Echoes of a distant airlift (2)

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.