In the summer of 1944, on a dusty airstrip outside Bangalore, a Royal Air Force pilot walked toward the aircraft he was supposed to fly that morning, then stopped twenty feet away. He had been flying Hurricanes for three years. He knew the Hurricane like the back of his hand—every sound it made, every warning it gave before something failed. But the thing in front of him now was entirely different. It was taller than he was. Its propeller diameter exceeded twelve feet. Empty, before a single drop of fuel or round of ammunition, it weighed twice as much as his Hurricane fully loaded and ready for war.
There was no two-seat version. No instructor could sit behind him to guide him through the flight. The first time any man flew a Thunderbolt, he flew it alone. And Britain hadn’t even asked for this plane. Every mission it could perform in Europe was already reserved for other aircraft. So all 830 of them were crated and shipped east to a war Britain had stopped thinking about. What that pilot later wrote was not what anyone on that tarmac expected. It wasn’t a complaint. It was something much closer to affection, and it was tied to a single number—a number that would cost lives on the same runway before the year was out.
The island had been quiet for so long that the men of No. 30 Squadron had almost forgotten what war sounded like. They had come to Ceylon in March 1942, flying Hawker Hurricanes from an airstrip south of Colombo. Three weeks later, on an early April morning, the Japanese arrived. Carrier aircraft came over the Indian Ocean with the first light of dawn—more numerous than anyone could count at the time. The squadron climbed into that enemy formation and fought. Some Hurricanes returned riddled with holes. Some never returned at all. For a few hours that morning, the war over Ceylon was as loud and real as anything over the fields of Kent.
Then it stopped. For twenty-two months, nothing happened. The Japanese didn’t come back. The squadron stayed on its island in the stifling heat, patrolling an empty sea. The Hurricanes grew older, their paint faded, and the young men who had run to their aircraft that morning became tired men who no longer ran anywhere. They flew only because the roster demanded it. They watched the horizon because watching was their job. Two years is a long time to wait for something that already happened.
In February 1944, the orders finally came. The squadron was leaving Ceylon. They moved first to Fazalpur on the twelfth of February through the flat brown dust of Bengal, then to Comilla in April. They were close enough to the fighting in Burma that the maps on the walls became important again. Then on the twenty-fifth of April, they were sent somewhere no one expected. Not east toward the front, but south, deep into India, to an airfield called Yelahanka outside Bangalore—hundreds of miles from any living Japanese soldier. They were being pulled from the frontline. No one told them why.
The answer sat on the other side of the airfield under canvas covers. When the covers came off, the men of No. 30 Squadron stopped talking. The Republic Thunderbolt didn’t look like a normal fighter. It looked like something designed by men who saw no reason to stop, so they built it around a massive engine. Its nose was huge, a thick cylinder of air-cooled power—eighteen cylinders arranged in two rows, a Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp generating over 2,000 horsepower. The Hurricane’s Merlin produced about 1,300 horsepower. This plane produced nearly double that, and it needed every bit of it because the airframe around that engine was the largest single-seat fighter the RAF had ever put in a pilot’s hands.
Empty, it weighed close to 10,000 pounds, while the Hurricane weighed about 5,800 pounds empty. Loaded for combat with fuel, ammunition, and bombs, the Thunderbolt exceeded six and a half tons and kept climbing. Its landing gear legs were as thick as a man’s thigh. The propeller blades were so long that engineers had to design a special telescoping landing gear, because normal legs would make the blades strike the runway on every takeoff. The guns were eight .50-caliber Brownings, four in each wing with 425 rounds behind each—3,400 rounds in total. A Hurricane pilot with cannon in his wings had 91 shells per gun and had to spend them as carefully as a man counting coins. A Thunderbolt pilot could hold the trigger down, turn around, come back, and still have something to fire.
