The Able Queen

I was one of the pilots on our way to join our squadron, the 19th Liaison Squadron in Kunming, China. When I found out where I was going, I was eager to get to China. From early adolescence, I had wanted to visit China, and I usually had a good outlook toward the people there. My only concerns at the time were my hope that there would be no problems getting to know everyone at our new base, and that this trip to Kunming would bring no problems. But I made it fine, no sweat.

What was it like, you ask? Briefly, fantastic! Exciting! Certainly enlightening, and of course, there were extremely frightening times as it was very dangerous. Beautiful too—the countryside there has so many spectacular areas of beauty. These were not the places that were tourist destinations, but remote places of great beauty.

“Flying the Hump,” as it was referred to, was not to be taken lightly. Flying over the most mountainous stretch of ground between India and China was a dangerous trip. There were places that had peaks that went up almost 30-thousand feet, and the temperature at that altitude was often well below -15 or more below zero (F). Flying this route, oxygen was very thin, and oxygen masks were required.

Why did we go this way? We were avoiding the Japanese enemy fighters that were also out there and trying to shoot us down, that’s why. By the end of the war, there were 1,400 airmen dead, and almost 400 missing. Some were captured by the Japanese, and many were never found and never heard from again.

Kunming was an important airbase because it was located at the end of the Burma Road, which was previously cut off by the Japanese and was the end supply depot for everything coming over the Himalayan mountains by truck or ox cart. The Kunming base had been an earlier AVG strip for P-40s and the headquarters for the Governor of Yunnan Province’s private troops. Now, it served as the headquarters for the 19th Liaison Squadron.

I arrived at my first base in this outfit, a small airfield northeast of Kunming that had a dirt strip airfield. It was called Yanglin, and here we were a constant target for Japanese bombers. The barracks had been built by hand by the local peasants using bricks made with clay and straw. Our barracks had red tile roofs and charcoal-burning heaters, and we did have doors, as opposed to most houses in China, which did not have doors back then as we know them.