E-mail to Daniel Jackson, November 5, 2007

I was a pilot, B-25, 341st Bomb Group, 22nd sq. The group had 3 sqds., two were mainly concerned with east China and Indochina. Our sqdn was assigned to misc. including Thailand, North Burma, and southern China. You must realize that all operations were limited due to shortage of supplies. Every ounce of supplies was flown in from India over most difficult terrrain [sic]. In fact, 700 transport planes were lost in the operation.  You will probably find much information in the books written about General Stillwell and Chennault. The references would be especially useful.

The Japs occupied the Salween area to cut off the Burma Road, which was the only link China had with the outside. General Stillwell set out to drive the Japs out using Chinese troops. That road was the most difficult imaginable – over incredible mountain terrain. But it was cut off and the territory was occupied. The battles to retake the road were conducted with rather poorly motivated Chinese troops. They had air support from the 14th. P-40 fighter-bombers were used quite well. The tiny fighters could carry a 500lb and had 4-6 50-cal, Mg. They operated at ground level if needed and were very effective. The terrain in the Salween area was about 3000 ft in the river valleys. The mountains rose more steeply than YOU CAN IMAGINE to 10-12,000 ft. The little fighter was not fast but could get the job done. Also, the pilot was well protected from ground fire. It was said that the P40 was the best crash-landing plane in World War 2. The B-25 was not suitable for close ground support in the tight mountain valleys. It used about 130 gallons of fuel compared to 50 for the P40. However, when targets such as warehouses and troop housing were identified we readily bombed these targets readily from altitudes of 5-10 thousand feet. Small towns occupied in the near Salween area were hit with success at will when we had the supplies. I was in China in 1944, only based at Yangkai. The fighter squadrons were mainly at Yunnanyi. I believe the fighter sqdns were 73rd, 75th, and 76th [sic]. Those people had a very risky job and they performed it well, although the entire operation was less than satisfactory. Good luck with your project on a forgotten part of the war. Excuse my typing.

Chap Hale

Interview by Daniel Jackson, December 3, 2007

I have just a few questions for you mostly about the Salween campaign.

I happen to know just a little bit about it ’cause I was stuck over in India in September of 1944 in a tent with some fighter pilots. None of us could get across the Hump on account of bad weather. We spent a couple weeks playing cards and drinking beer, so I learned a little bit about the fighter position.

How did you end up in China?

This was just because of the way things worked out. I was in a replacement training center, as they call it, in Columbia, South Carolina, in the last of ’43 and at the time when you finish your period then you’re supposed to receive an assignment overseas. So there was several of us were sent down to Florida and picked up new airplanes for each one of us. There were four crews. That’s what it was up to altogether. We picked up our B-25s. They bought them there. A brand-new B-25 cost $88,000. I remember signing for it. But then, we did it like in the movies. So the morning we were to leave there, heading for our first destination, which was Puerto Rico, and then at one hour on the trip you opened your orders to see where you were going. I opened the orders and saw 341st Bomb Group, China. Which was really good news because the things were not too healthy over in Europe. We weren’t too anxious to go to Europe. And so being sent to a faraway place like that, the reaction wasn’t too heated.  It was actually really good news. We actually flew the plane a period of thirty days with stops and all, all the way into China. A very interesting trip, but at this late date I think about it a lot. It wasn’t very important to me then, but it was quite a trip.

So you traveled across Africa then?

We went through South America and then to Ascension Island- You ever hear about Ascension Island? It was halfway between South America and Africa – about sixteen hundred miles each way – and then across Africa into the Arabian Peninsula. You had Aden which is right at the base of the Red Sea and then we went around the corner of the Arabian Peninsula to a place called Masirah Island, a little sand pile, and from there we went into Karachi which at that time was a part of India then down through Bangalore and wound up at Agra. And from Agra we moved on into the Assam Valley which is right at the base of the Himalayas. And then we flew the individual ships into Kunming, China, where we met the 341st Group and was assigned to a little base called Yangkai, about forty miles outside of Kunming.

How would you describe the supply situation out there?

