Smuggling over the Hump

The valiant, skillful flyers of Burma's treacherous Hump route were not all heroes. Last week the Army ruefully revealed that some had been low-grade scoundrels. Working with experienced Chinese, Burmese and Indian gangs, they had been smuggling gold, jewelry, drugs, arms and other contraband from India to China for more than two years, had piled up personal profits amounting to more than $4 million.

The vast racket did not by any means involve the great majority of Army personnel engaged in Hump operations (although the Army's failure to give names and figures did not help to correct that impression). But the guilty minority included scores of officers and enlisted men, plus some employes of the China National Aviation Corp., former Flying Tigers, Red Cross workers, and miscellaneous U.S. and British technical and business representatives.

Army investigators attributed the tremendous growth of the rich traffic to a made-to-order setup -- the hungry, isolated markets of China, well-connected local gangs, loose currency controls, the inflow of large quantities of U.S. supplies to India. With a corner on the only available means of transportation, the greedy among U.S. air crews were sure to be sucked in.

Money, Liquor, Women. The racketeers started by selling cigarets, watches, personal odds & ends. Then they branched out, sacrificing valuable cargo space to make room for their contraband, some times interrupting vital flights to get rid of it. Plied with women and liquor by well-heeled crooks, more & more U.S. air men became an integral part of the story book international syndicate that used an elaborate network of fences and even secret codes.

Five hundred cartons of cigarets were discovered under the floorboards of one plane. Another that crashed in the Burma jungle carried 35,000 rupees' worth ($10,631) of drugs and gold.

In another flagrant case, the command ing officer of a troop carrier squadron was in on a deal that netted $2,000 a trip, amounting in all to $50,000. His planes often landed at out-of-the-way fields under pretense of motor trouble, so that smugglers could unload under cover of darkness. In another case, a U.S. soldier and four Chinese were arrested in Kunming with $7,000 worth of sulfanilamide.

The inquiry that led to uncovering the racket was started more than a year ago, when Chinese bandits who were hijacking U.S. trucks were found to be armed with smuggled U.S. weapons. Under Colonel Harry Cooper, of Baltimore, a former U.S. secret service operator, Army investigators have cleared up 87 major cases (all involving profits over $5,000) and 213 minor ones, have virtually stamped out big-scale smuggling by U.S. personnel.

Some courts-martial have been completed, and others are in process. But no U.S. smuggler will get the punishment already dealt out to several Chinese accomplices. They were executed.

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