WWII Veterans Gather in India to Recall Conflict’s ‘Forgotten Theater’ : Commemoration: 20 Americans will fly to China in retracing of treacherous supply route.

They fought in the dark, leech-infested jungles of Burma, battled Zeros with the “Flying Tigers” or flew World War II’s most dangerous supply route, over headhunters and the world’s loftiest mountains, the Himalayas.

Yet, complain Americans who served in the C.B.I. (China-Burma-India) Theater, in this year of solemn anniversaries theirs continues to be the war’s most neglected theater of operations, though 7,000 U.S. servicemen, including 3,700 fliers, were killed and wounded.

“I was on the champagne circuit. Then I came out here--to the malaria circuit,” said former Army Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, 74, who parachuted into occupied France to conduct behind-the-lines operations before being transferred to India and China.

“We were the forgotten theater,” echoed Phil Piazza, 78, who fought and was wounded in Burma with the 5307th Provisional Regiment, a commando unit known as Merrill’s Marauders.

Fifty years after victory, they and other U.S. veterans of the C.B.I., including pilots who flew the Himalayas, or “Hump,” in rickety twin-engine C-46s and C-47s, have returned for a nostalgic visit and meetings with local comrades-in-arms.

Today, the 20 returnees will re-enact the 500-mile Hump flight, a vital supply lifeline that linked air bases in Assam in northeastern India to the city of Kunming in southern China.

Before leaving Calcutta, the vets, now mostly in their 70s, will settle into comfortable airline-style armchairs installed in the hold of a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, a cavernous super-transport brought along for the occasion.

It won’t be at all like half a century ago, when Army Air Force crews flew night and day in unpressurized, freezing aircraft, prey to Japanese fighters and peaks veiled by monsoon rain clouds.

All told, 650,000 tons of fuel, guns, ammunition and medical and PX supplies crossed the Hump in the years 1942 through ’45. U.S. crews strained to prevent China from being knocked out of the war--a circumstance that Allied strategists feared would free up a large number of Japanese army units for duty in the Pacific.

The unmarked route threading the snow-covered, 20,000-foot summits was a pilot’s nightmare, but it was the only way to supply China after the Japanese occupied nearly all of Burma in the spring of 1942.

Freak winds could hit 248 m.p.h., turbulence could flip planes over in midair or shove them earthward at 3,000 feet a minute, and the lashing monsoon rains lasted from May to October.

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Understandably, the cost in men and machines was sometimes enormous. In January, 1944, three American crewmen died for every 1,000 tons of cargo that reached China. Other crew members broke down under the stress--went “Hump-happy.”

So many aircraft--468 by historian Barbara Tuchman’s count--crashed that they formed an “aluminum trail” from Assam to Kunming. Some crewmen survived, but more than 1,000 were killed in the crashes, died after being captured by the Japanese or hostile tribes, or were found hanging in their parachutes from trees, their flesh devoured by ants.

Covering C.B.I. operations, the late journalist Eric Sevareid had to bail out over northeastern India’s Naga Hills, named for the tribe of headhunters who lived there. In 1943, he visited the base of the U.S. Air Transport Command at Chabua, India, and was appalled.

“There were at this time absolutely no amenities of life--no lounging places, no Red Cross girls, nothing cool and refreshing to eat and drink, no nearby rest resort to visit on leave,” Sevareid reported. “It was a dread and dismal place.”

Even today, the exploits of the American pilots in resupplying Chinese Gen. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops and the “Flying Tigers” of Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault’s 14th Air Force in such hazardous conditions elicit the admiration of flying professionals.

“It was an extraordinary feat,” said Maj. Gen. Dick Swope, commander of the U.S. 13th Air Force, who is accompanying the veterans on today’s flight. “In the era they were flying, they were operating at maximum altitude, in great cold, in aircraft that weren’t pressurized, in extremely tough weather.”

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One returning veteran, former Lt. Col. Jerry Breen of San Antonio, flew 90 missions and admits to often having felt fear at the controls. But as he reminisced, the ex-pilot exuded the aw-shucks modesty that many C.B.I. veterans believe is their hallmark.

“They gave us cargo, pointed us in the right direction, and we went,” Breen, 73, said. “I was too young to know any better.”

On Friday, at the Indian air force’s Palam base outside New Delhi, the Americans were welcomed with marigold garlands after they arrived on a 9 1/2-hour flight from Guam. On the sunbaked runway, the low-slung, jet-powered Globemaster nosed between two Indian C-47s, making the Hump-era transports seem tiny.

High-ranking Indian veterans had come to greet the Americans. In a speech, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Claude Kicklighter, who accompanied the U.S. delegation, took pains to reassure both groups of veterans that “our nation and your nation have not forgotten.”

Many of India’s surviving World War II soldiers, sailors and airmen feel keenly, and even painfully, that their wartime contribution has gone largely unnoticed at home as well as abroad.

By the war’s end, some Indian columnists have been pointing out, India had fielded the largest volunteer army in history--2.6 million men. Indian troops, they stress, helped stop Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at Tobruk, fired the first shots against the Japanese in Southeast Asia at Singapore and bore the brunt of the combat in the liberation of Burma, now called Myanmar.

“Is it realized that we had 20 divisions fighting in the war?” retired Army Maj. Gen. C. N. Das, 83, who came to Palam to welcome the Americans, asked one U.S. correspondent. “Or that Indians won no less than 31 Victoria Crosses?”

In this year of war anniversaries, columnist Inder Malhotra complained that his country “did not move a finger” to honor its own veterans. One reason may be lingering ambivalence about India’s World War II role, since India’s British masters deployed their most populous colony’s manpower chiefly to save the British Empire.

Interestingly, no military attache from the British High Commission appeared to have turned up for Friday’s ceremony at Palam--though a Japanese officer did.

Singlaub, a 35-year U.S. Army veteran, said he realized how neglected the wartime developments in China, Burma and India have been by historians and journalists when he tried to read up for his trip.

“I was amazed at how few books there are,” he said. “There’s plenty about the Pacific Theater, but not about the C.B.I. Yet the foot soldier here suffered as much as anywhere.”

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Singlaub was replaced as U.S. chief of staff in South Korea and forced to resign from the U.S. Army in 1978 after publicly criticizing then-President Jimmy Carter’s policies. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the Independence, Calif., native and 1943 UCLA graduate became the hub of a private support network working closely with the White House to finance arms purchases for the Nicaraguan Contras.

During World War II, Singlaub carried out covert missions for the Office of Strategic Services--the forerunner of the CIA. After traveling to China via India in late 1944, he led a rescue team that parachuted into a Japanese POW camp on Hainan Island and freed 400 Allied prisoners.