casual pilot glamour.
Out back, he discovered Hugh Woods playing badminton with his fiancée, Maj.
She’d been hired by the airline to manage the hostel.

“I heard you were looking for pilots,” Goutiere said.

“I don’t believe it,” Woody said, chuckling. “We’ve been
looking all over for pilots, and here you come, slouching out of the tea
patches.”

Woods inquired about his experience, and Goutiere gave a
quick verbal résumé: about eight hundred hours, the last three hundred hours as
a DC-3 copilot.

“You’ll do, but I warn you, this ain’t what you’re used to,”
Woods cautioned. The airline had lost its first plane on the Hump recently,
missing without trace. Woody summoned Suklo, the hostel’s Indian housekeeper,
and asked him to show Goutiere to one of the bunks inside.

And Goutiere proceeded to ask Suklo, in fluent Hindi, if
Suklo would be pleased to draw him a hot bath?

Woods nearly dropped his racket.

“Sahib,” mumbled the astonished servant, “Hindi you’re
speaking almost like a native. How come you’re speaking so good?”

Goutiere answered in Hindi, grinning slyly. He’d learned the
language taking pretty little Hindu girls to bed.

Suklo roared with laughter and hurried off to draw the bath
and share the story with the other servants. Pete Goutiere had spent his
childhood in India, and now, after fifteen long years in America, he was ready
to renew his love affair with the Orient.

Woody had Goutiere flown to Calcutta to formalize his employment,
and Goutiere started making Hump trips as copilot to the airline’s more
experienced fliers. Off duty, Goutiere began palling around with Jimmy Fox and
Charles Sharkey, two other recent arrivals. Six feet tall and tomato-pole thin,
swarthy, and sporting a small mustache, Fox was from Dalhart, Texas, where he’d
learned to fly as a teenager and been president of his high school class.
Before the war, he’d earned a degree from the University of California at
Berkeley and he’d migrated to the airline from Pan American Air Ferries.e
Charles Sharkey, of Lawrence, Massachusetts, had joined the airline a month
before the other two, and although Goutiere didn’t think Sharkey looked old
enough to drink, let alone pilot an airplane, he’d recently checked out as
captain, making him the new clique’s veteran. At only twenty-two years old,
Sharkey was the youngest pilot-captain in the China National Aviation
Corporation by a long measure, but he’d been flying since his early teens, when
he’d saved enough spare change and allowance to pay for flying lessons, then
for gas and aircraft hire to build his experience.

He’d come to Asia from Canada, where he’d spent 1940 and
1941 teaching flying to Commonwealth pilot candidates, and he absolutely
refused to let anyone call him Chuck, or Charles, for that matter. He insisted
on “Sharkey,” and with his pockets full of airline money, he’d built himself a
reputation for wild gambling and carousing on Calcutta’s Kariah Road.

Goutiere, Fox, and Sharkey all did one or two flying
rotations in the late autumn and, as most of the airline’s new hires did before
they settled into permanent Calcutta accommodations, when they were downcountry
they stayed in the Grand Hotel or the Great Eastern, opulent constructions of
the British Raj. The Grand faced onto Chowringhee Street and the Maiden,
central Calcutta’s long, thin park running along the east bank of the Hooghly
River. The Great Eastern was a few blocks away, at the intersection of Old
Court House and British India streets. Sharkey, Goutiere, and Fox were off duty
for the holidays, and they gravitated to the Grand’s lavish Christmas banquet.
Civic leaders blacked out the city to confound Japanese bombardiers and
navigators, but behind lightproof curtains, the Grand Hotel was spectacularly
lit for Christmas. American, British, Canadian, Australian, and CNAC uniforms
clustered against the bar. Brass insignia gleamed from the turbans and white
caftan coats of the servants bustling through the hotel, their midriffs wrapped
in red and blue cummerbunds. Right on the stroke of eight o’clock, the
uniformed and liveried majordomo stepped into the bar and announced,
“Gentlemen, dinner is served.”

More than a hundred guests filtered into the dining room and
stood behind their seats, contemplating tables heaped with turkeys and hams,
salads and side dishes, towering plum puddings, candelabras, and holly twigs.
The majordomo gave the order to sit, the orchestra struck up a Christmas carol,
and deep booms outside the hotel interrupted the band’s second stanza. Then
came whistles and yells: “Air raid! Air raid!”

The banquet room disintegrated into a chaos of fleeing
servants, fear-stricken band members, and military men dashing off to join
their units. The electricity failed and the hotel went dark, leaving the gentle
glow of the dining room candles illuminating the CNAC men and the two dozen
assorted uniforms who’d stayed at their seats. Engines droned, sirens wailed,
and more bomb detonations echoed over the city.

“What the hell,” said a voice, “let’s help ourselves before
dinner gets cold.”

A British officer found a carving knife and set to work on a
turkey, loading plate after plate. Another Englishman poured brandy over a plum
pudding and lit it up, the flames quickly subsiding to a blue glow. Sharkey
vaulted the bar and liberated an armload of whisky bottles. After dinner, one
of the Brits played Christmas carols on the hotel piano as the men drank and
sang into the wee hours.

Downstairs the next morning, British Boxing Day, Goutiere
picked a path through the prostrate bodies sprawled among the festive debris.
Thirty woozy steps beyond the dining room and through the foyer and onto the
sidewalk, Goutiere came face-to-face with the hard poverty of Calcutta’s
streets. A naked woman lay motionless on the sidewalk, her thighs wet with her
own menstrual blood, attended by a cloud of fat, hovering flies and two gaunt
dogs. Beggars accosted him. The contrast with the genteel colonial splendor of
the Grand Hotel couldn’t have been more extreme.

A few blocks away, Goutiere checked the airline’s flight
schedule posted on a board outside the bar in the Great Eastern. Another pilot
asked him if he’d heard about Privencal and Lane, two other recent hires.

Apparently, James “Skippy” Lane and Al Privencal had finished
their flying on Christmas Eve and were enjoying a booze session in the lounge
of the Dinjan bungalow. Soon, they were feeling no pain, and Privencal prattled
on about how he’d become a crack shot testing pistols for Colt Firearms before
the war. Eventually, Skippy Lane couldn’t stand it anymore. “Okay, Pri, let’s
see how good you really are,” he called from the other side of the lounge. “I
got ten rupees saying you can’t hit my foot.”

And so twenty-nine-year-old Albert Joseph Privencal from
Mount Tabor, Vermont, whipped a Colt 1911 automatic from his flight holster and
blasted a .45-caliber hole in Skippy Lane’s foot.

The strain of the Hump flying was beginning to tell.