“flying C-46s over the Hump in the China-Burma-India Campaign.”
I’ve heard you could navigate that route by the wreckage of downed aircraft.
His first C-46 featured Nationalist Chinese stars on the wings. A later airplane had Army stars. He was a civilian pilot, like a dozen others in this outfit. He wore an Army Air Force uniform with the CBI patch but without rank insignia. He was referred to as “captain.”
He identified the C-B-I as the ‘bump on the butt” of the Allied war effort since nothing of great importance happened during the campaign. It was a temporary patch job, driven by the fall of the Burma supply road to the Japanese. One can make the argument that American, Brit and Chinese forces held over a million Japanese on the Asian mainland vs moving them to defend against the island campaign. I don’t think Japan had the marine capacity to move them and, in any case, the chow was better than what the Japanese troops on the little islands could scavenge for themselves.