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John Alison saw service on more fronts than most of his contemporaries before his transfer to the China-Burma-India Theater, where he earned a reputation as one of the best pure pilots in the Army Air Forces.

Desperately searching for fighter planes to stock his American Volunteer Group (AVG), later dubbed the “ Flying Tigers,” in 1940 Claire Lee Chennault, the former U.S. Army Air Corps major hired as head of Chiang Kai-shek’s paper air force, traveled to the Curtiss-Wright factory in Columbus, Ohio, for a demonstration of the Curtiss P-40. The Army pilot chosen for the exercise was Second LieutenantJohn Richardson Alison, who had earned his wings at Kelly Field in 1937. “ Supposedly, the horsepower limit for the plane was 980 but I pushed it to 1,400,” Alison recalled of his short flight. “ I just pulled it straight over the runway, and went up and did an Immelmann. The demo aircraft took off with a minimum of gas, no armor plate or bulletproof tanks, no radio. I did a 360 right over the ground before them, did a wingover, a slow roll. I pulled the airplane up in a wingover and landed out of the wingover. It was a two-minute flight.”

The Chinese observers with Chennault enthusiastically agreed they needed 100 of the P-40s. Chennault disagreed. “ That is not what you need,” he said. “ You need 100 of these,” and tapped Alison on the chest. Indeed, the slightly built Alison was later described by several of his World War II associates as the best pure pilot they ever saw.

A decade earlier, while hunched over his books at high school in Gainesville, Fla., Alison had heard a Curtiss P-1 fighter go into a dive. “The prop revved up and that exhaust made just a beautiful sound,” he remembered. “ I was sitting in study hall, never saw the airplane but I decided that I wanted to be a fighter pilot.” After completing college, he graduated in 1937 from flight schools at Randolph and Kelly fields in Texas. A hotshot long before the concept of “ top gun,” Alison dismayed the promoters of the early Boeing B-17 when he convincingly demonstrated that he could push his fighter close enough to the weaponless rear of a Flying Fortress to shoot it down. His feat did not immediately persuade the bomber command to install a tail gun. “ Nobody in the Air Corps was going to listen to a pursuit pilot,” he said, “ a second lieutenant who claimed ‘I can shoot those things down very easily.’ ”

Still, his prowess in the cockpit of the P-40 registered sufficiently for him to be assigned in 1940, during the Luftwaffe *s London Blitz, as a liaison with the British. Under Lend-Lease, the Royal Air Force (RAF) had imported a number of P-40s to supplement its limited stock of Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires. In spite of his efforts, Alison’s hosts rejected the P-40 as inadequate for the defense of Britain, and the planes went to the Soviet Union. For that matter, neither were the British impressed by the B-17, dismissing it on the grounds that it lacked sufficient gun positions. According to Alison, one of the U.S. team members promoting the B-17 was so miffed he wrote home: “The goddamned British are so turret minded that if Winston Churchill died, they would fix a tail turret to his ass before they let his soul go to heaven.”

Shifted to Moscow to indoctrinate the Red Air Force in the workings of the P-40, Alison was in Russia after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. “ I was quite impressed with the Russians’ determination and their ability to work long hours,” he remarked. “The crews would work 14 hours a day. The mechanics were good and did a good job of putting the airplanes together with little instruction. They checked out 48 in 10 days and did not crack up a single P-40. I was in Moscow 14 days when the Germans bombed the city. The Russians put up a display of anti-aircraft fire that was a marvel to behold. They used the barrage system. I don’t know what material damage the anti-aircraft fire did to the Germans but it certainly must have done a tremendous amount of damage to their morale.”

Once the P-40s had been assembled, however, Alison found: “ They were very reluctant to let us see anything and do anything. We were not wanted in Moscow, nor in Russia.” Attached to G2, the U.S. military intelligence service , he found political commissars prevented him from meeting with engineers or officers. Frustrated in his work and unable to get flying time, Alison wangled a transfer to Basra, the Iraqi seaport through which machines and supplies destined for the Soviet Union and the British forces in the Middle East were funneled. For five months he worked with technicians there to reconfigure U.S. Douglas A-20 and North American B-25 bombers to suit Soviet needs.

