My father, S/Sgt. Robert Emmit Mahler, wrote an extensive diary of his experiences in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War Two. Written in his hand, the diary spoke of the camaraderie he felt with his fellow crewmen and of his sorrow at the death of the co-pilot Lt. William E. Meek. I now have just vague memories of reading it as a young child, and unfortunately it has been lost.

   We found the abbreviated, typewritten version shown here while going through family memorabilia. At first glance it appeared that my father's entire diary had been saved in that what I held in my hand was clearly many pages long. When it ended mid-sentence on page fifteen, I discovered to my dismay that there were three carbon copies of the same fifteen pages. Wondering aloud how that might have occurred, my daughter opined that, upon his return home, he must have decided to type from the original, but never finished.

   I hope you enjoy my father's story. He wrote with the flair of a novelist, the wonder of his adventure, and a frankness that defied the horror these brave men faced.

Paul Mahler      

Oct. 26, 1943
      Tues., 6:45 A.M.   We left Ascension Island for Accra on African Gold Coast (West Africa) and arrived there at 2:00 P.M. The going was rough here.

Oct. 29, 1943
      Fri., 5:30 A.M.   We left Aden, Arabia for the Island of Masirah arriving there at 11:00 A.M. We had dinner refueled and took off for Karachi, India. This was as far as our orders read so we settled down for a few days rest while awaiting new orders and another plane. We spent two days at the base in Karachi. We visited the town so mis-named the "Paris of India." It is the "Gateway of India." The biggest part of the town reeked with every imaginable odor. Lepers and beggars were innumerable. Approximately one-fifth of all the population of the world lives in India. We saw many odd and weird scenes in the town. Magicians and Fakers of all kinds amazed us with some of their performances. Sanitation is unheard of in India. Food is grown with human waste matter for fertilizer, hence every type of disease abounds in their foods. The dead, whose relatives are too poor to buy wood to burn the bodies, are thrown into the rivers. The most horrible stenches abound in the vicinity of these streams. The dirtier a thing is the more holy it becomes to the natives. The famous author of "Believe It or Not," Robert L. Ripley has written an odyssey of incredible oddities on the famous land of mystery. The strangest places on earth are the holiest and the strangest and most remarkable city in the world is the holy city of Benares on the muddy bank of the Ganges, India's holy river. Here amidst a crumbling confusion of holy places is a temple - the Nepalese Temple. About fifteen feet up on the outside is a frieze of sculptured figures representing in succession the eighty-one sinful positions.
      Sin is the curse of the human race although it is very popular. The question of what causes sin has perplexed all ages. But of all the doctrines which men have propounded in their endeavors to solve the permanent enigma of existence, probably none has had a more potent influence than that which holds that the spirit is eternally pure but his flesh is wicked and should therefore be subjected to various degrees of mortification. This gives rise to the various penances, punishments and ascetic practices so highly honored in all religions.

      The eighty-one sinful positions around the Nepalese Temple are counter-balanced by the same number of positions of punishment. These positions of penitence are practiced by an army of ascetics throughout India, particularly in the holy cities of Benares, Allahabad, Lahore, Mysore and Calcutta. These sects of ascetics are sometimes called "Faquirs" (often they are fakers), Sadhus Yogis, etc.
      They presume to renounce the world and its ways, cast off their clothing and cover their naked bodies with ashes which gives them a weird white appearance; they neither cut nor comb their hair and usually plaster their heads with cow-dung (as evidence that the cow is holy in India) and adopt one of the ingenious methods of self-torture with the idea of keeping themselves constantly conscious of their penance. They are most often found about the holy places and always flock to all the religious festivals in the sacred cities along the Ganges River where they are frequently made objects of veneration by the muddled multitudes of India who shower them with food and money which they accept in stony silence.
      A sight, which impresses one more than any other, I believe, is to stand on the steps of Dasashwamedh-steps worn, smooth by countless thousands of pious people and watch them descending into the sacred water.
      Nowhere on earth can you see such a weird cross-cut of human life with all its spiritual and social manifestations set in such a background of picturesque architecture as along the crescent-shaped shore of the holy Ganges River.
      Several miles to either side extend the bathing ghats, wide flights of stately steps sinking down into the sacred waters. Surmounting them are the strange temples and towers of their gods and the palaces of their kings. Above and in back are the narrow streets and lanes which connect the ghats with one another a bewildering mass of moldering alleyways, too narrow for wheeled traffic and overhung by crumbling buildings. These are the "Pukka Mahals." Crowding your way down the steps of the ghat, among the weirdest collection of humanity on the face of the earth - demented - deluded, diseased and devout - all struggling after their gods, you clamber aboard a boat and float slowly down the Ganges before all this pagan panorama, wondering all the while if leprosy is contagious and whether that one-eyed beggar with spots and both hands and feet eaten away has tainted you with that unmerciful disease with the red stump of his hand when he nudged you as you passed.
      Each ghat and each temple is different. Each is built and dedicated to a different god and each spot is peculiarly holy to a Hindoo - from the Assi Ghat, built at the junction of a river not visible to anybody but the Hindoo, down past several hundred ghats to the Prahlad Ghat, the last of all.
      Five of these are peculiarly holy and the millions of pilgrims that immerse in each successively on the same day - the Assi Dasashwamedh, Barna-sangam, Pachganga and the Manikarnika. Some are built in honor of monkeys, others to "Ganesh" a red idol with three eyes a silver cap and an elephant's trunk, riding on a rat. Another was built for the Dandas, ascetics who always carry long sticks upright, never putting them down.