Up close, it smelled of new paint, hot metal, and the distinctive oily sweetness of American factory grease—a smell no one in the squadron had known before. The rivets were flush and perfect. The panel lines were tight. Everything about it suggested it was built somewhere very far away by people who had never known shortage, and shipped across two oceans to a field where ground crews washed their tools in petrol because there was no alternative.
Men walked around it as one walks around something unbelievable. One of them, standing at the wingtip, realized he couldn’t see over the engine cowling from the cockpit at all. While taxiing, a pilot had to steer seven tons of aircraft toward a runway he couldn’t see, swinging the nose from side to side to catch fleeting glimpses of where he was going. There was another problem, the most important one. There was no trainer version. The Thunderbolt had one seat, and only one. There would be no instructor, no quiet voice behind the headrest, no second pair of hands to help. A pilot had to read the notes, sit in the cockpit on the ground until he could find every switch with his eyes closed, then start that massive engine and go—alone, for the first time, with no way back but his own hands.
In 1944, there was nothing in the RAF more lethal to a pilot than his first hour in a Thunderbolt. What none of them knew, standing on that field at Yelahanka, was why that aircraft had reached them in the first place. The RAF hadn’t wanted it—not in Europe, at least. By mid-1944, the shape of the air war over France and Germany was already set, and every mission a Thunderbolt could perform there was owned by something else. If you needed something heavy to break up a column of German armor, you sent a Typhoon, which the RAF considered best at low altitude where that work was done. If you needed to fight German fighters, you sent a Spitfire and soon a Tempest. There was no gap left for an American machine weighing seven tons designed to fight at 30,000 feet over Berlin.
So 830 Thunderbolts were allocated to the RAF under Lend-Lease. Every one of them went east. 240 were early Razorback models, known as Thunderbolt Mark I, with the fuselage extending behind the cockpit and a framed canopy that gave the pilot no rearward visibility at all. Then 590 of the newer type, Thunderbolt Mark II, with the rear fuselage cut down and a clear bubble canopy fitted instead, so the pilot could finally turn his head and see what was chasing him. Sixteen squadrons would fly them. Every one of those sixteen squadrons was east of Calcutta. No RAF Thunderbolt squadron ever flew a combat mission over Europe.
That was the truth of the aircraft parked in front of No. 30 Squadron. It wasn’t a reward. It was what was left over. The conversion was run through a unit at Yelahanka called No. 1670 Conversion Unit. It worked through the squadrons one by one. The first to receive Thunderbolts was No. 135 Squadron under Squadron Leader Lee Hawkins, beginning in May. By June, Nos. 146 and 261 were training on them. The Americans were already calling the plane “the Jug,” and the name crossed over without anyone deciding it should.
On the sixth of July, 1944, No. 30 Squadron gave up its Hurricanes. Three years. Three years for one aircraft across two oceans and half a war, and it ended on a July morning in southern India with a signature on a form. The Hurricanes were flown away or pushed to the edge of the field, the Thunderbolts were put in their place, and the squadron that had been a Hurricane squadron since 1941 stopped being one.
Then the flying began, and the reports started coming in, and they were not what the squadron had prepared for. Squadron Leader D. A. McDonald of No. 30 Squadron wrote down his first impressions clearly. He wrote: “She was pleasant to fly.” “A wide, roomy cockpit and controls that worked very smoothly.” He added: “And when you press the button, there is a very noticeable increase in power.”
“Pleasant.” That was the word a Hurricane pilot chose on his first encounter with the largest and heaviest single-seat fighter in the RAF.
It is worth understanding what he meant. The Hurricane’s cockpit was a narrow metal box built around the man—hot, crowded, everything within reach because there was nowhere farther to put it. The Thunderbolt’s cockpit was a room. There was space at the shoulders, space at the elbows. A man could sit upright in it. On a five-hour mission in the heat of Bengal, that was not a luxury. It was the difference between landing tired and landing finished.
