Remains of US pilots on their way home
Print Edition
CHINA yesterday handed over the remains of US pilots who supported the Chinese Army during World War II to representatives from the United States.
During the handover ceremony at Chengdu’s Jianchuan Museum in the southwest province of Sichuan, Raymond Greene, consul general of the American Consulate General at Chengdu, covered the casket with an American flag.
“US-Chinese cooperation during World War II was crucial to the global efforts to defeat fascism,” he said.
The remains are believed to belong to pilots tasked with transporting goods to southwest China along the famous WWII air route “the Hump.”
According to official files, a US Army C-87 transport plane with five US pilots went missing in 1943 on its return route from Kunming, capital of southwest China’s Yunnan Province.
The remains will be taken back to the US for DNA tests to see if they are the crew of this ill-fated flight, Greene said.
Villagers happened upon the airplane in 1993 at the top of a mountain in Bomi Country, Tibet Autonomous Region. At that time, without the resources to move the plane, only the remains were brought down from the glacier. It was not until August 2015 that the wreckage and more remains were removed to lower ground.
The Hump route, which began in the southern Indian state of Assam, passed over the Himalayas to Sichuan. It was established in 1942 and closed in 1945.
With 650,000 tons of goods transported via the route, it was a crucial channel in China’s, then weak, war-time logistics system.
As a major airborne passage, the Hump route witnessed the loss of more than 500 planes and the lives of more than 1,500 pilots from China and the US.
Jay Vinyard, 92, remembers how dangerous the route was.
On the evening of January 6, 1942, he said, he was ordered to carry petrol from India to Kunming in Yunnan Province.
Heavy storms had cut off radio communication and navigation signals, and he was forced to fly blind through the darkness.
“When I saw the lights of Kunming, it was the most beautiful scene I had ever seen,” he recalled.
Later that night, he was told the US Army Air Force had lost nine aircraft and 42 crew.
The route was so treacherous that all pilots had a piece of cloth attached to their uniforms in Chinese characters informing people who they were.
Wang Shujun’s father saved seven crew members in 1944. Wang, 80, lived in the township of Fulin in Hanyuan County, Sichuan, where aircraft plying the Hump passed every day.
“I remember my father seeing a plane with black smoke; he knew that it was going to crash,” Wang said.
Her father, Yang Renan, followed the plumes of smoke and found six Americans by a river, all injured.
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