While realizing he was performing a valuable service, Alison hungered for active duty in a combat theater. To his delight he received orders in June 1942 to report to Chennault, now a brigadier general.The former head of the AVG commanded the China Air Task Force (CATF), made up of several newly activated fighter squadrons of the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF). “ I picked up a P-40 in India which had 150 hours on it,” Alison said. “The plane wasn’t really fit for service, but we took a squadron of them in and used them in China.” In fact, some of the P-40s were so old that a companion of Alison’s recognized one as the plane in which he had trained in the States.

Equally deficient were the air bases in China. Everything from ammunition to spare parts to fuel had to be flown in over the Himalayas, the fabled “ Hump.” There was no radar. Detecting enemy raids depended upon a rickety but remarkably effective network of Chinese observers, reporting by telephone from distant perches— including one that overlooked the big Japanese installation at Canton.

Notwithstanding the poor state of their equipment, the newly arrived AAF pilots formed into the 23rd Fighter Group. “ We took over from the AVG, and we had that heritage, which was a marvelous thing for us,” Alison said. “ It certainly saved lives. General Chennault had seen the Japanese and knew them. A few of the AVGs, such as Tex Hill, Ed Rector, Frank Shields, Bob Neale and Gil Bright, stayed with us and went with us on our first missions. It certainly was a great relief to have those people taking responsibility for leading the boys out on missions while we, the older pilots who had been in the Army, could go out with them and see how it was done. As a result we had few losses.”

Early on, Chennault dispatched Alison and others from the squadron to an air base at Lingling, China. There was such a shortage of sweaters and flight jackets that Alison made communal property of them. “ When the mechanics got up before daylight to go down and warm up the airplanes, they had the privilege of wearing the sweaters and the jackets,” he recalled. “ When the sun came up it would get a little warmer, and then they would give the flight jackets back.” At the small mess, enlisted men and officers ate together. There was no running water, and everyone relied on outdoor plumbing facilities.There was no flight surgeon available, even when most of the contingent fell victim to food poisoning. They had no anti-aircraft guns, only slit trenches to take cover in.

ALISON’S FIRST MISSIONS were escorting B-25s hitting Hangkow. Promoted to second-in-command of Major David L. “ Tex” Hill’s 75th Fighter Squadron, he still had not tripped a machine gun against an enemy. One night, roused from sleep by an announcement of an enemy air raid, he had asked Hill, “ Has the AVG ever tried to get any bombers at night?” When Hill said no, Alison responded, “ If they come tomorrow, I’m going to make the effort.”

When the warning net later apprised the 23rd’s air base at Hengyang of incoming Japanese bombers on the night of July 30, 1942, Alison and Major Albert “ Ajax” Baumler, a veteran pilot who had fought with Loyalist forces in the 1936-37 Spanish Civil War, took off and began orbiting the field. A radio operator on the ground told Alison, “John, we can hear them now.” A few moments later, he advised: “ I see them. They are passing directly over the airfield.” Alison, who saw no planes, expected bombs to explode beneath him, but nothing happened. The ground controller reported, “There are three of them.” Several more minutes passed, and then the radio announced the return of the raiders and their location just east of the airfield. Searching the night sky, Alison suddenly spied six blue spurts of flame, the exhausts from the twin-engine bombers. He climbed to their altitude of 15,000 feet and maneuvered behind and below them.

“ As I began to pull up on them,” Alison recounted, “ I called the radio on the ground and said, ‘Okay, watch the fireworks.’ I counted my chickens before they hatched. It was the first time I had ever fired a shot in anger. You have some mixed emotions. There must be 15 people up there, and I am going to kill all 15 of them. I remember saying, ‘Lord, forgive me for what I am about to do.’ I had the left wingman in sight, and I just ran right into the formation. I was going so fast I didn’t know what I was doing. I went right in with them. Now I was trying to slow the airplane down. I was sideslipping so I wouldn’t run into them. Before I could pull the trigger, they shot me down, just like that.