And the controls did not fight the pilot. Everyone expected something heavy and brutal, a machine to be wrestled. Instead, the Thunderbolt answered its pilot smoothly, and the harder it was pushed, the better it performed. The button McDonald mentioned was water injection, a system that sprayed a water-alcohol mix into the engine to let it run at higher power without tearing itself apart. Press it and the Double Wasp rose from 2,000 horsepower toward 2,300. Men who had flown Hurricanes at their absolute limits for three years now held a key to power they had never needed.
But McDonald put one more number in his notes, and that number was the most important. A Thunderbolt would not lift off below 150 miles per hour. A Hurricane climbed at 100. Fifty miles per hour is not a small difference on a runway. It is hundreds of extra yards passing under the wheels while seven tons of aircraft gain the speed it needs. Hundreds of extra yards in which nothing can be done but keep straight and wait.
The airfields at Yelahanka were long enough. The airfields they were heading for were not. Ahead of them in Bengal and Arakan were strips cut from rice paddies and jungle, laid with pierced steel planking over mud, short and narrow and walled by trees at both ends. Every pilot who read that number did the same arithmetic in his head, and every one of them reached the same conclusion, and none of them dared say it aloud in the mess that night.
There would be a moment on every takeoff, somewhere past mid-runway, when the aircraft was too fast to stop and too slow to fly. In a Hurricane that moment lasted a heartbeat. In a Thunderbolt, on wet steel matting, in the damp monsoon air, it would last long enough to think about.
The men of No. 30 Squadron had just been given the most comfortable aircraft they had ever flown, but their next runway was not going to give them the distance to use it. The first Thunderbolts to reach No. 30 were early Mark I models, and every pilot who climbed into one discovered the same thing within ninety seconds of sitting down. He could not see behind him. The Mark I had a razorback spine—the fuselage ran unbroken from behind the cockpit to the tail, a solid wall of aluminum filling the space a pilot needed to look through.
In Europe, American pilots had been dying in that blind spot since 1943, and everyone knew it. In September, the replacements arrived. The spine of the Thunderbolt Mark II was cut down and a single piece of molded Perspex was fitted over the cockpit—a clear bubble that gave the pilot something no Hurricane pilot had ever possessed. He could turn his head and see his own tail. He could see the ground on both sides of his aircraft at once. He could see an aircraft coming.
Pilots who flew both models in the same week described the change as though someone had knocked down a wall in a house. But the cockpit was not the hardest part. The hardest part was giving up three years of everything they knew.
A Hurricane pilot fought by turning. That was the entire combat doctrine, dating back to before the war. You tried to get behind your opponent, and if you couldn’t, you turned tighter than he could until you did. The Hurricane wasn’t fast. It wasn’t fast at all. But it could maneuver in a tighter circle than any other aircraft, and an entire generation of RAF pilots had built their survival instincts on that single fact.
The Thunderbolt could not do that. It could never do that. Seven tons of aircraft cannot turn inside a Japanese fighter, and no amount of skill can change that arithmetic. The Nakajima Ki-43, which the Allies called “Oscar,” weighed about a third of a loaded Thunderbolt. In a turning fight, an Oscar would be behind a Thunderbolt within two circles and stay there.
So pilots had to learn something that felt to them at first like cowardice. Don’t turn. Dive away. Use the weight, all seven tons of it, point the nose down and let gravity do what your engine cannot, and drive through the enemy and past him too fast for him to get a shot worth taking. Then, when you have all that speed, convert it straight into altitude, pull the nose up on momentum alone until you are above him again. Dive, fire, climb, repeat. Never linger, never circle, never give him the fight he wants.
That was the American doctrine, forged in their blood over Europe. And it ran against every reflex a Hurricane pilot had built over three years. Some men adapted quickly. Some needed the instruction repeated two and three times, because the moment an enemy appeared through the windscreen, the old instinct floated up from somewhere deep and tried to pull the stick.
Instructors used the bluntest phrases they could find. If you turn with him, you lose. Not probably lose. You lose. The aircraft you are sitting in cannot do what you want to do, and the man you are fighting knows it better than you do. The only fight you can win is the one you never give him a second chance in.
