OTHER FAR EAST MISSIONS 

Operations involving airborne combat troops in the Pacific occurred toward the end of the war and were not as large or as widely reported as similar actions in the European theater. An exception included some of the most colorful airborne troop units and officers who served in the CBI theater. 

Operation THURSDAY, which took place March 5–11, 1944, had the goals of dislodging the Japanese from Burma and reopening a long section of the Ledo Road to make it possible to resupply China overland from the Burmese town of Myitkyina. One British officer, Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate, had already become legendary for mounting successful guerrilla operations behind Japanese lines. An equally colorful American officer, Col. Philip Cochran, commanded the First Air Commando Force, equipped with 25 transports, 150 Waco CG–4A gliders, liaison aircraft, and a number of fighters and medium bombers. Operation THURSDAY was a three-pronged attack, with ground troops advancing on Myitkyina from the north and west. South of the objective, the idea was to clear an operational base in the jungle behind enemy lines, use C–47 transports and gliders to move in an Indian division, and supply them by air in the fight against Japanese troops who would be forced to turn about to meet them. 

“Broadway,” an open field with grass surrounded by jungle, became the landing site for some 37 gliders that dropped in on March 6, 1944. They successfully delivered more than five hundred troops, including field engineers, and a pair of light bulldozers. By the following evening, the advance party had secured the perimeter and graded a usable airstrip; after sundown, more than 70 C–47 transports and additional gliders landed under cover of darkness. Within a few days, about 120 transports were landing each night, unloading cargo, and hastily flying out to make room for the next incoming airplane. A smaller field was hacked out of the jungle not far away. By March 10, the pair of ragged airstrips had received nine thousand personnel, five hundred thousand pounds of stores, light field guns, antiaircraft units, and 1,283 mules along with 176 horses to carry supplies and ammunition through dense jungles to the columns now moving toward Myitkyina. 

The advancing troops received additional supplies by airdrops from C–47s and small liaison airplanes. The latter also flew into convenient clearings to evacuate wounded soldiers. These rescue missions from dense jungle spots also relied for the first time on a group of six Sikorsky R–4 helicopters, which had been dispatched to the First Air Commando Force as a military experiment. 

General Wingate died when his B–25 flew into a hillside and exploded after takeoff from Broadway on a return flight to India. But the push toward Myitkyina continued with Merrill’s Marauders as the first Allied troops to reach its airstrip. Within hours, the First Commando’s gliders made landings at Myitkyina with engineers and equipment to prepare the strip for C–47s and other aircraft. By dusk, transports were making ar-rivals and departures, despite Japanese artillery shells hitting the airstrip perimeter. In succeeding weeks the airlift provided a crucial flow of supplies, often under fire from enemy positions in the nearby jungle. 

Operation THURSDAY became the most colorful airlift activity in the Pacific-Asian arena, although several additional airborne operations occurred. During July 1944, parachute troops jumped on Numfoor Island off the coast of New Guinea, only to find U.S. units from amphibious landings already in control of the airstrip marked as their objective. During the December battle for Leyte in the Philippines, gun crews with a 75-mm artillery battery were dropped on a ridge to cover the advance of ground units, but only one transport was assigned for this mission. Early in 1945, the drive toward Manila on the island of Luzon included a drop of thirteen hundred men who served largely as reinforcements for a rapidly moving ground offensive.

Considerable interest focused on a subsequent parachute assault to take the island of Corregidor in Manila Bay. “The Rock,” as veterans called Corregidor, had long been the symbol of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines, as well as the scene of a harrowing defense and defeat during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1941. The island measured only three and one-half miles long and one and one-half miles wide. Given the tendency of airborne drops to scatter miles wide of the target, plans to parachute onto Corregidor emphasized the narrow margin of error. The drop zone itself, a parade ground and golf course, was bordered on one side by sheer cliffs dropping to the sea. The C–47s made their action runs in pairs, and the size of the drop zone required each airplane to make two or three passes, with six or eight troopers jumping on each pass. Planners estimated a loss rate of 10 to 50 percent, but the target’s military significance and symbolic value justified the effort. In February 1945, after the first one thousand men were dropped, with 25 percent casualties, the paratroopers pinned down a number of enemy troops and provided covering fire for amphibious assaults in their sector. The battle to secure Corregidor took more weeks of vicious fighting. 

The final paratroop action in the Pacific campaign occurred on February 17, 1945, when a company of the 11th Airborne jumped into the area around a large prison camp near Manila and helped liberate some two thousand internees and military personnel who had survived harsh captivity since the fall of the Philippines in 1942.