Vicksburg WWII vet recalls ‘Flying the Hump’|[01/22/07]

Published 12:00 am Monday, January 22, 2007

Flying through a nighttime snowstorm across the Himalayas, Charles Gastrell saw something unusual flashing across the windshield of his B-24 bomber.

&#8220You could take your finger and it would follow your finger around like little lightning bolts,” Gastrell said, describing the phenomenon called Saint Elmo’s fire, which is produced by electrically charged clouds at the altitude of 30,000 feet – needed to clear the mountains that include the world’s highest peaks.

Gastrell was a 23-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot from Vicksburg, later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying more than 600 hours of some of what was regarded as the most dangerous transport duty of World War II, from India across Burma to China and back.

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&#8220Well, they used to say it was harmless,” said Gastrell, now 86, of the static-electricity in his cockpit. &#8220But one night I was going through all that and all of a sudden there’s a heck of an explosion. The stuff with static electricity had built up so much and then it exploded, and when it did you couldn’t see anything. Everything was yellow.

&#8220But fortunately when that happened to me I didn’t rear back and pull the stick back and take the airplane out of level flight.”

By that time, Gastrell was already an accomplished pilot. An Eagle Scout as a youth, he had joined the Mississippi National Guard’s local combat-engineer company while still a senior patrol leader in his Scout troop. He left Vicksburg for the war with the first group of guardsmen to depart, in November 1940.

From that company – Company B, 106th Engineer Battalion, 31st Infantry – Gastrell transferred to the U.S. Army Air Corps. He completed flight training in Oxnard, Calif., in February 1943, receiving the top award in a class of nearly 300 cadets.

Gastrell was first trained to fly planes of the type he would later pilot over &#8220the Hump,” as the China-Burma-India transport theater was called. Before being sent overseas, though, he was selected to flight-test many different types of aircraft before they were sent into combat in Europe. He did that for nearly a year, learning to fly about 10 different planes.

&#8220That’s really unusual for any second lieutenant to be able to fly four or five different planes in the same day and test them,” Gastrell said.

Many of Gastrell’s friends from training were flying to Europe, where they &#8220really got into the action. And a lot of them got killed over there and some of the guys even training got killed.”

Gastrell said he signed up to ferry planes around the world, but was sent to the American base in Jorhat, India, once his superiors noticed his test-pilot experience.

&#8220That’s just what we’re looking for,” Gastrell quoted his superior officers as saying.

The B-24s Gastrell had flown over the Himalayas were carrying mainly fuel and ammunition to five Chinese air bases.

&#8220Their job was to keep China in the war, bringing supplies, troops, high-octane gasoline, guns and whatever else a war needed in a round-the-clock airlift operation,” wrote another former CBI pilot, Otha C. Spencer in his 1992 book &#8220Flying the Hump.”

The bombers, configured transport, had had their guns removed. Each trip generally had a crew of three – pilot, co-pilot and engineer – and flights lasted six to seven hours, Gastrell said. They weren’t being shot at, but sometimes had to take evasive action when landing at Chinese airbases under attack by the Japanese, Gastrell said.

&#8220We were almost like taxi drivers in a way, because I never had the same crew or the same co-pilot or the same engineer,” Gastrell said.

New pilots in the theater were oriented to their jobs by flying missions as co-pilots before before being placed in command of a plane, Gastrell said. When taking off near the mountains’ base, the planes had to climb in a circular pattern to about 10,000 feet before beginning to cross them, Gastrell said.

The United States lost more than 1,300 pilots and crew members and 500 transport planes in the effort. Many crashed in the jungles of Burma and were never found.

&#8220Of course, anybody who bailed out over the jungle (had a) very small chance of getting out unless they happened to bail out near some native village or got lucky and got in one of those rivers and could come out,” Gastrell said.

Pilots and their crew had attached to their gear silk maps with Chinese writing asking whoever might find them after a crash to help them to safety. Gastrell said he has donated his for an exhibit that is to be placed in the transportation museum to open in the Levee Street Depot next year.

Pilots flew in all light and weather conditions, often in severe air turbulence, Gastrell said. Among the biggest hazards were the mountains themselves, including one 10,500 to 11,000 feet high at the beginning of a common return route from the base at Kunming, China.

Less-experienced pilots would try to cross the mountain as low as possible to conserve fuel but didn’t take into consideration a headwind that pushed planes into the mountain, Gastrell said.

&#8220You’re coming out of Kunming in the morning like that with the sun behind you looking like you’re looking at hundreds of mirrors in the mountain,” Gastrell said. &#8220What you were looking at was aluminum from the airplanes that had crashed into the mountain. It’s just like a junkyard.”

Gastrell flew transport missions from Nov. 12, 1944, until Aug. 6, 1945.

Shortly after the war ended, Gastrell left active duty with the Air Corps and enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In the interim, he and his wife, Kathryn, originally from Sunflower and then working at The Street Clinic in Vicksburg, married.

While studying at Georgetown, he began working in real estate and eventually developed a 17-home subdivision in a D.C. suburb in Fairfax County, Va., while she worked for the Internal Revenue Service.

After earning his bachelor’s degree from the school of foreign service, he went to work for the U.S. Navy as a procurement officer for aircraft. She became assistant director of the first integrated private school in Northern Virginia, Burgundy Farm Country Day School in Alexandria, Va.

The Gastrells have been married 60 years. They have three children, Linda Kathryn Gastrell Aden of Vicksburg, Charles Gastrell Jr. of Alexandria and Charlotte Elaine White of Hattiesburg; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Charles and Kathryn Gastrell returned to Vicksburg in 1980 and have been active in the Paddlewheelers round- and square-dancing group. Charles Gastrell said he has &#8220slowed down from tennis, golf, fishing and hunting” but he continues to exercise at the YMCA at least four days a week.