There is a particular kind of insult in being told your aircraft must run. Men who had spent 1942 and 1943 hearing that the Hurricane could out-turn anything in the sky now had to accept that their new aircraft, twice as powerful and eight times as heavily armed, was not allowed to stay and finish the fight. Some of them never fully reconciled with it. They applied the doctrine because it was correct, but they resented it, and both things were true at once.
There was something else the Hurricane had never taught them, and it had nothing to do with combat. The Thunderbolt’s cockpit at 20,000 feet over Burma was cold enough to require gloves. The same cockpit, parked on steel matting at Chittagong at ten in the morning with the canopy closed and the engine running, was an oven with a man locked inside. Ground temperatures climbed past 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, and there was no shade inside a bubble canopy. Pilots took off with their clothes soaked through with sweat. They climbed into cold air, the wet flying suits froze against their skin, then they descended into the heat again—sometimes three times in a single morning.
The oxygen mask made it worse. It pressed on the face and filled with sweat. A pilot on a five-hour mission learned to tilt his head to one side at intervals to drain it. These are not the details that appear in official reports. They are the details every man who flew there remembered for the rest of his life.
On the thirteenth of September, the squadron moved north to Arakan. Three weeks later, on the fifth of October, 1944, it went to Chittagong. Chittagong was the war itself. Bengal in October is a country recovering from drowning. The monsoon had been hammering the coast since June. What it left behind was a landscape of mud steaming in the morning sun. The air was so heavy with moisture that a man’s shirt was soaked through before breakfast and never dried.
The airfield was a strip of pierced steel planking laid directly on the ground. Thousands of interlocking metal sheets pinned over earth that shifted beneath them. When a Thunderbolt rolled across it, the whole surface rang and moved. Plate striking plate. A noise like a freight train crossing a bridge. That was the runway that had to give seven tons of aircraft 150 miles per hour.
Ground crews had it worse than anyone. Humidity is an enemy that never sleeps. It crept into radios and killed them. Mold grew inside tool bags overnight. It corroded any exposed metal and turned grease rancid in its tin. Men worked on engines under palm-frond shelters while rain fell two feet away, every tool they touched slick, every bolt they tried to turn fighting them. A Thunderbolt engine had eighteen cylinders and thirty-six spark plugs, and someone had to service every one of them in those conditions.
Then there was the country they had to fly over. Burma from 10,000 feet is nothing but green emptiness. No fields, no roads, no villages with patterns a man could navigate by. Just forest, hill after hill, stretching in every direction under a haze that erased everything into one color. There were rivers, and rivers helped, but the rivers of Burma bend and split and rejoin and look exactly like the river forty miles away.
Pilots who had learned navigation over England, where you could fix your position from the shape of a church or the line of a railway, found themselves over terrain that offered nothing at all. If you lost your way over Burma, the ground would not tell you where you were. The compass would tell you if you trusted it, and the clock would tell you if you had kept time carefully. Men who stopped calculating did not always come back.
What did not happen on most days was the thing everyone had trained for. The Japanese Army Air Force in Burma by late 1944 was a shadow of what it had been. But it was still there. Oscars appeared, sometimes the heavier Nakajima Ki-44, and on certain days over certain targets a Thunderbolt pilot got exactly the fight he had trained for. But those days were rare, and they grew rarer through the winter. A pilot could finish an entire tour and count his encounters with enemy aircraft on the fingers of one hand.
What was killing men instead was the ground. Anti-aircraft fire in Burma was not the wall of heavy shells they had faced in Europe. It was smaller, closer, and in some ways more personal. It was light machine guns hidden among the trees around a bridge. It was a machine gun mounted on a truck. It was infantrymen firing rifles straight up at an aircraft diving toward them. Hundreds of men doing it at once. And a bullet leaving a rifle barrel does not care that it was aimed by a frightened conscript.