Well, it’s beyond description! When the Japanese took over Burma, and there was only one supply route – it was the Burma Road – to China. A pretty poor route, but it was a route. So when they cut that off, every ounce of material that came into China had to be flown in. And that was for the B-25s and the P-40s and the P-38s. There were a few B-24s that were over there and they flew their own material. They flew it back and forth across the Hump and they could bring their own material. But everybody else had to depend on the transport line. They had mostly C-46s, which could carry twenty-one 55-gallon drums of gasoline. Over in the Assam Valley there was probably four or five fields which were operating basically continuously, just as fast as they could send things across the Hump into China, and get over there with a load of cargo and get back. It went on twenty-four hours a day and at night – at all hours – both bad weather and good. I may have mentioned that the record shows that some seven hundred of those transports were lost during that period.

Did you have any interesting experiences flying over the Hump yourself?

Well, the sense was this was routine. The first time I went we had to get way up high – say maybe seventeen thousand feet, which was high for a B-25 loaded. I went to India to pick up another airplane. I came back, we came about seven or eight, which wasn’t, didn’t have to get so high, but we ran into thunderstorms – very difficult. I only flew in China at night twice. This time I came in at night. It’s the weirdest thing flying over China in those days. At night there was not a light – not a single light – no lights. Whereas in the United States, maybe out in West Texas in that time you might just see a few lights or something like that, but in China it was absolutely totally black. It was rather a strange feeling.

I had one little experience that I had on the Salween River that I wrote up in a magazine that I will send you a copy of that. It’s written from a pilot’s standpoint, but it might be of interest to you as you look at things. Like I said, there were several bombing missions in the Salween. It was so tight of an area in there that the bomber just couldn’t maneuver very well, so we stayed up. I remember one time there was a located target which was apparently small warehouses – a group of them – each maybe as big as a house. And that mission we didn’t have any bombs except napalm bombs. Well, we really didn’t have any use for napalm bombs. So we loaded up our napalm and we bombed that encampment probably from five thousand feet. And we hit it real good and it burned every single building in there – just accidentally ‘cause those napalms didn’t fall out of the airplane like guided bombs do, usually they came out tumbling. Apparently that’s how they hit the target. That was such difficult territory down there. Later on, we managed to – did you research Stilwell? He was the big dog and he and Chennault didn’t get along at all. Chennault reported to him. That was very difficult for flying people. We didn’t get promoted on schedule and all that sort of thing.

The area of Lashio was the beginning of the Burma Road. We got into a situation where we were moved to a little base named Yunnanyi, which was a place where the fighters were, and we did shuttle bombing into Burma. There was a place, a little strip, called Tingkawk Sakan. From the air, down in the jungle, it looked like a matchstick lying there. It was a little strip. I think we had three thousand feet of pavement and then they cut the trees down for another two thousand feet. So you had to be up two hundred or more by the time you climbed out of that little ditch. That was the only time in the war that we used full emergency power that the airplanes had. It was really hard to get out of that. We’d operate in there and did a lot of missions and we bombed Lashio and north of that. At that time, this was in October-November of ’44, Stilwell’s troops were fighting heavily up in that area mainly around a place called Myitkyina; M-Y-I-T-K-Y-I-N-A, or something like that. The Chinese finally were kicking the Japanese out. Because at the same time the Americans were building the Ledo Road – You ever hear about the Ledo Road?

Yes

It was built by this base I was talking about. They built this thing by cutting the enormous trees down and piling dirt on them. And I understand that once they kind of cleared the Japanese out, they were able to put this Ledo Road on in. That was after the strip was finished. They also had a small gasoline pipeline that they managed to get into China. And so of course it enormously improved the supply situation, but I had been long gone by that time. We did a lot of bombing in that Lashio area, which was very comfortable while I served because there was no enemy activity. We didn’t have to worry about fighters, just a little bit of bad weather. I met and became friends with one of these P-38 pilots. He was a photographic [reconnaissance]. When we were bombing we didn’t have any trouble because practically every day, or every two or three days, these P-38 photo aircraft would sweep down into Burma, Thailand, and south Indochina and photograph everything that was down there. And if there was any interest then the P-38s, which had great long range, would go down and clean them out. So the result was, even though the Japanese had airfields facilities down in that area, they didn’t put any airplanes in there. The P-38s kept them out. The P-38s could do very long missions and they flew higher than any Japanese planes could get up there. I had one mission, I think, we went down into Thailand and the P-38s rode along with us – I guess maybe because they didn’t have anything to do. But that was the only mission I ever had any fighter escort.

Do you remember what you were going to bomb?

