Project 9: The Birth of the Air Commandos in World War II
312
Project 9: The Birth of the Air Commandos in World War II
312eBook
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| ISBN-13: | 9780826273222 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 07/08/2014 |
| Series: | American Military Experience , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 345,852 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Project 9
The Birth of the Air Commandos in World War II
By Dennis R. Okerstrom
University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2014 The Curators of the University of MissouriAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-7322-2
CHAPTER 1
An axiom of World War II is that the campaign in Burma was largely "the forgotten war," the stepchild of the China-Burma-India front, a backwater battle in the Asia-Pacific theater. It was recognized as such even while events were unfolding. The end of the supply line. The war no one cared about. A writer for the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs said in April 1945 that the Burma campaign had been "overshadowed by the climax of the war against Germany and the great advances in the Pacific."
What little most Americans knew about the war in Burma was focused largely on the exploits of Americans there: first, the dashing pilots who became known as the Flying Tigers, the American Volunteer Group under Claire Chennault; second, the exploits of Gen. "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell and his Chinese troops, which came to include the group known as Merrill's Marauders; third, the intrepid fliers hauling fuel and supplies over the Himalayas, the Hump pilots who battled ferocious winds, abysmal weather, and the world's highest mountains to keep the supply lines open and ensure that China remained an ally in the war effort.
A few movies featured the Burma front, but most were eminently forgettable: Burma Convoy, with wretched acting and amateurish settings; Bombs over Burma, a melodrama with a villainous Englishman serving as a double agent for the Japanese; and A Yank on the Burma Road, mostly set in Kunming, the China terminus. At the close of the war Errol Flynn enraged the British by starring in Objective Burma, a film that suggested that Americans had largely fought the Burma campaign themselves, with perhaps a bit of help from the British. The film was banned in Britain until 1952 and then shown with an apology.
In truth British and Commonwealth troops largely fought the war against the Japanese in Burma in one of the most physically demanding arenas of the entire global conflict, often in hand-to-hand combat with no quarter given or expected. Rugged mountains, swift-flowing rivers, tangled jungle, and horrific weather made Burma one of the least desirable places on the planet to wage war. In the north, head-hunting tribes were reputed to live in the Naga Hills, along the Hump route from Chabua to Kunming. Dense forests of hundred-foot teak trees made aerial reconnaissance difficult; marshy grasslands impeded land movement and in the rainy season turned vast areas into impassable swamps. These features, coupled with diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and dysentery, and a plethora of poisonous snakes and other unpleasant creatures, meant that Burma wore out men and machines at an astonishing rate. Then, of course, there was the actual armed enemy, the Japanese, who often were fanatical in their attacks and cruel in their treatment of prisoners. When Rangoon fell to the Japanese in March 1942, British, Indian, and Chinese troops waged a quiet but deadly war against the occupying Japanese that would erupt into a full-scale battle by early 1944, when Japanese troops invaded India and British forces marched into Burma. The fighting was ghastly. Britain's 14th Army alone suffered more than 40,000 battle casualties.
The reasons for the lack of American interest in Burma were complex and varied, but they centered on the view that Burma itself was not terribly important and certainly not worth the effort it would take to push out the Japanese. The British, having lost control of a valuable colony, naturally felt differently. However, American military planners believed that the northern part of Burma was important as a means of keeping China in the war by getting supplies to China from India. As early as mid-1943 top British and American military planners envisioned one key to defeating Japan would be a bombing campaign of the island nation by B-29 Superfortresses, and bases in China were vital to that strategic goal. While the British believed that crushing Japanese forces and liberating all of Burma should be a key goal as well, American planners were unwilling to spend much capital—in men or materiel—to realize it. The Burma Road, and later the Ledo Road, which wound through northern Burma, were worth some considerable effort as pipelines for supplies to China, and Gen. Joseph Stilwell and his Chinese troops eventually prevailed, with coordinated help from British and American forces. But in the meantime advocates of American airpower showed what intrepid fliers and the mind-boggling capacity of U.S. industry could do. Roads were not necessary, it seemed.