      An ordinary pile of logs and boughs, about four feet high, costs five dollars. This was just an ordinary one. The body was placed on top and several cakes of cow dung laid on its chest, while the nearest relative, the dead man's wife, ascended a few steps to a sacred spot where the holy fire was brought to burn the body.
      As I waited a sacred cow came wandering down the steps and calmly proceeded to eat the grass strands that bound the winding sheet to the corpse. The widow returned with shaven head and snow-white garments, waited for the cow to finish, then placed a handful of meal on her dead husband's mouth, walked five times around the pyre and without the slightest sign of emotion set fire to the pile at her husband's throat. The flames spread rapidly. From time to time the woman, assisted by a near relative, used long poles to make the fire burn faster. Not a pleasant sight. You are never so dead as when you die in India.
      When the fire died away the widow threw the remaining parts of the body into the water of the Ganges. The relatives then led her to the water's edge and broke the jewelry from her wrists and ankles and threw them into the river. Then, filling an earthen jar with the sacred water, she placed it on her shoulder, ascended to the smoldering pyre, and tipped in backward from her shoulder onto the glowing ashes of her mate. Straightaway she walked up the steps; never again will she look backward at the spot.
      On and up she went through an archway where monkeys were clambering and above which several vultures were soaring. Just as she disappeared from sight into the dingy crevices - called streets - of the Pukka Mahals she passed by a high platform on top of which is an image of Mahadeva where the worshippers of Mahadeva dwell, a spot supposedly immune to the possibility of earthly defilement.
      "Strange is man when he seeks after his own gods." Sometimes he thinks too much and seeks too long, yet learns nothing and loses everything, like the naked Faquir who sits all day glaring at the sun blazing in all its glory. He has looked too long and now sees nothing. The fiery rays of the Indian sun have burned out his eyes long years ago.
      Each morning this "sun-gazer" is carried down the steps to his accustomed place on the Dasashwamedh Ghat. His brothers placed him down gently - he could not walk as his legs had withered away from years of inactivity. He turned his face toward the east and slowly opened his eyes to greet the morning sun as it raised its burning head over the temple tops of the Holy City, here he remained the whole day long with his wide eyes staring fastened on the blazing sun without once turning them away or closing them for an instant until the dying disc had sunk once more below the horizon. He had been doing this for fifteen years.