There was a bridge at a place in Thailand that was known as Dara. It was six hundred miles a trip. It was an eight-hour mission each way and I mean that trip wore us down. That bridge was built by Americans and it looked just like a regular American bridge, with huge concrete pillars and steel superstructure. And when you were skip-bombing, your bombs would bounce away. When you did skip-bombing you had to have a delay on the fuse, maybe five seconds, so you could get away from it. And the bombs would hit those pillars and bounce off and it looked like you knocked the bridge out, but it would still be standing. I had a picture, I lost it. A little print, it was taken during a skip-bombing mission, the tail gunner took a picture, and right behind the airplane is two 1000-pound bombs exploding right behind the airplane. But they did bounce. It did remind me, there was one mission over there, a small walled city, and I looked up the records, they call it Tengchong. Them records seem to call everything Tengchong. The guys keeping the records didn’t keep them very accurate. We could go in and drop 1000-pound bombs on the wall of the city. The Chinese would go in. There were just three of us on this mission, I guess. We made our pass and dropped our bombs as best we could, but I don’t think we really got the wall. We had such few supplies that we couldn’t practice anything. And even when you do something like this you need some practice. So they just sent us over there to that valley, sling down there and get down low and drop your bombs and give it your best.

Most of the bombing was done at higher altitudes. I did fifty missions, but most of them were at several thousand feet, which was a comfortable attitude. Low-bombing in those mountains was extremely hazardous. We lost crews hitting mountains, getting lost in weather; we had one who actually hit a bridge – that was in Indochina. Another one which was shooting up a train, and he wasn’t being very effective, so he decided to hit the train head-on – and he hit that train head-on. We had, each aircraft had, six-to-twelve 50-caliber guns aimed forward. So it was pretty good for strafing except that the airplane was bulky and hard to maneuver, unlike a P-40. A P-40 was kind of like it was strapped on – it would go exactly where you thought it would go. The bomber was hard to control if you were trying to operate it above 150 miles an hour. The controls were so heavy and were hard to handle. If you were going after ships out on the ocean, it was okay because there wasn’t a mountain sticking in the way, so you could handle it all right. They actually used the B-24s to skip-bomb ships, big and bulky as they were. But we’d talk to these P-40 pilots and they told us about their strafing missions, which it sounds like that’s practically all they were doing – drop one bomb and then strafe the targets. And the P-40 was the really meant for this because it could get shot at and take a lot of holes and still come back. If they got shot down, it was a good airplane to crash-land in. They could crash-land that thing in a rice paddy. In the last of the war, they put in P-51s, but the pilots didn’t like it – even though it went much, much faster. But its cooling system was exposed and it would get shot up. Whereas the P-40 was well-protected – nothing happened to it.

Do you know how air support was coordinated from the ground? I know the Chinese troops at Tengchong had American troops embedded with radios and I was wondering if you knew how that worked.

No I don’t, but radio control at that time was so primitive. The radios that we had on our aircraft, the P-40s were the same way, are what they call command radios. It’s very low frequency – it’s even lower than AM that you’re talking about now. The better radios than these, HF and the UHF, were used in Europe. I never saw those until I came back from overseas. But that was standard. We never had nice radios on ours. They were very poor. You just couldn’t get any reception. The radio comms then were useless. But they put those boys on the ground – that was a little later in the game, after the Japanese were getting [?]. A lot of the Japanese didn’t go ahead and pull out, but once they were in there, they weren’t able to pull them out. So they kind of spread out in the small towns around there and lived off the countryside. And the Chinese weren’t very anxious to mix it up with them anyhow. But then when we got up there north of Mytikyina, they had not only the P-40s, they brought in some squadrons of P-47s – the big fellas – to operate out of that little place where we did our shuttle bombing. The activity up around Myitkyina got really heavy and the Chinese finally began to fight. I think there were some American troops in there with them. Stilwell had got them in there. They finally put a cork in that bottle. But it was getting late in the war and the Japanese didn’t have much use for it anyhow.