The command structure in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater was complex, a mixture of British and American leadership roles that did not reflect the numerical imbalance of their respective troops in the theater. The convoluted lines of command would present problems later. Lord Louis Mountbatten, operating from New Delhi, was selected as the overall leader—the supreme commander—of the South East Asia Command (SEAC), and he in turn asked U.S. Maj. Gen. George E. Stratemeyer to form a combined aerial force for the region. The Eastern Air Command had four air arms: the Tactical Air Force, Strategic Air Force, Photo-Reconnaissance Force, and Troop Carrier Command. The Troop Carrier Command (TCC) was under Brig. Gen. William D. Old, a capable and courageous U.S. flier himself, who often led from the cockpit. For ground troops the organizational chart was equally byzantine, with Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell a key and at times obstreperous player. Stilwell had no love for the British, and he held several simultaneous positions that made him virtually independent in the CBI: He was deputy supreme commander of SEAC, as well as chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek; additionally Stilwell had operational control of Northern Combat Area Command. In the words of a popular song, he was his own grandpa. Relations among Allied ground commanders were frequently icy, but in the corridors of airpower the chill often thawed: as the Brits and Americans came to know each other well, and to depend on each other, the working relationships were often quite warm. Air lanes over the eastern end of the Himalayas and across northern Burma, while costly in terms of lives and goods, could in fact keep China supplied with fuel and the weapons of war.
A key to keeping the air routes safe for the transport of thousands of tons of war supplies was disrupting the lines of Japanese communications and transportation. That would be the mission of the eccentric British major general Orde Wingate, whose troops would operate behind enemy lines and would be inserted and then supplied by a colorful and unusual American air task force, originally called Project 9.
Comprised of a small select group of U.S. airmen, later to become known as the 1st Air Commandos, Project 9 was secretly tasked with providing aerial support to British troops operating hundreds of miles behind enemy lines. The original group of 523 men—of whom, astonishingly, 300 were pilots—would fly gliders, cargo planes, fighters, bombers, light aircraft, and the world's first operational helicopters as an extremely unorthodox and independent unit equipped so fully that it was autonomous. They would aid Wingate by inserting his troops into remote jungle clearings in Burma by glider. At night. They would then keep him supplied, evacuate his wounded, and serve as aerial artillery for the ground war. The Air Commando chief was an American fighter pilot, Col. Philip Cochran, a good-looking, glib, independent-thinking combat flier already immortalized as Flip Corkin in the comic strip Terry and the Pirates. His cocommander was Johnny Alison.
Cochran and Alison were given carte blanche to build an organization to support Wingate while simultaneously and unobtrusively displaying the capabilities of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Over six months, during which they also had to organize, train, and deploy their unit to India, they put together a group of men as colorful and individualistic as they and who included some of the best-known fighter pilots of the time, a member of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, a top major league baseball player, and the biggest child actor of the silent films of the 1920s and 1930s.
They answered only to Gen. H. H. "Hap" Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces. The 1st Air Commandos were authorized by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself, as requested in person by Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, at the Quebec Conference in August 1943.
Before the war most Americans doubtless would have associated the name Burma with men's shaving cream, as the marketing strategy of Burma Shave used hundreds of jingles—white letters on small red signs—placed along the nation's highways.
"Our fortune / is your shaven face / it's our best / advertising space" was a blatant admission of the signs' mission. Some jingles were simply bad puns: "Ben met Anna / made a hit / neglected beard / Ben – Anna split." Others were fairly clever: "Said farmer Brown / who's bald on top / 'wish I could / rotate the crop.'" Virtually all the doggerel was written by Allan Odell, son of the founder of Burma Shave, Clinton Odell.
Between the wars it is doubtful, however, that the average American could have located Burma, if given a global map, or said much about the geography, history, climate, or potential strategic importance of the country. Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia of 1936, found in even the most remote farmhouses of the day, devoted barely a single page to the country; a lone black-and-white photograph depicted a tiny spired haven perched on a balancing rock. The caption read: "Thoughts of the next world should not be difficult to worshippers at the Kyaktiyo Pagoda, in the mountains of Burma. For not only does this boulder overhang a steep chasm, but it rocks gently back and forth when the wind blows."
Mountains of Burma, indeed. In just a few years Americans would know about the mountains—the northern range would be given the not-so-affectionate nickname "the Hump" by pilots hauling cargo into China—as well as the rivers, jungle, hills and highlands, and coastal regions. Burma was a country of varied geography, with two major seasons—the wet and the dry—and a long history of conquest and war, some impossibly exotic-sounding rivers, fantastic crumbling pagodas and ancient ruins of long-ago cities, and a diverse population with ethnic tribal loyalties that were often united as much by their hatred of the British colonial regime as by their religion, Buddhism.
