During WWII, I Flew the Famous China-Burma-India “Hump” Route over the Himalayas

Bernie Miller
Born: 1921
Hanford, California

I  stayed in school until June of 1942. Then I got into the Air Force under the Service Pilot Act. I was sent to Mather Air Force base where I took primary, basic, and advanced training. From there I was sent to New Mexico for Bombardier school. They were training to use the Norden bomb site. We were flying twin-engine Beechcraft. We would have three students, an instructor, and a pilot for a total of five people in each plane. We would have ten 100lb. practice bombs, which we would drop anywhere from 1000feet to 10,000 feet in elevation.

I was there for over two years. By that time I guess they had all the bombardiers they figure they needed. They shut all the schools down, and I got transferred from the West Coast training command to the air transport command headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee.

I went to Nashville and from there I went to India. From Nashville they flew us to New York, then Bermuda, The Azores, Casablanca, Tripoli, Cairo, Abedan, and finally Karachi. Karachi was the staging area for the CBI. I was in the China – Burma – India theater of operations. I spent about a week or ten days in Karachi and then I was assigned to one of the nine air bases in the Assam valley. That’s where the flights over the Himalayas originated. I was flying the “Hump” over the Himalayas.

Three of the bases were for 4-engine planes and the rest were twin-engine planes. I don’t know how they figured it but us fellas that had twin engine planes got sent to the four engine bases. The pilots who were single-engine pilots got sent to the twin-engine bases. So that’s how I ended up at a four-engine base.

We never flew with the same crew; he always had a different crew. With us new guys they usually put us with a pilot who was near the end of his tour of duty. You needed 750 hours to be on rotation to come back to the United States. They used to give us pilots who had 650 or 700 hours who knew the way. They taught us.

Here in the states when a train to bomb crews they sent them somewhere for transition time to teach them how to fly the plane. In our case they sent us over there and a week later we were in the coal pilot’s seat. We had no transition time.

I was stationed in Assam, which is a province in northern India. We flew from India across Burma, over the hump and into China. I get over their late so I had about a half-dozen missions. I got over there in June, 1945. The war ended in August.

After the war ended the four-engine bases were the first ones to be closed. I hadn’t been there long so I was transferred to Calcutta. That’s where everyone was evacuated out of China-Burma- India (C-B-I). There were one-quarter million Air Force personnel in the C-B-I win the war ended and they were all evacuated to Calcutta or Bombay to catch boats home.

So that’s what we were doing. We were flying all the guys out of China or out of different fields in India. I went down there in October of 1945 and stayed there until May of 1946. I got home in June of 1946.

When I was flying the home, we were hauling cargo in the C-87 and the 109. These were versions of the B-24. The C-87 had all the armament and gun turrets and bomb bays removed. Everything was stripped. They had a flat bed inside. We carried all kinds of cargo. Once they even took apart a bulldozer. We flew a lot of gasoline!

The 109’s had three 600 gallon tanks in the bomb bays. When either one was fully loaded with high-octane fuel we had as much as 5000 gallons on board. It was a flying bomb, and some of them did blow up.

If you got a leak in a 50 gallon drum at 24,000feet and it was in a location where the crew chief or radio operator could get to it, they would untie it, rolling out the door, and get rid of it. You can take a bucket of gasoline and through a match in it and it will burn. But if that bucket of gas was nothing but fumes it would blow up. That was the deal in the plane. If the plane got full of fumes and some relay sparked it would set off the fumes.

The routes over the Himalayas were all lettered: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I.

A, B, and C were routes for four-engine planes. The rest of them were routes for twin-engine planes. They couldn’t get as high as the four-engine planes. We’d get up to 22,000feet going over. But coming back we could go 24,000 or 25,000feet because we were empty. But there were also mountains there that were twenty to 24,000feet high. You had to follow the route and hit your checkpoints or you might hit one of those mountains.

