June 15, 2006
The Flight of the Hump Pilots Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 09:00 AM EST The mail arrived at my uncle’s house on a Monday as June began, and he was reading through it, sitting at the table where breakfast had been served. I was a room away, and my father was in the kitchen, my aunt on the other side of the house. My uncle called all of us in to see a magazine that had just come, holding it out and saying nothing more than, “Will you look at this?” That was hardly unusual; my uncle, lively and sly at the same time, can be counted on to stir up just such a quiet morning as that Monday was, yet there was a note of surprise in his voice that wasn’t just kidding around.
I glanced across the cover of the magazine, fairly jostling it in my effort to be the first to spot something familiar, such as his name, or something conspicuous, such as a mistake embarrassing to the editors. The title of the magazine was “China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association.” That was nothing noteworthy for anyone who knows my uncle.
During World War II, Sgt. Howard Francis Berk was in the Army Air Forces, part of the 1330th Base Unit, which was stationed mostly in Jorhat and Assam, India. The 1330th was part of a massive effort to support the Chinese resistance to the Japanese by keeping supplies flowing along the only plausible route. And the only plausible route, at that point in the war, really wasn’t very plausible at all. It ran to China from northern India over the Himalayas—the “Hump.” As many as 15,000 Americans at one time were assigned to operate it. Due to Japanese fighters, cruel weather and the danger of flying fully loaded cargo planes over the earth’s highest roadblocks, 3,605 airplanes crashed in the effort. “We used to navigate by the wrecks,” my uncle once told me.
I grew up knowing about the C-B-I theater of war, thanks to my uncle, and therefore I skimmed past the title of the magazine to keep searching in my haste to discern whatever it was that had struck him as so dramatic. The pictures on the cover consisted of a shoulder patch (captioned “1942-1945”), a photo of a memorial, a photo of an airplane, and another patch. I leapt to the wobbling conclusion that my Uncle Howard was thinking that I, of all people, didn’t realize that he was in the China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association. With that, I flunked the moment.
He pointed to the bottom of the cover. “Membership Newsletter,” it said. He read the rest. “March 2006,” he said out loud, “Final Issue.”
I gasped. I admit it. The last two words carried the reality of an obituary reporting the death of a neglected friend. Of course I know perfectly well that World War Two veterans are going fast these days. But the ranks are supposed to dwindle against time, not surrender to it. “It has been a great run,” wrote the president of the Hump Pilots Association on the inside, “It is very sad that the Association must be dissolved. But time has caught up with us and we must give in.”
I have been tempted ever since to conclude that I don’t much like the idea of valiant Hump pilots and their crew members giving in. They never, by God, did that in the Himalayas. And so forth. But anyone who could fly fully loaded planes over the Himalayas is nothing if not coolly, if cruelly, realistic. The Hump pilots are disappearing of their own volition, in their own way, and according to their own time.
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