At half past four on the afternoon of 5 March 1944, a photographic officer landed at Lalaghat in Assam with a three-foot-square print under his arm and ninety minutes to spare. Captain Charles Russhon had flown over Burma that morning in a B-25 without telling the man whose operation depended on what he found. He handed the blow-up to Colonel Philip Cochran and said that the Japanese had caught on to them.

The photograph showed Piccadilly, one of two jungle clearings where 77 Indian Infantry Brigade was to land by glider that night. It was covered in teak logs laid out in rows. Anything touching down among them would be destroyed.

The decision nobody wanted

Radio silence had stopped Russhon reporting from the air. So the first anyone at Lalaghat knew of it was that print, and by then the gliders were loaded and the crews were standing by their aircraft.

Two decisions followed, and they belonged to different men. Whether to go at all fell to Lieutenant-General Sir William Slim, commanding Fourteenth Army. Major-General Orde Wingate told him the decision was his. Slim later wrote that he would have given a great deal for someone to relieve him of it, and then gave the order: the operation will go on.

Where to land was Wingate’s, and it was driven by Brigadier Michael Calvert, who flatly refused to have his brigade split either side of the Irrawaddy. Everything would go into Broadway alone. The contemporary Special Force report records it in one dry line: after a conference with the army commander and the brigade commander, Wingate decided to use Broadway only.

A footnote worth having, because it kills a good conspiracy: patrols later found that Burmese loggers had laid the teak out to dry. Nobody was setting a trap. And the same logging industry was about to do far more damage at Broadway than it had done at Piccadilly.

Two gliders per aeroplane

The double tow was not an act of desperation. Cochran and his deputy Colonel John Alison had built the 1st Air Commando Group around it, and trained for it in North Carolina, for the simple reason that they had 26 C-47s and needed to move a brigade. Twenty-six tugs pulling two Wacos each meant the whole first wave went in one lift.

What nobody had trained for was the weight. The Chindits remembered going short in 1943 and had quietly stowed extra ammunition and rations, and the airborne bulldozers alone weighed 4,230 lb apiece. Every glider was over its limit. The tugs then had to climb to 8,000 feet at full power to clear the Chin Hills, in turbulence, at night, flying blacked out.

Overweight gliders wander. A wandering glider lets the rope go slack, and slack rope either fouls the other glider or snaps when it comes taut. Seventeen broke loose. Cochran broke radio silence in the air to order position lights on and the safer high-tow position, then abandoned double tow partway through the first wave and sent the rest out one glider per tug.

Of 61 gliders launched, 35 reached Broadway. Eight came down in friendly territory, nine in hostile, and the recall caught seven more. Those figures come from the Special Force report; you will see other numbers in other accounts, and they do not reconcile.

WW2TV on the 1st Air Commando Group and the glider operation in the China-Burma-India theatre.

What was waiting at Broadway

The clearing had been photographed and looked clean. It was not. Years of dragging teak logs out by elephant had cut ruts across the whole field, sixteen inches deep and up to four feet wide, baked hard and completely hidden under four-foot elephant grass. From 8,000 feet they were invisible. From a glider on short finals they were unavoidable.

Alison was not even supposed to be in charge. Lieutenant Colonel Arvid Olson had been given Broadway; his glider went down on the way in.

Captain Neville Hogan, a Chindit officer who had never flown before and had never seen a glider until that week, remembered everyone smiling too much on the airfield, all wearing the same bravado grin. On the ground he heard men screaming in the dark as more gliders arrived and piled into the wreckage of the ones already down. His own glider clipped another. The mule aboard broke both front legs, and his first act in Burma was to shoot it.

Soya Link, then Pork Sausage

At about half past two in the morning Calvert sent the code word Soya Link, which meant stop, send no more. Nine gliders of the second wave turned back.

Then came one of those moments that sound invented. A glider carrying a Clarkair bulldozer had swerved to miss a wreck and gone into the treeline at sixty miles an hour. The trees tore both wings off. The fuselage kept going, and the dozer broke its moorings and shot forward — but the Waco’s nose was hinged, designed to swing up when a jeep drove out, and it swung up now. The bulldozer passed underneath the two pilots, who were thrown clear and landed unhurt. Calvert, who had watched that glider go into the jungle like a charging elephant, then heard an engine start, and a working bulldozer drove out of the trees. He sent Pork Sausage: success, keep coming.

By dusk on 6 March the engineers had a 4,800-foot runway with landing lights and a control tower improvised inside a wrecked glider. Brigadier General William Old flew the first C-47 in himself at ten past seven that evening, landing south to north against instructions and getting away with it. Sixty-odd Dakotas came in over the following night.

What it bought

Across the whole operation, Broadway and the second strip at Chowringhee together took in 9,052 men, 175 horses, 1,283 mules and 509,083 lb of supplies. Air Vice Marshal John Baldwin, who commanded Third Tactical Air Force, said afterwards that nobody had seen a transport operation until they had stood at Broadway under a Burma moon and watched Dakotas landing and taking off in opposite directions on a single strip at the rate of one every three minutes.

Six RAF Spitfires flew into Broadway on 12 March with a mobile radar. Forewarned the next day, they shot down four attacking Japanese fighters for the loss of one. The detachment did not last a week.

Wingate’s Order of the Day on 13 March did not undersell it. Every man who took part, he wrote, might feel proud one day to say “I WAS THERE” — and the capitals are his, on the original typed sheet.

Gliders suffered an 85 per cent loss rate over the operation, most of it in those few hours at Broadway. The transport force, flying hundreds of sorties into a jungle strip at night, lost exactly one C-47 — and it was lost on the ground, colliding with a water buffalo.

Period newsreel footage from the Burma campaign of 1944.

Sources: Christopher L. Kolakowski in Army History 121; Mason, Bergeron and Renfrow, Operation THURSDAY: Birth of the Air Commandos (USAF); Special Force report, UK National Archives WO 203/25; William Slim, Defeat Into Victory; John Masters, The Road Past Mandalay; John T. Correll in Air Force Magazine; The Chindit Society; Burma Star Memorial Fund.