      Pilgrimages are quite the thing in the Far East. All Mohammedans hope to make one to Mecca before they die. All Hindoos hope to bathe at least once in the Ganges River at Benares. Their penchant for penitence has created some ingenious methods of locomotion. They come crawling and rolling long distances to their temples on the river. One deluded disciple of Siva crawled all the way from the Himalaya Mts. taking more than two years to make the journey. I happened to be in the Kali-Ghat Temple and I witnessed the finish of one of these pilgrimages of penance. A woman - followed by a curious crowd - was progressing by means of a series of prostrations. Standing up straight she would extend her arms above her head and then kneel and slide her hands forward on the ground until she was lying at full length on her face in the dirt. Keeping her finger-tips on the ground she raised the rest of her body in much the same way as an inch worm and gaining her feet she stepped along until her toes reached the tips of her fingers - then she stood up again and repeated the performance. She had been travelling for many days in this fashion to reach the Khali Ghat. The Goddess Kali, the object of her struggles, is a large black figure with four arms, three red eyes, a long scarlet tongue reaching out three feet from the mouth, a necklace of human skulls, and no legs.
      The curse of India is the Hindoo religion. More than two hundred million people believe a mothy mixture of mythology that is strangling the nation. "He who yearns for God in India soon loses his head as well as his heart."
      Modern Hindoo theology is a development of several ancient and odd forms of worship, the first form of which was called Vedism, or the worship of nature. Some representing these sects of the middle ages, still survive and you can see them about the streets of Calcutta, particularly at the Kali-Ghat Temple. "Nail-men" whose nails grow until they pierce their palms; "Sky-facers," who hold their faces rigidly upward until they are unable to bend them back; "Up-arm men," who hold up their arms in the same manner until they wither away; "tree-men" who hang upside down in trees like monkeys; "Skull-men" and "Pot-men" who carry these symbols, and other forms of religious fanatics.
      Most of the wretches that we see around the holy places of worship have no idea that their attitudes and symbols mean; all are intellectually degraded and some are mere fakers.
      The modern Hindoo has one God who pervades everything, called Brahma. His three personal manifestations are as Brahma, the creator; Vishner, the Preserver; and Siva, the Destroyer. Brahma is generally represented with four heads and four arms in which he holds the various symbolical objects.
      From Brahma, Vishner, and Siva have sprung a multitude of lesser gods who the Hindoos, faithful to their practice of exaggeration, reckon up to the astounding total of 330,000,000.

      The Hindoos believe that all evil proceeds from antecedent evil and that the penalty must be suffered in each succeeding existence. There are eight-four lakhs (8,400,000) of different species of animals through which the soul of man is liable to pass, and the Hindoos object is to rid himself of this series of continuous transmigrations so that he may live in the same heaven with his god.
      To this end he makes offerings to the image of a god, abstains from killing any animal, gives money to priests, does penance which at times extends to serve bodily torture propitiates demons and keeps strictly the rules of caste. There are almost a hundred different castes, each entirely separate with regard to marriage and trades. This briefly is Hindoism. It sounds almost unbelievable yet more than twice as many people as there are in the United States believe such things with a burning fervor that we, as Christians cannot understand. A strange country is India.
      A few days later we were moved to a small Air Force base at Malir about ten miles from Karachi still awaiting transportation. We spent a week or ten days here and decided to remain on the base as we had seen enough of the Indian towns for a long time. Finally our new orders came thru and we were ordered back to Karachi spending another two days there.
      We left Karachi on a C-47 bound for Agra in the north central part of India not far from Delhi. We spent a few days here and had time to visit the famous "Taj Mahal" which is admittedly one of the seven wonders of the world. It was built by the Emperor Shahjahan in memory of his beloved Queen Mumtaz Mahal. As she lay on her death bed she reminded him that she had borne him a son and she made known her last desire that her husband should no re-marry. In her last few moments the Emperor promised that her tomb would be such a marvelous monument of architecture that the whole world would desire to visit it and that her memory would live forever.
      It was constructed on the right bank of the river Jumna about two miles from the city. Twenty-thousand workmen who were employed daily, took seventeen years from 1631 to 1648 to complete it. No accurate account of money spent in its construction is available but it has been estimated at somewhere around one billion, five hundred million dollars ($1,500,000,000). It is studded with precious jewels and stones. The main construction is of pure white marble. The tombs of both the Emperor and his Queen are located directly below the main central dome of the palace. Because the Queen died before Shahjahan her tomb occupies the central palace. The Emperor's is on the left and slightly higher. The tombs are gorgeously inlaid with costly stones, pieces beautifully cut in very attractive designs. They were so highly polished that they still shine like mirrors. Quranic inscriptions are engraved on both.
      The main gateway of the Taj Mahal is 151 feet by 100 feet and stands on a platform 211 by 86 feet in front of the gate. The face of it is beautifully inscribed with Quranic text in black letters and inlaid with marble pieces. Under the vaulted roof in the octagonal chamber a beautiful brass lamp presented by Lord Curzon hangs in the center.