Our part in China was a very, very small operation. We just could not get supplies. My base had two squadrons of B-25s and one of B-24s. I guess we probably had about a thousand men there. Our food was mainly eating off the land – the Chinese. For Thanksgiving and Christmas they flew us in some canned Turkey and occasionally a little British marmalade, but most of the time we made do with Chinese cooks and all Chinese food. Everybody had diarrhea all the time. It was pretty uncomfortable. We were fed regularly. The Chinese did the best they could. Now, the Chinese trucks over there – we had no gasoline to drive trucks for our squadron. All they had, I think one jeep and one personnel carrier, which you used to take folks back and forth to the airplane. And they ran those things on ethyl alcohol, methanol. And they would just barely run! They would just barely run. The altitude was sixty-five hundred feet above sea level at the base. They would just barely run. The Chinese had a few old trucks they had that were charcoal-burners. You ever hear about a charcoal-burner – a truck? They kind of clunked along and then they would just barely make it. They just made the most awful racket you ever heard – smoke, fumes – but that’s all they had, a big charcoal burner on the side of the machine. We didn’t even have a two-by-six truck on the base. You know what a two-by-six was, don’t you? A deuce-and-a-half: the standard GI two-and-a-half-ton truck. Any vehicle we had had been brought over in pieces then put back, welded together. Refueling was done with the Chinese operating hand pumps, pumping it out of the drums and into the tanks of the airplanes – very laborious. I don’t know how much was written about this campaign, about Stilwell – how much detail was in the books about Stilwell. I know there are a number of books about Chennault, but I don’t know about Stilwell.

Most of the books about Chennault don’t really mention much about the Salween Campaign since he wasn’t a big proponent of it.

I don’t think they would because of the ground part. He wasn’t really interested in that. He was the commander and he was kind of doing the best he could to ensure the back of the Japanese Air Force was broken. He wasn’t too much interested. It was a small effort and the B-24s and B-25s did do pretty good by going down and chasing all these ships away from the coast. The Japanese shipping was hugging the coast of China to get away from our submarines. So when we were able to get down there and bomb those that came along the coast, we broke that up. So that was the most effective part really of the 14th Air Force.

 Were you guys used a lot against railroads as well?

Oh yes. Any railroad we could find, we’d tear it up. That was easy stuff to knock out – unless it was right tight in the mountains.

How would you tear up the railroads?

We’d hit the bridges and just catch the trains – that was the easy part. So they couldn’t run their trains in the daytime. We knocked some of the smaller bridges out. You knock those things out one day, come back two days later and they had it up and running again.

How effective were B-25s at hitting bridges from medium altitude? How difficult was it?

Very difficult. Very difficult. We generally got down to low altitude. Except for that one I was telling you about it was no problem to knock them out – the ones that were built of wood. Go down low, close to the water, and you couldn’t miss. But that old bridge that was built by American standards was a tougher one. It was a first-class bridge. But most of them were not that way. Most of them were almost temporary bridges. The highways weren’t operable because they didn’t really have many trucks either. If the P-38s could find those trucks they just would wipe them out. There wasn’t a lot of P-38s then, but the P-38 was awfully good for what they were doing.

How would you compare the B-25’s ability to skip-bomb bridges with the P-38’s ability to skip-bomb bridges?

The P-38s weren’t doing that much. They were shooting-up stuff. A P-40 or a P-38 or any of those things, their opposition was not too heavy, it was pretty much a duck shoot – duck soup – to hit their targets. It was easy. In Europe they used P-38s very heavily over there against trains and stuff like this. But it was a deadly game and they paid a severe price in Europe for attacking ground targets. For a P-38 to attack a target in Burma or Thailand was easy.

Did you ever have trouble with ground fire?

Oh yes. Anytime you went after a bridge or anything like that. But the Japanese weren’t very good at it. The Germans were deadly, but the Japanese … you might come back with holes and they’d usually be in the tail. I never had anybody get hurt, though I had holes in the airplane. They usually wouldn’t lead the plane right – most of the holes would be in the back. Some of the small bridges, they had manholes in each end at the front and the back of the bridge, and as you came in they’d be shooting at you. But of course we could keep them down. Then when you went past them, on the other side, they’d pop up out of their manhole and shoot at you as you left. But then you’d have to shoot your tail gun at them to keep them down. So we got a lot of ground fire, but it just wasn’t that effective because they didn’t know their business. It wasn’t like attacking Germans at low altitude. They would absolutely eat you up. There was only one time I ran into good anti-aircraft; I was at Hainan Island which was off the coast over there. There was a case two years ago where an airplane – one of our surveillance planes – had to land over there – emergency landing – after hitting a Chinese fighter. It had to land on Hainan Island and the Chinese wouldn’t give it up. They had to dismantle it and take it out piece by piece. This first mission I had, it was down there over six hundred miles away. We had received word that there was some ships in the little harbor down there. So we go down to that little harbor to sink those ships. We got down there and there was only one ship in the harbor. It was pretty easy, we sank that one. Then the orders had been, after you do that, go ahead and strafe the docks. We sank that ship, but on the other end, we ran into the most intense fire I ever seen – never seen again. It was just unbelievable how accurate they were. So they were shooting us up. We weren’t going to try to strafe the docks right into those things. Actually, on that trip, I was flying copilot and I saw, right in front of my eyes, I saw a 75-millimeter shell just explode right in front of the plane. I saw it open, but it wasn’t a good clean burst. We didn’t get any holes. Shut the engine off for just a microsecond. But I saw it. People won’t believe that I saw that. It didn’t explode right! If it had exploded right I wouldn’t be here. But most of their anti-aircraft was very poor. In case they even had the 75-millimeter, they wouldn’t be anywhere close to you most of the time. This one place they were just dead-on. We learned you don’t want to fool with the Japanese Navy, from our standpoint. But the rest of it was relatively easy pickings. One replacement airplane was shot down when I first got there by a Zero, but the rest of the time we didn’t. Our losses were just weather, getting lost, and stuff like that. The ones I told you about. But those P-40 pilots, they seemed to dust up like they were doing a good job. They helped the Chinese. They had a very poor opinion of the Chinese fighters of course because they were going in and do their thing and the Chinese would sit there and watch them do it and then the Japanese would run them off again.