A Thunderbolt came out of its dive at 500 feet to fly through all of it. This was the mission now. This was what the squadron did. The system had a nickname borrowed from the Typhoon squadrons in Normandy. They called it the taxi rank. A section of Thunderbolts took off, climbed, flew to a point on the map above the front line, and began to circle. That was the mission. Circle and wait and burn fuel and listen.
Somewhere below, moving with the leading infantry, was a visual control center—a small group of men with a radio. And when those men needed something destroyed, they called for support. A voice gave coordinates and a description. A bunker at the end of a rocky spur. An artillery position in a village. A road junction where trucks were moving. The section leader rolled his aircraft and put it into a dive.
Diving a Thunderbolt at a target was unlike anything a Hurricane pilot had done before. It began with a turn. The section leader banked his wing, the horizon swung and dropped away to be replaced by green, then the nose settled on the target to be destroyed. From 8,000 feet, a bunker at a road junction does not look like a bunker. It is just a different shading. A place where the pattern of the trees is slightly wrong. And the pilot had to keep that shading in the center of his windscreen while every part of his body told him the ground was coming up fast.
The speed built with a violence no light aircraft could match. Seven tons pointed down with 2,000 horsepower behind it does not merely accelerate. It plunges with intent. The airframe began to make a sound, a rising note through the structure, and the controls, which had been light and easy at cruising speed, grew steadily heavier in the pilot’s hands until the stick felt set in concrete. That heaviness was not a flaw. It was the aircraft holding itself absolutely steady, and a steady gun platform is the only kind worth having.
The .50-caliber guns were set to converge at a predetermined point. Inside that range, eight streams of fire met in one place. A pilot who put that point in the right spot and held the trigger for two seconds sent more than 200 rounds into a space the size of a garden shed. The Thunderbolt shuddered and slowed noticeably under the recoil of its own guns. The whole aircraft rocked back against the weight of what it was throwing. The tracer streaked straight and fast, then the ground erupted.
If there were bombs, they came off at the bottom of the dive, and then came the moment that decided whether the pilot would go home. The pull. Hauling back on a stick that no longer responded to movement. Feeling the wings take the load. Seeing the green ground stop approaching and begin sliding away beneath the nose. Blood drained from the pilot’s head, the edges of his vision went gray at the corners, and for three or four seconds he flew on memory of where the horizon had been. Treetops passed beneath him at 400 miles per hour.
Then came the sudden rise, the reward for all that weight. All that speed converted straight into altitude. The nose went up and kept going up. The airfield was behind and below. The light flak from the treeline reached the place where he had been, not where he was now. A Hurricane at that moment would have been low and slow and vulnerable. The Thunderbolt was gone, high and away.
Twenty minutes later, the pilot was back at 8,000 feet. Hands steady, waiting for the next radio call. There is something worth reflecting on in that. These were fighter pilots. Every man had joined to be a fighter pilot, had been selected for it, and had spent three years being told his purpose was to find enemy aircraft and destroy them. And now he was a taxi driver circling over a forest at 8,000 feet, waiting for a corporal on a radio to tell him where to go.
No one wrote home about that. There was nothing worth writing about. You did not come back with a victory to boast of. You came back to report that the target had been hit, an intelligence officer wrote it down, and the next day you went back to do it again.
But the aircraft they were doing it in turned out to be almost perfect for it. Everything London had decided made the Thunderbolt unsuitable for Europe made it exactly right for Burma. Everything. Every objection inverted. It was too heavy to maneuver. In Burma, no one needed to maneuver. What Burma needed was something that could carry weight, and the Thunderbolt carried more than any other aircraft on the theater. Three 500-pound bombs, rockets under the wings. And those eight .50-caliber guns, which did to a Japanese supply column what no other aircraft in the RAF could do. Because eight guns firing together do not just damage a truck. They tear it apart.
