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Saga Of CNAC #53

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Fletcher Hanks was a transport pilot flying the dangerous Hump route (over the Himalyas) from India to China in WWII. When his friend Jim Fox crashed his CNAC #53 C-47 in the mountains of China he tried then to get to the crash site but was unable to make it. This book is both a story of the CNAC (China National Aviation Corporation) civilian organization during the war and of Mr. Hanks total determination to find out what happened to his friend.The aluminum trail: China-Burma-India, World War II, 1942-1945 : how & where they died In his eighties Fletcher Hanks finally found the wreck of CNAC 53. This is one truly amazing story of courage and determination. For any reader with an interest in the history of the China Air War this book is a must have.The Hump: America's Strategy for Keeping China in World War II (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series)

The story of the WW II "Hump" airlift has never been very widely publicized, and one of the more obscure aspects of it - an obscurity inside a vagary, to paraphrase Churchill - was the role played by the Chinese airline CNAC, the China National Aircraft Corporation. For those not up on the background story, China was cut off from its allies by both sea and land for much of the war and was supported solely by an airlift route that funneled supplies through what was then India (now Pakistan and India) to China over the Himalayan Mountains. With the aviation transport technology available at the time this was a severe test of man and machine, even without the complication of Japanese interceptors operating from Burma. The loss rate has been compared to that of the unfriendly skies over "Festung Europa," without exaggeration; over sixty years later hundreds of US and Allied aircrew are still MIA along the route. Among the missing was the mixed American-Chinese crew of CNAC C-53 (Douglas DC-3) # 53, which disappeared on March 11, 1943 on a return flight to India. This book is about one man's quest to find the wreck and determine the fate of its crew: pilot Jim Fox, copilot Thom, radio operator Wong.

The author, Fletcher Hanks, is the very definition of "spry." He was a CNAC pilot during the war, a colleague of the the missing crewmembers, and the fact that he, himself, was on the expedition that walked into the wilderness on the China-Burma border fifty-four years later says volumes about the man. His first-person account of the 1997 expedition provides the foundation of the book, but his background information on, and reminiscences about, CNAC's contributions to the airlift itself are fascinating, often funny, sometimes unsettling, and . . . invaluable. One of the problems facing US aviation historians trying to present a balanced view of these events is that the USAAF portion is well-documented and a comparatively large number of surviving participants are available to interview, but material about CNAC is sketchy. Records were lost or unavailable after the Chinese Civil War, and China itself was closed to Westerners for decades. Although this book alone can't fill the gap, it does bridge it somewhat.

It's quite a story. Imagine:

- Being cleared for takeoff with lightning strikes on the field and instruction to "avoid the B-25 burning at the end of the runway."

- A copilot who's a bear to fly with. No, really, a bear. Named Elmer.

- A proposed monument to Margo, the most accomplished prostitute in Calcutta, featuring statues of her in "four artistic positions" (see "unsettling," above).

- Losing your "kicker" out the cargo door while dropping rice to Chinese troops in the jungle, and having the man show later in Kunming to complain. Odd, because he hadn't been wearing a parachute.

Returning to the expedition itself, after a certain amount of hardship and adventure the joint Chinese-US team did find both the wreckage and, less expected, a reawakened sense of alliance and shared sacrifice. In 2003 a bust of Jim Fox with a dedication written by then-President of China, Jiang Zemin, was unveiled at the George Bush Library and then placed on display in Fox's home town of Dalhart, Texas. This gesture of international goodwill serves as the climax of the book, and a fitting tribute to those who fought the good, but unglamorous and little-known, fight long ago.