World War II was well under way, and events and a determined enemy had conspired so successfully that the Allies fighting in China found themselves in the position of having to obtain virtually all of their supplies via airplanes if they wished to continue hostilities. Despite the remarkable advances in load-carrying ability of airplanes since the days of the Wrights, supplying a military operation via airlift had never been successful. The logistics of supplying a large group of people who both desired to eat and hurl mechanical invective at an opponent were simply staggering. Needed material was measured in thousands of tons per day in a time when few of the transports in existence could even carry ten tons of payload. The Army pilots also faced an additional, niggling variable: they would have to cart all of the needed bits and pieces over the highest mountain range in the world, itself a generator of some of the meanest weather imaginable.

In almost British understatement, the air supply line to China became known as the "Hump." Peaks forced enroute operations to take place at a very minimum of 15,500 feet above sea level. The sheer magnitude of material to be carried required that airplanes arrive at each of four Chinese airfields every few minutes, around the clock, month after month. Air Force General Tunner organized and commanded this aeronautical nightmare with such success that he would be called upon a few years later to do it all again when he set up the Berlin Airlift, a virtually identical operation that received far more publicity yet operated in less taxing circumstances.

Imagine, if you will, that you are Dave Hertel, or one of the other pilots who, as did Dave, spent most of 1945 and 1946 coaxing massive Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commandos over and between the giant rock piles of the Hump. Take a long moment to start your consideration by recognizing that the C-46 was the largest piston twin ever, bigger even than a number of four-engine airplanes, such as the B-17 Flying Fortress. Then let it sink into your aeronautical soul that you had yet to turn 21 when you ferried a brand new C-46 from the U.S. to Mohanbari, in the Brahmaputra River valley of eastern India, via the Caribbean Sea, South America, the Atlantic Ocean, with a fuel stop at Ascension Island, and thence across Africa and a big slice of Asia. Mohanbari was one of several air bases set up as cargo hubs where surface transport brought the multitude of things to be stuffed inside C-46s, C-54s (which later in civilian life became the DC-4) and bastard variants of the very fine B-24 Liberator bomber known as the C-87 and C-One-Oh-Boom (C-109 aviation fuel tanker). A bit more than 500 miles to the east, on the Yunnan Plateau of China, were the four bases to be supplied.