Echoes of a distant airlift (2)

The world's first great airlift first entwined the United States in a complex triangular relationship with the Chinese communists and the Chinese Nationalists which still causes complications today. The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin, in the second of two articles, analyses the lasting impact of the "over the Hump" airlift on Sino-American relations.

HONG KONG (JP): As a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III commemorated the 1942-1945 "over the Hump" airlift between India and China by flying from eastern India into Kunming in southwestern China on May 28, it was just like the old days, fifty years ago.

As in World War II, the Chinese were wondering what the Americans were up to, and the Americans were wondering what reception they would get. Then, as now, the Chinese communists were unhappy over U.S. ties with the Chinese Nationalists, while the Americans were shrugging their shoulders over nit-picking by the Chinese bureaucracy.

Immediately, it should have been newsworthy that the commemoration flight took place at all. Following the May 22 decision of the Clinton Administration to grant a visit visa to Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, a seven-man delegation from the People's Liberation Army air force, led by the air force commander, had cut short a ten-day visit to the United States in protest. Later, Chinese Defense Minister Chi Haotian similarly canceled a June visit to the U.S. for the same reason.

Yet the People's Liberation Army air force has continued to host the 19 U.S. veterans of the Hump airlift, accompanied by the Undersecretary of the Air Force, and the commander of the United States Air Force Transport Command. On May 29 there was a ceremony at the memorial in Kunming to the pilots who flew "over the Hump" in the epic airlift. Then the American party moved on to Beijing, before returning home.

So far, the Chinese protest gestures over the visa for Lee to visit have hurt the Chinese side more than the American. A riposte which hurts U.S. interests more than China's may still be forthcoming. To have canceled the Hump commemoration would have been petty -- and the People's Liberation Army air force was probably very interested in taking a look at the C-17 and its accompanying KC-10 tanker on their first sortie into East Asia.

Earlier there was one example of Chinese bureaucratic nit- picking of the type so well known to those in charge of the Hump airlift during World War II. Naturally the American idea was that the C-17 would fly the old dangerous and direct India-China route along which so many pilots died bringing help to China. But that is not a regularly permitted air-lane these days -- and the Chinese would only permit the C-17 to follow today's regular flying route rather than the historical one.

Of course, the Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist government was the recognized government of China during World War II, controlling that territory not occupied either by the Japanese or by the Chinese communists. The nit- picking -- and worse in the eyes of the U.S. military, the corruption -- was sometimes so bad that the Americans inevitably ended up wondering whose side the Chinese Nationalists were actually on. It didn't help Sino-American relations when, at one stage, Nationalist officials threatened to do a deal with the Japanese invaders unless the Americans were more supportive.

The "over the hump" airlift operation survived despite ever increasing American disillusion with Chiang Kai-shek's government, but the strategic purpose behind the airlift changed as a result of U.S. disenchantment. The original idea was for the U.S. to support Chiang's forces in their land campaign against the Japanese.

This gave way to the more realistic objective of supporting U.S. air operations against Japan from bases in China. Chiang himself even preferred this objective because it was less likely to place his own forces at risk.

In this and other ways, the Americans soon learned that Chiang and his generals were often more anxious to destroy the Chinese communists than to defeat Japanese aggression. As late as 1944, the Japanese were actually expanding their conquests within China when they were on the retreat everywhere else in the Pacific.

Several U.S. air bases within China were then captured by the Japanese. There was even a brief period when it was feared that the Japanese forces might take the terminus of the Hump airlift, Kunming, or even capture the Nationalist wartime capital at Chungking -- though neither fear was actually realized.

It was in the wake of the Hump airlift, and the consequent U.S. military involvement with China, that the Americans inevitably developed a relationship with the Chinese communists, in the hope that the nationalists and the communists could come together to defeat the Japanese.

The suspicion with which Chiang Kai-shek and his officials then regarded these American overtures to the communists in Yenan is reflected today in the suspicion with which Chinese communist leaders regard continuing U.S. ties with the nationalists on Taiwan.

As the Americans spent a great deal of blood and treasure sustaining the hazardous India-China airlift throughout World War II, they inadvertently flew into the heart of the Chinese civil war -- an involvement they have been unable to end, since, politically, that civil war still continues.

The commemoration provokes memory of two other strands from the past. First, had the current commemoration taken place in the initial stages of the Chinese communist revolution, it is certain that the government would have used the occasion to stress the widespread corruption which brought down Chiang Kai-shek's regime on the mainland, and led to the new communist order.

It is no longer possible for the communist regime to do this, since history has in this sense come full circle: corruption within Chinese officialdom is just as pervasive -- some would say even worse -- as it was 50 years ago.

A good example of the practices which the Americans had to tolerate as part of their war effort came when the Hump airlift was given its most challenging task -- that of sustaining an aerial offensive by the newly-developed B-29 four-engined bombers against the Japanese homeland.

The bombers were based at Kharagpur in India, but actually set out to bomb Japan and Japanese shipping from China. The Hump airlift had to get all the necessary logistical support across the Himalayas to those bases.

On the one hand, airpower historian Walter Boyne notes, Nationalist Chinese officials "refused to get serious about the construction of the U.S. B-29 bases until sufficient money had been paid to permit embezzlement on a massive scale". Army General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell estimated that at least half of the US$100 million in gold required by the Chinese to build the bases was siphoned off by corrupt officials.

On the other hand, "the bases themselves were a monument to the patience and industry of the Chinese people who literally built them by hand, without power equipment of any sort, using the most primitive tools to move earth or chip stones".

In this contrast, one sees a duality still observable today -- the frequent tendency of foreigners, not only Americans, to have the highest respect for the long-suffering Chinese people, while reserving a good deal of skepticism and disdain for those few Chinese who presume to misgovern and exploit them.

In the end, the courage, tenacity and sacrifice that went into the wartime airlift over previously inaccessible areas had a lasting and significant impact: the Hump operation opened military eyes to the vast possibilities in air transportation.

As one commander of the Hump operation in 1945, Gen. William Tunner later wrote: "Halfway around the world in a forgotten operation over high mountains and dangerous terrain, we pioneered and established it. There were areas in the world where air transport might have been tested more easily but the Hump was designated as the great proving ground by the exigencies of war. After that, we knew air transport would work anywhere".

In 1948-49 the famous Berlin Airlift saved West Berlin because all West Berliners had a strong will to endure.

In 1942-45 the often forgotten India-China Airlift helped but could not save China -- because China, then as now, had a weak will to save itself from its own shortcomings.