Beyond Lion Rock Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  Roy Farrell flew freight from Dinjan; Syd de Kantzow in Calcutta mostly flew people. An article in an Australian newspaper brashly entitled ‘The Man Who Saved Chiang’ described Syd’s flying career as follows:

  Before going to China, Captain de Kantzow gained his commercial flying experience in Australia and in England. Later, as test pilot for the Bristol Aircraft Company, he flew Blenheim bombers to Greece. With the collapse of Greece, he returned to Britain and was immediately selected by the RAF Transport Command for the ferrying of much-needed bombers from America to Britain…. After a year of this work on the North Atlantic, he transferred to Pan American Airways to fly aircraft across the South Atlantic from Brazil to Africa. As Pan American Airways are part shareholders of the CNAC, de Kantzow later got his opportunity to fly in China….

  Australia … Britain … Greece … North Atlantic … South Atlantic … China – Syd de Kantzow had be
en well acquainted with responsibilities and risks by the time he first looked down on the Hump. It was Syd who had made the initial survey of the Hump supply route on which the decision to go ahead had been based. From time to time asked for specifically by name, he flew the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, and ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell and Major-General Orde Wingate, the eccentrically brilliant British Chindit commander, as well.

  De Kantzow was undemonstrative by nature, yet he was one of those men people notice. He stood out partly because of his flying ability, partly because of his unusual accent – he was the only Australian flying the Hump – and, no doubt, partly because of his spick-and-span, movie star appearance. When the war was over he told an Australian journalist (who was understandably astonished to hear it) that flying the Hump had been a ‘dull and monotonous job’, but no doubt well before his three-and-a-half-year tour was up it had become so. True, the Hump was high, wide and dangerous enough for most men, but at one time de Kantzow and the other CNAC pilots were flying across it as much as three times a day. Never mind that you are squeezed into the tiny and very draughty cockpit of an aircraft given to falling thousands of feet without warning, only levelling out at the last possible minute and so abruptly you believe you can hear passengers and cargo dropping through the floor: boredom will set in.

  One day, during the British retreat from Burma, de Kantzow was ordered to fly Chiang, Madame Chiang and Stilwell to Kunming, and soon after take-off sent a message to Chiang from the cockpit: he had just received an urgent call from a Chinese observation post that Japanese Zero fighters were after them.

  ‘How many?’ de Kantzow had asked.

  ‘Fifteen,’ said the voice from the ground. ‘Oh, and they’re just above you.’

  When I discussed this moment many years later with Syd’s elder sister, Eve, now eighty years old, in her little house in Sydney, she glanced fondly at a silver-framed portrait of her brother in CNAC uniform on a sideboard and said, ‘Syd was a real daredevil, you know.’ On this flight, the Australian daredevil saved the Generalissimo’s life as well as his own. Throwing the DC-3 into a dive, Syd dropped through a mass of cloud heading into a tangle of mountain gorges where his camouflaged plane would be as good as invisible to the Zero pilots, deftly zigging and zagging through horrendous cliffs until the Japanese went home in disgust. Never mind that Madame Chiang was sick and his other passengers were half-dead with fear, he had saved them and the plane. ‘He had nine lives, I think,’ Eve said.

  As a reward for this daredevilry, his widow Angela is inclined to believe, as well as for a number of hazardous air-drops of rice, salt and medicines he made to Chiang’s soldiers cut off by the Japanese in Burma, Syd de Kantzow was awarded Nationalist China’s Order of the Flying Cloud. It was one more decoration in a family that in its time had won quite a few.

  Syd was born in 1914, ‘on the day the HMAS Sydney sank the Emden,’ Eve says. ‘That was the reason for his first name. As for his second, the de Kantzows were Swedish, possibly of Polish origin. My nephew went to Sweden a few years ago and saw a family there called von Kantzow, they’d written to Syd in Hong Kong, having seen his name in some aviation lists.’ According to Eve, a Charles Adolphus de Kantzow, married to a London girl called Emma Bosanquet, was Swedish ambassador to Portugal for many years until his death in 1867. This de Kantzow was a Chevalier Baron of St George in the Portuguese peerage and had a chestful of Swedish orders as well; one of his sons (Syd’s great-uncle) served with considerable distinction in the Indian Army, surviving the Mutiny (but because of his almost foolhardy courage, only just) and ending up as a lieutenant-colonel.

  There had been at least one literary de Kantzow. Eve interrupted our talk to bring me a neatly bound volume of poems published in 1906 with the title Noctis Susurri (Sighs of the Night) and written by Sydney de Kantzow’s grandfather, Alfred, when he was a lieutenant in the 22nd Madras Native Infantry. One of them was called ‘The Himalayas’:

  Sheer this descent how many thousand feet

  From this my eyrie! It is legion lost;

  The stifled passion of the torrent’s beat –

  A labyrinth of rocks by ravines crossed….

  It is very far from Kipling or Swinburne, admittedly, but when I talked with Eve de Kantzow about just such things – sheer descents, ravines, the Hump – it seemed appropriate to Syd, the aviator grandson.

  ‘Syd’s friends died one after the other,’ Eve said. And she added something of immense sadness: ‘Old in the head, Syd was. Old for his age.’