“ I was right alongside the right wingman, and he put the top turret on me. He [had] these two .30-caliber machine guns, and he started right at the nose and went right to the tail of the airplane. Bullets went through the cockpit. I got burned in the left arm. He was shooting tracers. It didn’t even break the skin, but I had an enormous blister on my left elbow. I knew the airplane was hit very bad. There was no time to be frightened; there was no time to do anything but react.

“ Here the airplane was right ahead of me. I pulled the trigger. I am convinced I killed everybody on board, but surprisingly the airplane didn’t catch fire. I think the reason is that I was firing right into the fuselage. He coated my airplane with oil, the windshield and everything. I claimed him as a probable. We were fighting over a very broad river, and I think the airplane probably fell into the river. Later on, we did pull a bomber engine out.

“ I kicked right rudder, and I blew up the second wingman. Then I turned on the leader, and I blew him up, but they dropped bombs, and they hit the airfield, surprisingly The two of them were falling in flames, the first one I didn’t know what happened. I knew I was hurt bad so I started down from 15,000 feet. I was essentially right over the airport. I started down just as steep as I could with the throttle back to get the airplane into the airport. As I made my first circle, I looked back and I saw Ajax’s guns go off, and another bomber was on fire. Apparently, there were two formations. So we had three bombers falling in flames. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we also had a P-40 falling in flames too. I still had control of the airplane, but I had a five-inch hole right through the crankcase of the engine. It was just a little bullet hole where it went in and a five-inch hole on the other side where it came out. I had lost all the oil.The engine kept running. I got down to where I thought, ‘Boy, I have got it made.’ I had no safety belt in this airplane. They had a shoulder harness and [it] was made out of such stiff material that it absolutely restricted you in the cockpit. I couldn’t turn. I just can’t stand not to be free in the cockpit and looking in every direction, so I never wore the safety belt. I didn’t wear any restraining gear, figuring that nobody was ever going to shoot me down.

“ I got down to about 3,000 feet before the airplane really began to develop symptoms. The engine began to backfire; flames began to spurt out from under the hood. I guess I panicked a litde bit because I dove the airplane from 3,000 to make a 180-degree [turn] and come back. I was going so fast, and when I headed back to the airfield, I had misjudged. It was dark, and I was apprehensive. I dove the airplane right at the airfield; I was going to skid it in on the belly. The airfield wasn’t 5,000 feet long. The surface was clay, but I figured if I just got the thing on the ground and let it skid to a halt, I would be all right. But I was going so fast that this was impossible. I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do that. I pulled up the nose, and I opened the throttle, and the engine still ran. By this time , flames were now coming out of the cowling. The engine was still running, but I was headed right toward the river— I must have had 120 knots even then. The airplane was in a nose-high angle, but the propeller was still turning. I was getting a little bit of power, just enough to drag me to the river.

“ There was a railroad trestle I had to clear. There was no opportunity to maneuver the airplane. I was very fortunate that I missed the airport. All I had to do was go straight. I breathed a sigh of relief when I cleared that trestle and got over the top. I sat it down in the river. Knowing that I was going to put my face into the gunsight, I braced— I had the throttle cut, and I had my left hand up on the cowling braced as best I could. I had my right hand on the stick. When the airplane hit the water, it was very rapid deceleration. I had the canopy open. We didn’t wear helmets and goggles. My earphones had just been blown off my head and out of the airplane.

“ I hit the water, and the canopy crashed shut. Bang! The airplane came to rest with the canopy out of the water, and I just rolled it back — it still worked— undid my parachute and stepped out on the wing, and the airplane sank. Water immediately put out the fire. I swam over to a log raft [from] a lumbering operation. As I swam over, I looked, and there was a Chinese man running out across the logs. He reached down and got my hand and pulled me up. I had put my face into the gunsight, but fortunately it didn’t knock me out. I had a bad cut on my forehead.”

