There was a Sicherheitsdienst agent in the lobby, but he paid little more than perfunctory attention to the small group of natives who came out of the elevator, chattering like gossiping women.
Across the street from the H6tei d’anfa, one of the Deuxi6me Bureau agents pointed his finger at them as he counted them like sheep. He was satisfied. Seven had gone into the hotel, and seven had come out.
In twenty minutes they were out of Casablanca on the Atlantic coast road to El Jadida. There they turned onto the road which would take them-via the Tizi-ntichka pass-through the mountains. The road was narrow, unpaved, and there were no barriers. The French Foreign Legion had built it using only picks and shovels.
The trip to the palace of the pasha of Ksar es Souk took them all night.
S Kunming, China 18 December 1941
When the P40-Bs and the First and Second Squadrons of the American Volunteer Group began to land at Kunming, Wingmen canidy nd Bitter were waiting for them. They had been there three days. Callidy and Bitter had been officer- and deputy-officer-in-charge of moving the ground element from Toungoo to Kunming.
The ground element of the American Volunteer Group had made the first leg-about 350 miles-of the trip to China aboard a special train, made up of thirty-three flatcars, a dining car, and three first-class passenger cars.
,Army bodied” (canvas-roofed flatbed) Studebaker and International two-ton trucks (some olive drab with Chinese Army insignia, some , With the CAMCO legend on their doors, and some unmarked), all loaded to capacity, were chained to the flatcars. SO were two aircraft-fueling trucks, a fire truck, half a dozen Chevrolet pickup trucks, four jeeps, and three Studebaker Commander sedans, one of them Canidy’s. fter midnight, and The train passed through Mandalay shortly a arrived at Lashio, the eastern terminus of the Burma Road, as dawn was breaking.
While the Americans of the AVG group ate breakfast in the dining car, the vehicles were unloaded from the flatcars and inspected by a team of American mechanics. Six of the trucks and one of the pickups were judged unfit to make the trip, They would follow with subsequent convoys. road trip, the As Canidy was being given instructions for the CAMCO Twin Beech D 18S appeared in the sky, and thirty minutes later John B. Dolan, Carrying two canvas suitcases, walked UP to Canidy’s Studebaker and asked if he had room for a hitchhiker.
Once the convoy set out it averaged 20 mph over the Burma Road, and it took them forty-four hours to drive its 681 miles. This and included a ten-hour overnight stop. The road was too narrow too dangerous to drive in the dark. they had seen hu-At more than a dozen places along the road, trucks which had man chains of Chinese manhandling cargoes Of es. And there had gone over the edge back up the steep mountainsid been three large black gashes burned in the thick vegetation where fuel trucks had exploded and burned.
In the Studebaker, Dolan volunteered to explain how the Arnerican Volunteer Group would have to function now that the United States was in the war.
They were supposed to have one hundred pilots. They had eighty. There were supposed to be about three hundred people it, the support element. There were just over one hundred thirty – And there would be no More “Volunteers” released from the Army and the Navy and Marine Corps to “Work for CAMCO.”
Of the one hundr @ed P40-Bs shipped from Buffalo, seventy-five remained. Ten were simply missing, probably riding the Orient in the hold of some freighter, or on the bottom of the sea in ships sunk by the Japanese. Twelve had been wrecked beyond repair in training. Of the seventy-five aircraft now in AVG hands, twenty were grounded, more than likely permanently, because of missing parts.
When they reached Kunming, very early in the morning, smoke had been still rising from the fires started by the Japanese bombing attack the previous day. The Japanese tactic was to bomb the city with incendiaries. They knew that fires were going to cause more physical and psychological damage than high explosives.