China-America air hitchhike takes 29 days
Trip along U.S. supply line is good lesson in geography
By A. T. Steele
Chicago, Illinois –
It has taken me 29 days to hitchhike 15,000 miles along the longest aerial supply line in the world – the U.S. Army’s zigzag skyway between Chungking, China, and the United States. It was no record. The trip has been made by others in as little as six days. But it was a journey not lacking in exciting moments. And as a short-term lesson in geography, it was unsurpassed.
You’ve got to take a trip like this to appreciate the truth of the wartime saying that “the sun never sets on the American Army.” I hitched rides on eight different planes and landed in a score of airports, each with its American ground crews and its American installations.
Doing swell job
Uncle Sam’s Air Transport Command, whose job it is to push airplanes across the Atlantic to the battlefronts of Russia, Africa, India and China, is doing an extraordinarily difficult job with growing efficiency. There are losses en route – perhaps more than Americans realize – but the population is small in relation to the whole. The great majority of these aircraft are going, of course, to Africa and Russia.
I was interested, though, to meet numbers of transports and pilots bound for China – proof that the promise made to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of a stepping-up in the volume of airborne supplies is on the way to fulfillment.
It is a stirring experience to stand, at dusk, in the African bush, on the African coast, or on a speck of land in the Atlantic and watch these armadas of new planes come in through the equatorial sunset. By nightfall, at most airdromes, billeting facilities were jammed to overflowing with arriving pilots.
Weather is good
We were lucky to have perfect flying weather on the first stage of our journey from China to India. This 500-mile jump across the Himalayan barrier can be the dirtiest stretch of transport flying in the world when the barometer hangs low. Then we crossed India.
From India, we had a long hop across the Arabian Sea and came down to a brief landing on an airfield built on the glaring sands of Arabia. From the cool upper air, Arabia is a fairyland, with its naked tumbling hills, its oceans of sand, its silver and turquoise shoreline and its occasional villages, which, in their sandy setting, have a bleached ghostly quality.
Five minutes after landing in the Arabian airport, I would have sold my interest in the country for a nickel. Emerging from our airplane, we were hit by a blast of sunshine which had the penetrating power of an X-ray. The reception committee consisted of several American airport attendants, stripped to the waist and as brown as Indians, and a trio of robed Arabs carrying antiquated guns in their hands and silver-sheathed knives on their belts.
Guard planes
I asked the Americans:
Who are your friends?
A soldier with an Alabama accent volunteered:
These are from the Sultan’s army. They guard our planes.
We were conducted to a mess tent shimmering in the desert heat. A table was lined on one side with piles of American canned goods. It was a first-class meal and 100% American from start to finish.
A couple of hops later, we were in Italian East Africa. Here again, the Yanks were very much in evidence, and so were the Italians. Italian prisoners of war – those who preferred work and income to staying behind a barbed-wire fence – were employed in numerous capacities around the American air base.
Serve as chauffeurs
Some served as chauffeurs, some as skilled laborers, some as cooks and waiters. There were even Italian barbers. However, while the Americans are allowed the luxury of Italian haircuts and shampoos, they are obliged to shave themselves. It is against the rules for the Italians to use razors on the Yanks.
In the airport cafeteria, excellent food was dished out by a row of smiling white-aproned Italians, under American supervisors. The Italians seem fairly content and glad to be out of the war. They get along with the Americans, less well with the English.
We flew on then across the waist of Africa toward the Atlantic coast. Below us sped the brown wilderness of the Sudan. This plateau land of desert and brush and thorn trees forms a wide belt from one side of Africa to the other. It is broken occasionally by low ranges of hills, weird pinnacles of rock and tiny villages of circular, thatch-roofed huts – each looking like the next.
