Hunt for heroes of the Hump
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.
But flight crews - and planes - went missing with such alarming frequency that the sector was branded the 'Aluminium Trail' by commanders struggling to cope with the loss of machines and men.
Spearheading the high-profile recovery campaign after more than six decades is the US defence department's Hawaii-based Joint Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Command (JPAC).
Formed under intense public pressure to trace soldiers who vanished during the Vietnam war, JPAC has an annual budget of more than US$100 million for identifying and recovering missing US troops worldwide. And its hands are full. There are an estimated 1,700 still missing in and around Vietnam, about 8,100 on the Korean peninsula, and roughly 78,000 from the second world war - of whom approximately 35,000 are 'recoverable', according to JPAC.
Southeast Asia, not surprisingly, is still a major area of concern where JPAC has three foreign satellite offices. But today the Hump - spanning India, Myanmar and southwestern China, where around 400 US planes and 1,400 men disappeared - is a top priority.
JPAC's Troy Kitch said recently that the missing planes included more than 100 in India, about 100 in Myanmar and more than 170 in China. Mr Kitch believes that as Myanmar is out of bounds and Beijing is 'unco-operative', JPAC must now concentrate on northeastern India - a region where 416 Americans are still untraced.
'We must bring home our fallen heroes [from India] and arrange their funeral with full military honours in our cemeteries and family graveyards,' he says.
JPAC was jolted into action in 2005 by an amateur trekker with an avid interest in military history. Clayton Kuhles, a US businessman-turned-adventurer, first heard about a plane wreck close to the Indian border from a trekking guide in Myanmar.
The guide took him to a hunter of the Kachin tribal group, which occupies an area straddling the borders of the three countries. He showed him the remains of a second world war plane he had chanced upon while looking for game animals and medicinal herbs in the wilds.
An excited Mr Kuhles immediately sent JPAC photos of the scattered wreck, along with the longitude and latitude of the crash site.
Mr Kuhles' contribution is gratefully acknowledged not only by JPAC, but by surviving family members of missing second world war servicemen across the US. They have formed an organisation to pressure the Pentagon, the US Congress and the Indian government to spare no effort in recovering their loved ones. Putting the internet to good use, the group mounted a campaign which forced JPAC to contact New Delhi for permission to send a team to Arunachal Pradesh, where Mr Kuhles has spotted most of the crash sites. The group also wants JPAC to fund Mr Kuhles' future expeditions, but the body has yet to loosen its purse-strings.
The group's Larry Green says: 'There are nephews and nieces and grandchildren who have discovered how effective they can be with modern means of communication. They have discovered that they can reach out and touch the government in a way that's similar to what the Vietnam war families did a generation ago.'
Convincing New Delhi was not as easy, though. The Indian government repeatedly told JPAC that it could not guarantee people's safety because of the presence of several insurgent groups fighting for independence in the northeast.
India also argued that giving the Americans a free run of Arunachal Pradesh might upset Beijing, which claims part of the border state as belonging to Tibet . The Americans were even told to wait until an amicable solution to the festering India-China border dispute was found. But ultimately all differences were ironed out by the high-powered Indo-US Defence Policy Group, paving the way for JPAC's India initiative.
According to Henry Jardine, US consul general in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta, the first official search operation will start once the monsoon rains stop in October and will last until December.
Mr Jardine, who assisted JPAC head Rear Admiral Donna Crisp in talks with Indian officials, says that New Delhi has promised helicopters, all-weather transport planes, intelligence input and the support of former servicemen and second world war veterans who live in the region.
'India will provide all logistics support to JPAC once the mission starts on our soil,' says Sitanshu Kar, a spokesman for India's Defence Ministry.
Throwing more light on the first Indo-US operation of its kind, Defence Secretary Vinay Singh told Outlook magazine: 'The Americans are sending a 10-member team with GPS, metal detectors and satellite phones. We are arranging local guides and hunters. It's a restricted area but it's a humanitarian mission and we will be supervising it.'
Admiral Crisp, who knows how crucial the host nation's assistance is for her mission, says: 'We are completely dependent on the Indian government. We have knowledge of a few crash sites and I appeal to the people of India to let us know if they find any more.'
Her deputy, Lieutenant-Colonel Johnnie Webb, is confident of finding human remains and belongings 'although it may take over a year to identify them properly in military ID laboratories'.
Colonel Webb, a veteran of several recovery missions, says: 'We have worked in similar terrain before. Our experience is that human remains stay well preserved even after decades.'
Joginder Singh, a Himalayan climber and retired Indian soldier who saw action during the second world war, agrees. Mr Singh, now a sprightly 83, says: 'It's going to be a hell of a job to hunt for men downed six decades ago. But the extreme temperatures up there may have preserved some bits and pieces.'
Members of some of the missing airmen's families have even appealed to JPAC to let them join the search. There are reports of enthusiastic young men and women - presumably grandchildren of the lost war heroes - getting vaccinated and working out in gyms to build stamina and endurance for hiking to the crash sites.
