Word: humping
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Hardin & the Hump...
...your Dec. 18 cover story on Major General Tunner, you say he was sent to India to take charge of the A.T.C. airlift which flew "the Hump," and quote General Wedemeyer: "Tunner created an epic in air operation...
Tunner came over in August 1944 . . . The Hump was almost whipped-but not quite-by June 1944. There still remained those mythical monsters-of whom all the pilots had heard-that rode the winds of the Himalayas and slammed planes in,to mountains...
There was a man named . . . Brigadier General Thomas O. Hardin . . . In his leather jacket and beat-up hat, he was zipping back & forth over the Hump at times when any self-respecting general would have been making out his per diem vouchers. . Legend has it that he started over one night shortly after a group of transports took off. Arriving in China, he was something less than delighted to learn that all of the transports had turned back because of thunderstorms. He then issued his famous proclamation: "There will be no more turning back because of weather conditions...
...southern Japan, brought with him, as usual, assistants of long standing. Tunner's chief of staff Colonel Glen R. Birchard had been with him in Germany. Both his communications officer, Colonel Manuel Hernandez, and his operations officer, Colonel Robert ("Red") Forman, were holdovers from the days of the Hump. Says Tunner: "When we start a new airlift, we start in a hell of a hurry. It is a whole lot easier to start with people you know...