Flight to the West

Hell-riding pilots of China National Aviation Corp. had one of the toughest assignments of their bullet-spattered careers last week: to fly out officials, soldiers, wives, children and loyal Burmese from Burma to India through skyways thick with Jap planes.

Seven Pan American transports (C.N.A.C. is owned jointly by China and Pan Am) were stripped down for the task, seats and other impediments removed so that on some trips 21-passenger planes carried 70 refugees. Night after night these unarmed, unarmored planes shuttled through the skies, in one three-night period evacuating 1,200 from an airfield north of Mandalay. They kept up the job until the Japs closed in, took off for the last time an angel's whisker ahead of capture.

Landing at hastily improvised Indian airfields, the rescue planes refueled, then took off quickly for another trip across mountains that offered no possibility of emergency landings. In all, 10,000 were saved from fields lighted by the red flare of Burma's fires.

"They were a tired lot," said one pilot of the soldiers he had evacuated after their three-month, losing fight.

These airborne refugees were only a drop in the great mass surging westward from Burma, seeking safety. By motor, cart, horse and foot, humanity streamed through mountain passes so treacherous that probably not more than half of the 750,000 refugees were likely to get through, and many already lay dead of cholera (see p. 46).

Leopold Amery, Secretary for India, told the House of Commons that upwards of 300,000 Indian refugees were moving across the mountains, and said that Indians and non-Indians were getting equal treatment: subsistence allowances, refugee camps, free transportation when available. Little transport was available.

Aside from the thousands of personal tragedies implicit in such a mass flight, chief danger was that refugees would clog the roads, hinder defense of the haven toward which they were struggling.

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