Its rate of climb was poor for a fighter. In Burma, that mattered less than the fact that it dived like a falling safe. A Thunderbolt that had just released its bombs from 500 feet did not need to climb gently. It had speed, enormous speed, and it used it to punch through the light flak and come out the other side before the gunners could track it. Pilots who had flown Hurricanes over the same targets understood the value of that difference perfectly.
Its engine was the wrong type. That was the objection in Europe, where liquid-cooled engines gave better streamlining and speed. But a liquid-cooled engine is a fragile thing. One bullet in the radiator, one hole in a coolant line, and the temperature rises and the engine stops, and the pilot has four minutes to find something flat. The Double Wasp had no radiator and no coolant. It was cooled by the air passing through it. Bullets could punch through cylinders while the other seventeen kept turning. Men came back from over 100 miles of Japanese-held jungle with an engine shaking and nearly falling apart, and they came back because the engine had nothing in it that could leak.
And it was huge. That had been the complaint from the first day. Too big, overbuilt, too much fuel, too much of everything. That size meant range. A Hurricane in Burma was tied to its airfield by a leash an hour long. A Thunderbolt with drop tanks could stay in the air for five hours. Five hours changed the entire map. It meant a squadron in Bengal could reach targets that had been untouchable. It meant that when the Liberators went to bomb Rangoon, nearly 500 miles down the coast, fighters could cover them the whole way, which had never been possible before. The aircraft no one wanted in Europe was the only aircraft in Asia that could do the job.
No. 135 Squadron, the first unit to convert, finished its training and returned to the front on the sixteenth of October, 1944. Through that autumn and winter, other squadrons followed, one after another. Sixteen squadrons in the end, all in the east, all working the same way, flying over the same jungle, waiting for the same voices on the same radios.
On the tenth of December, 1944, No. 30 Squadron moved forward again to a strip called Jumchar. The monsoon season was over. The dry season had come, and with it the offensive everyone had waited two years for. The Fourteenth Army was moving. And when an army moves, it needs clear skies above it, roads open ahead of it, bridges broken behind the enemy, and it needs all of it today, and again tomorrow.
The tempo of work rose and never came back down. That was the period that shaped what the squadron became. Not the training at Yelahanka, not the first flights, not the novelty of American engineering. It was four months at Jumchar, flying the same kind of mission over the same kind of terrain morning after morning, until the extraordinary became routine.
Morning at Jumchar began in darkness. The cooks woke first, then the armament men, and by the time the pilots reached the dispersal area the bombs were hung, the ammunition belts were loaded, and the ground crew had been awake for two hours. Starting a Thunderbolt before dawn was an event in itself. The cartridge starter fired with a bang, the propeller turned, then the eighteen cylinders caught one after another, and the noise rolled across the strip into the trees and sent every bird within half a mile into the air at once.
Then the pilot climbed onto the wing root, stepped over the edge, and dropped into the roomy cockpit; a fitter leaned in to help him strap in, the canopy slid shut, and the world narrowed to a green half-circle of instrument faces and a windscreen with gray dawn light leaking through it.
Takeoff remained the hardest part every time. Brakes off, throttle forward, tail up at about sixty, then the long run, the ringing of the steel matting below, and the trees at the end of the runway growing clearer and clearer. 110, 130, 150, the ringing stopped, the aircraft was flying, and the pilot’s hands trembled slightly on the controls, and no one in the world would ever know.
The men stopped feeling the fear they had felt at first and began to feel a tiredness that sleep did not cure. Briefings grew shorter because there was less to say. Post-mission reports grew shorter because there was less to report. A pilot took off before the heat built, flew over the green canopy, circled, took his call, went down, did his work, came back, ate, slept, and the next day his name went back on the list.
No one was shooting down aircraft. No one was making a name. In England that same winter, the newspapers were full of the advance into Germany, and the men flying over Burma read it in papers that reached them three weeks late. They had acquired a name for themselves by then. The Forgotten Army, the soldiers called it, and the pilots used it too, because it was accurate, and because there was a kind of grim comfort in saying it out loud.
