Come October, hand-picked American and Indian defence personnel aided by expert tribal trekking guides and state-of-the-art electronics recovery equipment will fan out in the mountains and jungles of India's sensitive frontier province, Arunachal Pradesh, on an unprecedented search operation.
Finally cleared by the Indian government last month after two years of secret talks between New Delhi and the US Defence Department in Washington, the objective of the meticulously planned exercise is to find the mortal remains of hundreds of American airmen whose transport planes went down in present-day Arunachal Pradesh while ferrying supplies between British-ruled India and Kunming , Yunnan province , to reinforce Chiang Kai-shek's beleaguered Nationalist army battling Japanese forces at the height of the second world war.
Allied pilots - mostly Americans but also British, Australians and Canadians - were forced to fly the dangerous route from air force bases in northeastern India across the Himalayas from 1942, when the Japanese captured the land route between India, what was then Burma and China, to the end of the war in 1945.
They flew over what came to be known as the 'the Hump', a reference to the deadly 4,500-metre height, which had to be crossed in harsh weather conditions with elementary navigational tools like maps, compasses and radios. The result was massive casualties, from the weather, accidents and Japanese fighters.
According to war records, Allied airmen defied death on a daily basis to airlift around 650,000 tonnes of fuel, munitions and equipment over the world's highest mountains to bolster the Chinese government against all odds.
Documents reveal that on a single day in 1945 as many as 1,000 round trips were made across the Himalayas, transporting 5,000 tonnes of vital supplies.