His rescuer helped Alison reach the shore, where a trio of Chinese soldiers trained their weapons on him. “ I had my little flag out,” he recalled, “ and in my best Mandarin I was saying, ‘I am an American fighter pilot.’ ” Alison was taken to a hospital run by an American missionary doctor, who stitched up his wounds. The airman trudged back to the air base and surprised Hill and the others, who believed he had been killed crashing into the ground.

FOR ALL ALISON’S SKILL AS A PILOT, he had narrowly escaped death because of buck fever.That initial encounter, said Alison, conditioned his emotions whenever he faced the enemy: “ I was always apprehensive before going into an engagement. It was very exciting, tremendously stimulating. I can remember a number of times having my feet shake on the pedals. I used to say, ‘Gee, I am sure glad I am not a bomber pilot. I would hate to sit here and let my co-pilot see me tremble.’ Once engaged, all that left because you were so busy.” Alison was credited with two of the bombers, Mitsubishi Ki.21s of the Japanese army’s 62nd Sentai (group).

“John was always a boy scout,” said Philip Cochran, a pal from his Air Corps days, “ trying to help people, and he was always rescuing bad boys. Though a teetotaler, he had a great following of drunks whom he was forever getting out of trouble We called him Father Alison.”

One of Alison’s rescues involved Baumler. “ Ajax would get drunk, and I should have disciplined him,” Alison admitted. “ But he flew with us, he fought with us. He was a brave guy.”

After he was given command of the 75th Fighter Squadron, Alison said: “ I got a message from Chennault saying that a column of Japanese tanks had been spotted coming up the Burma Road. He wanted me to take six airplanes, take off at dawn the following morning. I had to land at a place called Yunnanyi, refuel, and then go down and stop these tanks. They were light vehicles, more like armored cars. The .50-caliber was very effective against them.”

After a predawn briefing, Alison led five other pilots toward the parked P-40s. After warming them up, the crew chiefs had begun shutting the engines down. “ I heard one airplane start up, and it pulled out onto the airstrip,” recalled Alison. “ I just figured, Ajax is drunk and in that airplane. He took off, got up to about 400 feet, made a left turn and started for the rice paddies, came back in, landing. He had never pulled his gear up. I said, ‘Thank God, he is on the ground.’ ”

To Alison’s dismay, however, Baumler turned around and rolled toward the parked fighters. “ He didn’t realize how fast the airplane was going. I shouted to everybody: ‘Run for your lives! Get out of the way! Here he comes!’ He came up the runway, but there was a drainage ditch at the end. Right at the last minute, he saw the ditch, kicked hard left rudder and ran through the line of airplanes. When the dust cleared, and airplane parts stopped falling, there were two airplanes locked together, full of fuel, but they didn’t burn. Ajax jumped down into the rice paddies, water up to his knees, running.”

FOR THE MISSION ALISON scrounged a pair of P-40s that had been in the repair shops. The six took off, but after refueling at Yunnanyi one of the planes would not start, another struck a stone roller used to smooth the runway surface and a third never lifted off, splashing into a rice paddy at the end of the strip. In place of eight serviceable planes, Alison now commanded only three. To complete his frustration, a thick cloud cover blanketed the target area, and Alison faced the unpleasant task of reporting an aborted mission and five lost planes to Chennault.

He enlisted Tex Hill, a favorite of the CATF commander, to help him explain what had happened. The pilot who smashed into the stone roller had simply committed a stupid error. But Alison said: “ I was concerned about Ajax. If we told Chennault what happened he had to court-martial him. The question was whether Ajax was worth saving. Neither Tex nor I had enough experience with alcoholics to know that you never really save an alcoholic. We told General Chennault Ajax had damaged two planes in a taxi accident. General Chennault was a wise man. He knew exactly what happened, but he didn’t want us to tell him what happened. He didn’t want to court-martial Ajax. In retrospect, knowing Chennault, knowing the man, he had to know.” Baumler stayed sober long enough to become a squadron leader, but he eventually drowned his career in booze.