They were flying the best ground-attack aircraft in the theater, in a campaign that would decide the fate of a country the size of France. The dry season was running out, the rain would return, and everyone at Jumchar understood that whatever was going to be settled in Burma would be settled in the next few months or never settled at all.
On the twenty-fourth of April, 1945, No. 30 Squadron moved to Akyab on the Burmese coast, and everyone understood what that meant. Akyab was not a rear airfield. Akyab was a launch pad. The Fourteenth Army had broken the Japanese at Meiktila and Mandalay during the dry season and was now driving south toward the capital, and there was a clock ticking that no one could stop. The monsoon would return. It would arrive in mid-May, and then the roads would dissolve and the airfields would drown, and the advance would halt wherever it had reached. Rangoon had to fall before the rain.
The operation was called Dracula, and it went in at the beginning of May with an amphibious landing at the mouth of the Rangoon River, a parachute drop, and the entire Fourteenth Army coming down from the north. The air side of the operation was an intensification of everything the Thunderbolt squadrons had been doing all winter, compressed into days instead of months: strikes on the approaches, strikes on anything that moved, air patrols over the landing beaches, and escort for transports and bombers.
On the second of May, 1945, Rangoon fell. After three years of Japanese occupation, the capital of Burma was back in British hands, and the men who had helped make that happen had no way to celebrate. This is what a Thunderbolt pilot in Burma had to show for a year of war. He had a logbook, and in that logbook were times of sorties, coordinates of targets, and short handwritten lines describing what he had attacked. That was all. There were no victory markings painted beneath the cockpit canopy, because there were no victories of the kind that get painted. He did not shoot down aircraft. He destroyed bridges and trucks and bunkers and gun positions, and a bunker has no name, and no one paints a silhouette of a truck on the side of a fighter.
The men who flew Spitfires over Kent in 1940 became household names in a single summer. The men who flew Thunderbolts over Burma in 1945 had a logbook and a tan.
And then, almost immediately, it was over for them. No. 30 Squadron flew its last operational sortie on the thirteenth of May, 1945, eleven days after Rangoon fell. The monsoon rains arrived, the front lines froze, and the squadron was withdrawn from operations. On the eighteenth of May, it returned to Chakulia in India. The war was still going on. Japan had not surrendered, and would not for another three months. But for the men of No. 30 Squadron, the fighting was finished, and most of them did not know it yet.
They spent that summer in India doing what squadrons do when no one needs them. Training flights, maintenance, waiting. On the third of July, 1945, the squadron moved again, down the coast to Visakhapatnam. And on that same day, a thousand miles to the east, the last great land battle of the Second World War began without them.
The Japanese Twenty-Eighth Army had been trapped for months in the Pegu Yomas, a range of hills between the Irrawaddy and the Sittang, after British forces cut their route to Rangoon. Nearly 30,000 men, sick and starving and out of ammunition, with nothing left but the decision to try to break out. Their only way east ran across open ground and then across a river. They came out on the second of July.
What happened over the following five weeks at the Sittang Bend was not a battle in the conventional sense. British and Indian infantry held their positions and waited. Above them, through gaps in the monsoon cloud, the support aircraft went to work. The same system, the same visual control posts with the same radios, the same Thunderbolts and Spitfires circling and waiting for a call.
The RAF flew more than 3,000 sorties in that period and dropped over 750 tons of bombs on men in the open. By the seventh of August, when it was over, the Japanese had lost some 14,000 men. More than half of them were dead. On the British and Indian side, 95 men were killed and 322 wounded. 14,000 against 95. That is not a battle. That is what happens when one side has aircraft and the other side has nowhere to hide.
It was the last major land engagement of the war. And when it ended, the Japanese Burma Area Army had effectively ceased to exist. Eight days later, Japan surrendered.