I wish I could have more to tell you, but I don’t. Like I said, the accounts of the fighter activity down there was second-hand. We had our little thing going on. You kind of stayed alive until you had the chance to go home.

Chennault was a very popular man, lots of stuff written about Chennault, but nobody cared much for Stilwell. He was not nice. He was very dedicated and Army all the way. We didn’t like him because he made us stay second lieutenants for a whole year.

I have one last question for you. When did you leave China?

I left China the first week of 1945.

What did the Army have you do once you got back?

I went through several things. I went through instructor school for B-25 pilots and then the permanent pilots decided they didn’t want the returnees around, so they shipped us off. Finally, I ended up in California, out there pulling targets in B-26s for the P-38 base out there. You’d fly out over the ocean and pull targets out there for them to shoot at. I think they got mixed up one day and they shot one of those B-26s down. Well, you really weren’t far away. A thousand yards up in the air is not very far. We pulled the targets a thousand yards out. But we were out there and we had radar service using our ships. That was a good deal when it all ended. The B-26 was a pleasant plane to fly, but it was not near as combat worthy as the 25 was, for the type of work we had to do.

Are you talking about the Martin B-26, or the Douglas B-26?

The Martin B-26. Of course, you could never have got them off the ground where we were. But it was a good fun plane to fly – fast – although the 25 had good wings. It would get you off the ground. So being at sixty-five hundred feet above sea level to start with, the engines were not turbo, so you didn’t get off the ground very well. The problem was you would like to be 130 or 140 miles an hour when you left the ground and sometimes we’d be staggering off at 110 or 120 fully loaded. But it was a reliable airplane, never any failures on that. The maintenance people really did their job. I considered myself lucky when I went to China and lucky I survived it, because not everybody did. It was an interesting war when you live through it. One of my friends I talked to, he just died, he was in the Pelilieu campaign over in the Pacific … terrible … terrible … in the Marshalls. It was just a horrible thing. The casualties were unbelievable. He talked about how horrible it was, but he said on the other end, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I thought that was a remarkable statement. Going through a war like this was an interesting thing. Thoughts are always with us, how things went.

Well, thank you for talking to me sir, you have been very helpful.

I’m glad to hear somebody was interested in a very obscure portion of the war. I wish you luck in your obscure pursuit of these things that happened in history. What are you going to be in, the infantry?

No, I’m going to hopefully fly.

Well, flying is, one thing I got into the Air Force because I was in ROTC in the infantry and I knew one thing: I did not want to walk! Going through flight school was a very, very interesting thing at that time because they didn’t have a lot of patience. You either got through or you didn’t. But now I’m sure if you get in there, they make sure you get through and they’ll take enough time and patience to get you through. But I wish you every bit of luck and I appreciate you writing this thing for history.

Well, I appreciate your help sir.

I still wish I had been able to put my bombs in that city wall because I think if I had had the practice, I would have known how to do it.

You know what’s funny, is every single pilot I’ve talked to that flew in China has commented about that.

Talked about the fact that you couldn’t practice or anything? No, we couldn’t practice anything. The ones over in Europe, they’d drill, drill, and drill so they could get everything right.

It was a different war.

We got by. And I hope we’ll get by the next one. Well good luck to you.

Thank you very much, sir. You have a good night.

Good night.