In early March 1943, the CATF was expanded into the Fourteenth Air Force. Chennault, now a major general, asked Alison to work with the Chinese Fighter Command, which had just received new P-40s. The Fourteenth Air Force had acquired Consolidated B-24 Liberators of the 308th Bomb Group (Heavy), and the Chinese were to escort them on raids. During a mission against enemy airfields on May 8, thick clouds obscured the target, and Alison, who was somewhat familiar with the terrain, advised the bomber commander he would drop down to determine the visibility below the overcast. With Lieutenant Charles Tucker, one of the other Americans assigned to help the Chinese, Alison descended toward the shrouded objective. Before he even reached the thick, fleecy blanket, swarms of Nakajima Ki.43 fighters of the 33rd Sentai zoomed up.

Alison radioed the bombers to switch to a secondary target, while the enemy started to pass him on its way up. “ I got in behind one and hit him,” he recalled. “ I could see my tracers exploding on the side of his airplane. He turned over and went straight down into the clouds. I feel that I killed him. He didn’t even pull out. I claimed him as a probable.

“ As I got near the bombers, I came up on another one. He began to turn, and I hit him. He exploded. There were three of them coming in on the bombers. One was coming from underneath. I just held the trigger. I didn’t really expect to hit any of the three, but I thought that my firing at them might divert or turn them. I thought I could finish this before the guys from down below got within range, but I didn’t. He got a lucky first blow, hit me in the tail, the main hinge of the rudder. They punctured all the gas tanks, blew out all the tires.” Alison’s P-40 began to vibrate badly, but a Chinese fighter pilot, 1st Lt. Tsang Hsi-lan, drove the Japanese planes off his tail.

After Alison staggered back to the base, he saw his rudder dangling at the end of a cable. He had barely climbed out of the P-40 when a Douglas C-47 landed, with World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker aboard on an inspection trip. When introduced, Alison quipped: “ Captain Eddie, you are a veteran at this business. You kind of showed us how it should be done. This is a good example of how not to do it.” Alison’s riddled P-40 was likely one of four claims made by the 33rd Sentai in that fight, but he probably had killed 1st Lt. Ichiro Sakai. In any case he was credited with his ace-making fifth victory.

With orders already cut for Alison to return to the States and form a new fighter group, he was awaiting transport in Kunming when he noticed a flight of Japanese planes retiring after a feint or training mission in the vicinity. Alison decided they could be caught landing at the nearest Japanese-held air base, Lashio in Burma. He roared off in a P-40 and once airborne met a half dozen other U.S. fighters. By radio Alison invited the flight leader to come along, but the latter demurred because his patrol had used up too much fuel. One anonymous soul, however, volunteered to act as Alison’s wingman.

Over Lashio, Alison saw two planes entering the traffic pattern. “ I started down in rather a big spiral and as steep as I could, trying to catch those two airplanes before they got on the ground,” he said. “ I couldn’t make it. They both were on the runway, and the first one pulled off and went over to the parking area. The second one was coming down the runway. As it pulled off, I was at about 3,000 feet in a very steep dive. I pulled the trigger. The first rounds hit him. All six guns just hit him almost at once. He blew in every direction.

“ I leveled off and looked over. My wingman shot at the other airplane. I saw his tracers as he pulled out. They started short of the airplane, and then they walked through. He missed it. When I pulled out I was going in the wrong direction, and then the anti-aircraft started firing at us, the 20mm with the little gray bursts and then the bigger guns with the big black bursts. The small-arms fire you never knew because you couldn’t see that. They had lots of guns at Lashio, and they were all firing. I kept the airplane right on the airfield, went around it at tree level, did a 180-degree turn and started back. The other pilot was doing a good job catching up with me. As always, the second airplane was getting most of the fire. It was all hitting near him, but they apparently never struck him.”

Tom Cotton, who joined the 75th Fighter Squadron in the spring of 1943, recalled: “Johnny Alison was a truly fantastic pilot. He either flew a P-40 on the maximum or the minimum performance [level]. He was either just hanging in the air or just going crazy. He was completely fearless. He’d get up behind a Jap, and if he didn’t shoot him down, I’d swear he was going to run him down.”