No. 30 Squadron was not there. The squadron that had been the first to convert at Yelahanka, that had learned to fly the Thunderbolt when no one knew how to fly it, that had gone up to Chittagong and Jumchar and stayed on the support line through the dry-season offensive, sat at Visakhapatnam reading about the end in signals.
There is no dramatic moment I can give you here. No one in the squadron made a speech about it. Units get moved and wars go where wars go, and the men who were pulled out eleven days after Rangoon simply were not there when the thing they had worked for reached its end.
They kept the aircraft a little longer. No. 30 Squadron flew Thunderbolts until February 1946. Across the theater, the other squadrons stood down one by one, and the last Thunderbolts left RAF service in October 1946, a full year after the war ended. And then the RAF had to decide what to do with 830 American fighters sitting on airfields in India. The aircraft had come under Lend-Lease. They were never really Britain’s. Under the terms of that agreement, the machines had to be returned to the United States or disposed of another way. And shipping seven-ton fighters across two oceans at the end of a war, when America had thousands of newer aircraft sitting in the desert, made sense to no one.
So they were broken up where they stood. Ground crews who had spent two years keeping those engines alive in the worst climate in the world now walked down the flight lines with axes and cutting torches. The propellers came off. The guns came out. The airframes were cut into pieces small enough to move, and the pieces went to scrap, and the scrap went to the furnaces, and a fighter that had cost more than $80,000 to build in New York ceased to exist in a field in India in about an hour.
One Thunderbolt of this type survives in Britain today, serial number KL216, in a museum in London. The squadrons that flew them over Burma left nothing else behind at all. No preserved machine from Chittagong. No airworthy example carrying the markings of No. 30 or No. 135. The aircraft went, the airfields went back to jungle and rice paddy, the pierced steel matting was lifted and sold, and within a few years there was no physical evidence that any of it had happened.
Consider what that means. An army that called itself forgotten, fighting a campaign the newspapers at home barely covered, in an aircraft its own air force had decided it did not want in the main theater, and when it was all over, the men who flew it and maintained it destroyed the last of them.
And yet, go back to that July morning in 1944 at Yelahanka, when Flight Lieutenant D. A. McDonald climbed out of a Thunderbolt for the first time and sat down to write his opinion of it. He did not write that it was too heavy. He did not write that it could not maneuver. He did not write about its armor or its eighteen cylinders or its eight guns, and he did not write about the fact that it had been sent to him because no one in England could find a use for it. He wrote that she was pleasant to fly. A wide, roomy cockpit, he wrote, and controls that responded very well. And when you press the button, a very noticeable surge of extra power.
This is a man describing an aircraft he has known for a few hours and admiring it without the slightest idea of what he will later ask of it. And over the fifteen months that followed, he and the men around him asked everything of it. They asked it to take off from a strip of steel matting laid over mud at a speed none of their aircraft had ever needed. They asked it to fly for five hours over a country with no landmarks. They asked it to carry bombs a Hurricane could not lift, to dive through rifle and machine-gun fire and come out the other side, and to bring them home on an engine full of holes. And it did all of it.
There is a particular kind of respect men develop for machines that never let them down, and it is not like affection—it is much harder to earn. The Thunderbolt earned it in Burma, from a group of pilots who had every reason not to give it. They had not chosen it. They had not asked for it. It was handed to them because it was surplus to the requirements of a more important war somewhere else. They flew it anyway, and it took them into the worst flying conditions on the face of the earth and brought them back, and when the job was done they watched it cut into scrap on an Indian airfield and went home to a country that never noticed.
The best thing ever said about the Republic Thunderbolt in RAF service was said by a Hurricane pilot in Bangalore in the summer of 1944, before a single round was fired from it in anger, and everything that happened afterward only proved him right.
So here is the question I leave with you: if a machine, a campaign, and the men who fought it can all be erased so completely—scrapped, forgotten, and unremembered—what does it actually take for a war to be remembered at all?
