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Show Tif i WAR S GREATEST SAGA When the final history of the war w,1 H ' "! VtS greatest chaPters Will describe that branch of the service serv-ice totally new to war-the Air Transport command. Transporting prime ministers and presidents! wounded men, jeeps and Pat Hurley's Hur-ley's Cadillac over oceans and deserts des-erts has now become commonplace news to the American public. But behind that commonplace news is a thrilling story of painstaking, back-breaking back-breaking pioneering. Here are some things few people know about the Air Transport command: com-mand: Most used air route in the I world is not between Washington Washing-ton and New York, not between New York and Chicago, but over "The Hump" between China and India. . . . Traffic over this world's highest mountain range, the Himalayas, is so heavy that planes travel at different altitudes alti-tudes so there will be no collisions. colli-sions. One plane will have orders or-ders to fly at 22,000 feet, another at 23,000, and so on. Three or four different air routes are used across the Hump, also to avoid collisions. Next most heavily used air route Is across the North Atlantic. The ATC sends a plane across the At- lantic every 58 seconds. That's about as fast as traffic moves on the Pennsylvania Penn-sylvania railroad between New York and Philadelphia, busiest rail line in the world. . . . The ATC is now flying fly-ing returning troops across the Atlantic At-lantic at a rate of 50,000 per month. . . . For years, ATC pilots have been briefed on how to land on the difficult airports of Greenland, Green-land, Iceland or China. Now the ATC has the tremendous thrill of briefing pilots on arriving at home ports Boston, Portland, Long Island. Is-land. . . . Pilots say that no briefing was ever more welcome. From Battle Fronts. More than 220,000 wounded men have been carried in ATC planes away from the battle front. During Dur-ing the early stages of Okinawa fighting, planes swooped down on makeshift runways, taxied up to ambulances, am-bulances, took off right under the noses of Jap guns. Stretchers were loaded aboard while the planes rev fueled: . . . One big ATC job has been getting crashed fliers out of the Himalayas. Amazing fact is that 75 per cent are saved. . . . Lt. Gen. Harold George, boss of the ATC, realized in advance that crashes would be heavy over the Hump, so men were given special training on how to live in the jungles. They were even taken to jungle outposts to get familiar with the jungle before be-fore they hopped. . . . Every plane flying the Hump has a small tin chest (with its own parachute) containing con-taining medicine, snake-bite, antidote, anti-dote, water purifier, concentrated food, signal flares, mirrors, mosquito mosqui-to nets, etc. This chest is kept near the plane's door. If the crew has to jump, the chest is kicked out before be-fore the last man leaves the plane. ... In the jungle, crews are taught to stay where they are until sighted by rescue planes which signal instructions in-structions as to where they can be picked up. . . . Natives are usually friendly and the chances of getting rescued from the jungle are far better bet-ter than if a flier drops over the desert des-ert or in the sea. Japs Shot Down Many. The Japs shot down many ATC planes early in the war by painting their DC-4s with U. S. insignia. . . . ; Flying up close, the Japs waited until they had perfect targets, then fired. . . . U. S. planes had to be repainted. Before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt ordered special fighter planes rushed to the British in Egypt where Rommel had General Montgomery's back to the wall. . . . However, fighter fight-er planes couldn't make the long trek across Africa without refueling and there was no airport in the heart of the continent. . . . One day an American engineer was dropped off a plane almost in the center of Africa, Af-rica, in French territory not far from the Sudan. He had his pockets stuffed with money, and his head stuffed with ideas. That was about all. He also had' instructions to build an airport. ... Six weens later the ATC came back and he had a 4,500-foot sodded runway, in fairly good shape. He had drafted most of the camels and most of the natives na-tives in that part of Africa and paid them plenty to do the job. Fighter planes immediately began crossing to the Egyptian front and the British Brit-ish army staged its comeback. . . . Today the French are making diplomatic diplo-matic inquiries as to this airport, apparently with a view to taking it over. Fifty Million Letters. Fifty million letters were flown by the ATC to Europe in April. This peak load has now dropped off due to troop transfers out of Europe, but the ATC has been the largest mail carrier in history Also it runs the world's largest hotel chain. It must be prepared to handle 1,000 men a night at Natal. Brazil, also feed them. ATC hotels are scattered scat-tered all over the world to handle ferrying and combat pilots. ... When the weather is bad. hotel facilities overflow. |