Credited with six enemy planes destroyed in the air, plus a number of probables by May 15, 1943, Alison had barely been home a month when he was summoned to the Pentagon for a meeting with General Henry H. “ Hap” Arnold, Army Air Forces chief of staff. Arnold informed Alison that, along with Lt. Col. Phil Cochran, he had been assigned as co-commander of the 1st Air Commando, responsible for helping the legendary British Maj. Gen. Orde C. Wingate and his 20,000 specially trained jungle troops known as Chindits, who operated deep behind Japanese lines in Burma. Originally, Wingate had only requested help in retrieving casualties and some tactical air support, but Hap Arnold wanted the commandos to actually fly in with the Chindits, using gliders, and then carve out an airstrip for cargo planes and fighters.

While still preparing in India for what Wingate labeled “ long range penetration,” the outfit led by Alison and Cochran used their Stinson L-5 Sentinel liaison and artillery spotter planes to succor beleaguered British forces trapped in a western portion of Burma known as the Arakan. “ Until we arrived,” said Alison, “ they never had a satisfactory way to take care of their wounded. A lot of casualties became fatalities simply because there was no way to produce adequate medical care. When the British were surrounded, they scraped out a little strip inside their defensive square, and we dispatched one squadron of our L-5s. They would carry a fresh man in and bring an injured man out. If a man was hit or wounded, very often in about an hour’s time, we could have him back in India in a general hospital.” That system became an integral part of the entire Chindit operation and was also deployed by a separate Air Forces group for the benefit of Merrill’s Marauders, the smaller U.S. Army version of the Chindits.

At 6:10 on the evening of March 5, 1944, after a brief delay because of changes in plans, Operation Thursday, the second Chindit expedition of World War II, started out from India.The gliders were loaded with bulldozers, tractors, jeeps, mules, soldiers of General Wingate’s forces to guard the landing area, and members of the air commando force to direct the building of airstrips.John Alison piloted a glider towed by the second airplane. “The DC-3 [C-47] had to climb 8,500 feet to cross the mountains through turbulent air on a flight into enemy territory that lasted three hours and 15 minutes,” recalled Alison. “The gliders were overloaded with men and machinery; parachutes were not worn. Every pilot left our home base knowing that once he was committed to this flight, the airplane that was towing him did not have enough gasoline to turn around and tug his glider all the way back home. Every pilot knew that no matter what the outcome of this venture, he was going to be deposited 200 miles [officially the distance was 165] behind the enemy lines, and if everything did not go right, 200 miles is an awfully long way to walk through jungle country.

“ From the photographs,” continued Alison, “ we had estimated two logical places on the field where the Japanese might have machine guns. The first two gliders were down and their crews out immediately and on the dead run for these two points. Fortunately, the enemy machine guns were not there, and as my glider came over the field I saw the green flare, which meant that the first two gliders were not being fired upon, and my landing could be accomplished without that harassing thought. The pilot on the end of the other rope from the airplane cut, and I followed right behind him. He came into the field and had to purposely crash his glider to keep from running into the first one [there].”

The manuals for the Waco CG-4A glider called for 4,200- pound loads. “ I think my glider probably had 6,200 pounds,” remembered Alison.“ I cut loose and picked the spot, put the glider right where I intended. I hit the ground at 80 miles an hour, and my glider rolled to a stop without any damage.”

The pathfinder gliders, first to touch down, set out flare pots to guide the succeeding waves. What they didn’t know, however, was that for many years the local people had logged teak and during the wet season had slid the huge logs down to a river across the field. Over time the technique gouged deep ruts that elephant grass covered, making the trenches invisible from the air. “ They formed perfect glider traps,” said Alison, “ and there was no way to avoid them. The gliders arrived overhead in large numbers, and when a glider starts down there is no way to stop it. As each one hit the trenches the landing gears would come off, and the gliders would go in a heap. We tried to arrange the lights to spread the gliders all over the field to avoid collisions, but this was impossible— they were coming in too fast to change directions, and glider after glider piled into each other in the landing area….It was a dramatic evening but we lived through it, got our equipment down and got our men down without too many casualties.”