Geographically the country lies between India on the west and French Indo-China on the east, China to the north and northeast, and the Bay of Bengal to the south. It appears to have been constructed by a giant with a rake who left deep furrows and rows of hills, all going north to south. Four main rivers flow down from China to the Indian Ocean: the Chindwin in the west, then the great Irrawaddy, the Sittang, and the Salween in the east. If you squint your eyes as you look at a map, you might visualize the country as shaped rather like the head of a goat in profile, with a long beard that is the coastal region of Tenasserim. The country is a bit larger than the state of Texas, and about half of it is in the broad valley of the Irrawaddy. The upper valley is high, arid, intensely hot in the summer, and creased with steep gorges that quickly turn deadly as rain washes down from the higher places. To the south, including the coastal regions of Arakan and the Tenasserim, the land is lush, with teak trees, elephant grass, and thousands of other species of tropical plants fueled by the humidity and steady rains. Around the 1,000-mile valley of the Irrawaddy is a collar of highlands, forming a natural barrier that, while not preventing a series of invasions, at least made the efforts difficult for the invaders while also giving to the inhabitants an illusory sense of protection and isolation. On the west, separating Burma from India, rise the Chin Hills, rugged mountains that form a natural barrier between the two countries, and in the east a long frontier borders Thailand, or Siam. Teak and rice were Burma's major products for the Commonwealth, but Burma's strategic location gave it value beyond its commercial potential.
Historically Burma had been the scene for many centuries of a series of invasions and internal wars, not unlike other places where ideas, religions, and the promise of wealth clashed with competing views. Mongols, Chinese, Portuguese, British, and then Japanese invaded, and between invasions competing kings of city-states fought numerous wars.
British interests in Burma had revolved around commerce and the need for raw materials for the empire's home industries, as well as its markets for finished goods. As European leaders from the time of the first voyage of Columbus began dividing up the globe through wars and treaties, the fear that old enemies might obtain some trade or strategic advantage in unclaimed corners of the world drove the actions of centuries of governments. For more than sixty years, beginning in 1820, the colonial armies of Great Britain, based in India, had clashed with a variety of leaders in Burma. In 1885 Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, helped instigate events that would allow the British Empire to annex Burma without provoking too much outrage from the other European monarchies and republics.
Much as the American newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst was able to stir up demand for war with Spain in 1898—helped by the accidental explosion of a boiler aboard the warship USS Maine—so too did the Times of London contribute to a shameless mercantile scheme to gain unfettered access to the rice, teak, and jade of Burma. A man of dubious morals but with extremely good connections, Giovanni Andreino (his brother was the Roman Catholic bishop in Burma, and Giovanni had been appointed representative of the three largest British trading firms in Burma), claimed to have a secret document sent by the French to the Burmese foreign minister. It proposed that the French would smuggle arms into Burma from French Indo-China, just across the Mekong, in exchange for monopolies on a variety of Burmese goods and raw materials.
At the time Burma was under the watchful eye of the British. Lord Churchill, then a young and rising politician, saw political opportunity in the situation, although it would require skill and a certain amount of luck. Skill he possessed; luck was furnished him when the Burmese Council of State levied a huge fine against a British company with the exotic name of Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. The Council of State determined that the BBTC had exported teak lumber without paying royalties, and the Burmese government, known as the Court of Ava, refused to reconsider the fine. This was a golden opportunity for the British to remove the king, Thibaw, and install a more compliant ruler. The British sent to Mandalay, the ancient city near the midpoint of the miles-wide Irrawaddy River, a list of demands for arbitration and other considerations, including Burma's surrender and the country's acceptance of a role subservient to India's. A deadline for compliance was set, and Gen. Sir Harry Prendergast was appointed to lead an expedition up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay.
The Burma Expeditionary Force made quick work of the ill-equipped and poorly trained legions of the Burmese king, all done in such a way that the French were unlikely to launch a counterattack. After all, what nation could allow a backwater country such as Burma to levy such a fine, thumbing its nose with impunity while also striking a most dangerous blow against free trade?
British colonialism thus arrived in Burma, and as happened too often in too many places, the colonial power made a mess of its relations with the indigenous people. The king was exiled to India, never to return, but the people around his teak palace later saw the carcass of his white elephant, virtually a deity itself, dragged unceremoniously from the grounds. Although it apparently had died of natural causes, this outrage was not to be endured. That, and other high-handed or thoughtless incidents, created an ongoing insurgency throughout Burma that left hundreds of British troops dead in countless ambushes and thousands of Burmese publicly executed by the occupying forces.
The situation remained much the same throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Although not exactly the blueprint for insurgency such as occurred in Iraq after the 2003 invasion by the United States and its coalition partners, the situation meant tension remained high between Burmese nationalists and British colonials.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Project 9 by Dennis R. Okerstrom. Copyright © 2014 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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