The twin engine planes flew passes that were only sixteen to 20,000feet high. They had the same problem; they had to go in-between the peaks. Fully loaded, they could only get to about 16,000feet

From India to China we always had a 25 to 50 mile-per-hour tail wind. It took four-and-a-half hours to go over and five-and-a-half hours to come back. It took about ten hours to make a roundtrip. So by the time and I had 750 hours for rotation he had about 75 trips over the rock pile.

The night of January 6 and seventh, 1945 there were more planes lost in a 24-hour period than any time over there. There was a storm that had come out of Africa and across the Indian Ocean. It turned up through the Bay of Bengal and hit India and Assam. By the time they figured out what was happening, the winds out of the south were hitting 150 or 200 miles an hour. Planes were making corrections of more than 30° to hit their checkpoints. One evening we lost eight planes. Every base lost at least one.

The flights went around the clock, 24 hours a day. When your turn came to the top of the list, you went. It didn’t matter what time it was. I used to be asleep at two or three in the morning and an Indian fellow would come around and shake me.

“Sahib, it’s time to get up and go fly!”

They would call you about two or two and a half hours before your flight was ready. You got up, got dressed, had a bite to eat, and went down to the flight line and that everything checked out. The flight was about 650 miles in one direction. 500 miles of that was over mountains. There were no landing sites anywhere. If something went wrong you were out of luck.

On my first flight, we got to 24,000feet and we hadn’t been there five minutes when we lost an engine. The pilot turned 180° and headed back for the base. He knew that if another engine went out the plane wouldn’t fly. We landed.

When that happened you got the next plane that was ready. In that plane we didn’t get to 5000 feet and we lost another engine!

So we came around and landed again. This time they let us go back and get some sleep. We had been up for a day and we hadn’t gone anywhere.

The bases in India were similar to the ones here in the central valley of California. They sit at an elevation of about 300 feet. When we got to China, that delegation of the bases was over 6000 feet That old plane comes in plenty hot at 6000feet. That’s why the runways were twelve to 15,000 feet long. There was a lot of coasting room after we hit the ground.

We only carried cargo one way. Coming back we might have a sick or injured person to bring back to India from China. When I got there were no more Japanese aircraft in the area. During the early years of flying the hump there were a lot of Japanese fighters in the air. The Flying Tigers took care of them.
After the worst started the Flying Tigers which was a civilian group in the pay of the Chinese got taken into the Air Force. They used to take off and follow the planes as far as they could for protection, then return to base. And on the China side planes would pick them up as well.

So when you got to the top of the list and major flight you went back down to the bottom of the list. You would make about two trips a week. We had about 35 or 40 planes on the base and maybe we had 90 or 100 crews. We used to rack up 90 or 100 hours of flying a month.

After the war ended I was transferred from the Assam valley to Calcutta. There they had C-54’s, which were called DC-4’s in civilian use. These were transport planes that could carry about 45 or 50 passengers. We use those did bring people from all over India and China. In China there were bases at Kunming and Sinching. There were probably 3000 or 4000 people on each base. They had to be brought out. That was a case where you would fly over empty, pick up a load, and bring them back to India.

I came home on a boat called the USS General Sturgis. It was a navy transport with about 300 sailors on it and 3000 Air Force personnel. We came down around the tip of India, across the Indian Ocean, through the Gulf of Aden, through the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and finally the Atlantic. It was a 30 day trip. It was a relaxing deal because even though there were a lot of guys there you were going home. You weren’t going to war.

I was in India for just about a year. I went over in June and got home in May. What do I remember about India? The filth! I’d say it is the dirtiest country on earth. We would see kids sleeping on the street and women with babies sleeping on the street.

They had all these cattle over there which were sacred. They didn’t kill them for food but the people were starving to death. If the cow was in the street you walked around it you didn’t try to move it. Some Indian would get after you.

During WWII, I Flew the Famous China-Burma-India “Hump” Route over the Himalayas

http://www.greatlifestories.com/life_story/war_and_peace/bernie_miller/223_8.html