Actually, 21 men were killed at the landing area labeled Broadway, including Captain Patrick Casey, the engineering officer who was expected to direct the clearing of debris and construction of the airstrip. Another 60 individuals suffered serious injuries. Only 32 of the original 67 gliders launched actually reached Broadway, but there were 539 soldiers, three horses and 33 tons of equipment on hand.

“ The entire second wave of gliders was stopped by radio and returned to base,” said Alison. “ In the first wave we had enough equipment to build an airfield, and it wasn’t necessary to jeopardize other men’s lives as our patrols reported no Japanese nearby.” The soldiers constructed their fortified square, slit trenches, foxholes and barbed-wire barriers. Chindit headquarters then received the encouraging news that the troops were not under siege.

“ The next morning,” recalled Alison, “ the landing ground presented a desolate scene. There were parts of gliders strewn all over the field. There were [a number of] dead and many wounded.The British brigadier was a little discouraged. He was worried about the wounded as they limited his ability to maneuver in case of an attack by the enemy. We immediately radioed for our lightplanes and just before noon, L-ls and L-5s landed , picked up the wounded and flew back into friendly territory unescorted.

“ I talked to our engineer, [Casey’s deputy] Lieutenant Robert Brackett, and said, ‘Can you make an airfield in this place?’ He replied, ‘Yes, sir, I think I can,’ and I said, ‘Well, how long will it take?’ He replied, ‘If I have it done by this afternoon, will that be too late?’ He wasn’t just kidding— that night the first DC-3 landed at Broadway at 7:20, and altogether 65 sorties arrived that night bringing in about a thousand men, fighting troops, mules, machine guns and equipment.”

From Broadway, Alison flew to another site that Lt. Col. Clint Gaty had established for the Chindits on the second night, named Chowringhee for a famous thoroughfare in India. For the next three months, the Chindits would rampage behind the Japanese lines, blowing up railroad tracks and bridges, ambushing unwary enemy and destroying supplies and communications.

The enthusiastic reports about the alleged successes of the Chindits and Merrill’s Marauders inspired Hap Arnold. He ordered Alison home to help create four more air commando organizations. The general told Alison, “ We are going to retake Burma by air.”

“ Whose troops are we going to use?” asked Alison.

“ We are going to move the British army into Burma,” was the reply.

It fell to the less confident Alison to explain that the British had no plans to retake Burma in the near future and that Maj. Gen. Wingate, who had been killed in a plane crash on March 14, had expressed great frustration about the reluctance of his superiors to commit troops in that area. Only after Cochran confirmed Alison’s statements did Arnold drop the idea.

For political, strategic and tactical reasons, both the British and American efforts behind the Japanese lines in Burma were minimized. Alison now moved to a staff position with the newly formed 3rd Air Commando Group in the South Pacific and ended his World War II duty as an operations officer for the Fifth Air Force.

After Alison retired from active duty in 1947, he held a position as an assistant secretary of commerce and later became an executive with Northrop Corporation. On a visit to one of Northrop’s research facilities near Boston, he met the chief engineer, Dr. VC. Tsien. During their conversation, Alison mentioned he had been stationed at Hengyang, near the scientist’s home. “ Were you a bomber pilot?” the latter asked as he looked closely at Alison’s face. Alison replied he had been in the 75th Fighter Squadron. “Then we have met before,” announced Tsien. “ I’m the man who pulled you out of the river.” A quarter of a century later, Alison had met his savior. They became great friends.

A member of the Air Force reserves, Alison retired in Washington, D.C., as a major general in 1955.

Gerald Astor is a World War II veteran and the author of more than 30 hooks, including the new release The Jungle War: Mavericks, Marauders and Madmen in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II

Originally published in the August 2004 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.