HEADQUARTERS, XX BOMBER COMMAND, INDIA - Nineteen enlisted men pioneered the B-29
Superfortress into India - setting the stage for the ever-increasing raids on the Japan homeland.
Those men who silently and secretly left the States on the first day of 1944 with Brig. (now Maj.) Gen.
Kenneth B. Wolfe and a small group of key officers weren't the kind of soldiers one connects with usual pioneering. But, then, their job wasn't usual pioneering. They were clerks, typists and draftsmen. They were the men Gen. Hap Arnold had wanted to lay the groundwork in the CBI Theater for the first B-29 Command. While the rest of the XX Bomber Command was having "growing pains" and still training, "K.B." and the boys took off. Their air trip was uneventful, though Sgt. Kenneth Berresford barely escaped when one of the planes crashed and burned at Khartoum. The 19 enlisted men and officers were plopped down in the middle of India. Nobody knew they were there - nobody was supposed to know. Theoretically, the E. M. were supposed to help the staff officers with the necessary clerical work, the filing, typing and drafting. But things didn't work out that way. There was no place in which to type and draw. There was a Headquarters building, all right, |
but the outside of it was jacketed with thousands and thousands of yards of barbed wire (which E. M.
painfully removed) and on the inside there was nothing but dust - and a pack of jackals.
There were no lights, no seats, no files, no furniture. Many of the thousands of men |