  We sipped weak whisky and water under Syd’s framed portrait, under Eve’s unsmiling brother with the handsome, quick-eyed face that was not quite Robert Taylor’s, not quite Ronald Colman’s. On the table between us we spread out old newspaper photographs of those dark, strenuous days of war – pictures of half-naked black GIs, shining with sweat, labouring in Calcutta docks; of elephants lifting ammunition crates with their trunks; of Hump pilots in sweat-stained khaki shirts and cowboy boots, arms round each other’s shoulders, pinning on smiles for the cameraman from Life magazine. They were pictures of a time that seemed a very long way from this small house in the Sydney suburb of Vaucluse, with Chinese flower prints and an old Cathay Pacific calendar with a Thai dancer on its walls, and an old lady pouring me Red Label, clinking glasses, and turning the album’s pages. Here on those pages were C-47s over Shangri-La – tiny, twin-engined aircraft that shifted 650 tons of arms, ammunition, spare parts, trucks and men across the roof of the world from Assam to China. Were the thousands of high-cheekboned scarecrows, like extras in a multi-million dollar Cecil B. de Mille production, really Chiang’s coolies, levelling mountains to make airfields for the Americans? The pictures of General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell reminded me of a dyspeptic Grandma Moses, and General Claire Chennault, the American hero of the Flying Tigers, of a middle-aged John Wayne.

  You could fit Roy Farrell into this game of ‘match the film star’ and label him James Stewart – except that, although he is tall and lean, Farrell is by no means laconic. Roy could be a shrewd but very genial Texan rancher rather than what he is – the son of the postmaster-general of a small town called Vernon that lies four hours’ drive west of Dallas. Talking with Roy evoked the same sense of unreality I had felt with Syd’s sister Eve. It was a long way from the cobras, mud and sticky heat of Dinjan to Farrell’s air-conditioned room in the motel on the roaring Dallas–Fort Worth parkway.

  Unlike Syd, Roy Farrell was not a veteran pilot when CNAC took him on in Burma. Far from it. According to a letter he wrote to me which he hoped would ‘set the record straight’, he had his first solo flight in his own Piper Cub at Singleton Field near Fort Worth on 7 January 1942, less than two years before he joined the Hump circus. He joked that ‘The cockpit was very crowded. I had a bumblebee in there with me.’ Despite the bumblebee, he was awarded his Commercial and Instructor’s Licence on his twenty-sixth birthday, and later his ground school rating for instructing navigation and meteorology. ‘I tried to get in with CNAC that summer, but to be hired as a pilot you had to have 1,400 hours of flying time of which 100 hours had to be in an aircraft of over 200mph. I had to do something about that. So I bought a 1929 Laird single engine, open-cockpit plane with a 220mph Jacobs engine in which I would get my hours of heavy time. A few months later I got my instrument rating from American Flyers in Forth Worth. So with that, Owen Johnson of Pan American Airways – he came through recruiting for CNAC – hired me. I left Miami for CNAC and the Far East on 7 October 1943.’

  It had not been quite as orthodox as all that, however. A whimsical footnote to this honest testimony relates that on its second or third flight, the 1929 Laird blew a cylinder and for the next several months it sat totally immobile in its hangar because Roy could not find the spare parts. Nevertheless, he admits, as it were with a wink, ‘The aircraft and engine dutifully had logged in their logbooks over 400 hours (a little over the necessary hundred hours) of flying.’ How lucky! But we can see, as he intends us to,
that Roy Farrell was certainly not an experienced flyer when he arrived in Dinjan to fly CNAC’s DC-3s.

  ‘The first look I got at the cockpit of a DC-3 (or C-47) lasted about twenty seconds – I sneaked in to a Braniff DC-3 on the ramp at Fort Worth. I was overwhelmed by all the instruments, gauges and switches. The second look I got was on the C-47 flight from Calcutta up to Dinjan. My third look was shortly after at the field at Dinjan and I was in the co-pilot’s seat with Cliff Groh as captain.’

  What followed might make a few scenes in a Woody Allen film. ‘Cliff called for me to open cowl flaps when he started the engines. A Piper Cub doesn’t have cowl flaps and I didn’t know what he was talking about, so he reached over me and trailed the flaps. He ran the engines up and did a thorough cockpit check just as dark settled in, and he called for me to release the handle for raising the lever that lifted the landing gear. Again, Piper Cubs didn’t have retractable landing gear so I didn’t know what in hell he was talking about….’ Roy laughs at his amateurishness. ‘At the end of my first trip to Chungking I heard one Chinese mechanic shout to another, “Whaddya know – he made it!” The second trip the same guy hollered, “Hey – he made it again!” – that shows you. Anyway, all co-pilots had to have thirty-two round trips to check out – to be passed – as senior pilot. I did them in time.’ In all he made 523 trips over the Hump.

  Farrell easily recalls the terrible coldness of the Hump. ‘Freezing! No heaters. To make things worse, my beautiful fleece-lined jacket didn’t meet with my pants.’

  And how some people even found time for smuggling: ‘One night I found gold bars and a few thou’ dollars in US stashed in the C-47’s bulkhead padding.