Night Landing

War Department files finally opened up. Washington told how U.S. Colonel Philip Cochran and his second in command, onetime A.V.G. Fighter Pilot John R. Alison, landed "up to a division" of Wingate's Raiders deep behind Japanese lines in Burma, in one of the great Allied airborne assaults of the war.

That weird first night, 27 big C-47 transports hauled their double tows of gliders up to a rough, gullied clearing in the jungle. The glider pilots, Colonel Alison among the first, cut loose, hoped for the best as they headed down for the clearing.

Said Alison: "We were in complete darkness [on the field] because we didn't dare turn on any lights. [Gliders] were landing at all angles and their pilots couldn't see us any more than we could see them. . . .

"Men were running all over the field shouting instructions. Often those trying to help wounded men off the field would have to duck out of the path of a landing glider. . . . We learned lots of lessons."

Fiction Writer James Warner Bellah, now an infantry lieutenant colonel, made the flight, told how 50 men sweated to haul glider wrecks from the landing path.

"Two more are howling down over the trees, roaring toward the congestion. One of the two sees it in time . . . but the other crashes head on, and welds two gliders into a ball of scrap.

"Screams tear the night and the wrecker crew claws into the wreckage with bare hands to get at the injured. A British surgeon is already inside doing something under a flashlight, something quite frightful with his kukris [Gurkha sword] after his morphine has stilled the screaming.

"And there is a quiet North Country voice in there. 'Don't move me--this is where I hit--and this is where I die.'

And somebody's damned good sergeant goes out on the tide."

That night 500 men were taken in, 30 killed, 33 injured. Of 54 gliders dispatched, 37 arrived, eight landed safely elsewhere, nine among the enemy. Six nights later transport planes had shuttled into newly built airfields thousands of men, more than 500,000 Ib. of stores, 1,183 rnules, 175 ponies.

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