Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (3 page)

That’s the kind of thing that happened in those days.

Roy Farrell flew freight from Dinjan; Syd de Kantzow in Calcutta mostly flew people. An article in an Australian newspaper brashly entitled ‘The Man Who Saved Chiang’ described Syd’s flying career as follows:

Australia … Britain … Greece … North Atlantic … South Atlantic … China – Syd de Kantzow had been well acquainted with responsibilities and risks by the time he first looked down on the Hump. It was Syd who had made the initial survey of the Hump supply route on which the decision to go ahead had been based. From time to time asked for specifically by name, he flew the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, and ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell and Major-General Orde Wingate, the eccentrically brilliant British Chindit commander, as well.

De Kantzow was undemonstrative by nature, yet he was one of those men people notice. He stood out partly because of his flying ability, partly because of his unusual accent – he was the only Australian flying the Hump – and, no doubt, partly because of his spick-and-span, movie star appearance. When the war was over he told an Australian journalist (who was understandably astonished to hear it) that flying the Hump had been a ‘dull and monotonous job’, but no doubt well before his three-and-a-
half-year
tour was up it had become so. True, the Hump was high, wide and
dangerous enough for most men, but at one time de Kantzow and the other CNAC pilots were flying across it as much as three times a day. Never mind that you are squeezed into the tiny and very draughty cockpit of an aircraft given to falling thousands of feet without warning, only levelling out at the last possible minute and so abruptly you believe you can hear passengers and cargo dropping through the floor: boredom
will
set in.

One day, during the British retreat from Burma, de Kantzow was ordered to fly Chiang, Madame Chiang and Stilwell to Kunming, and soon after take-off sent a message to Chiang from the cockpit: he had just received an urgent call from a Chinese observation post that Japanese Zero fighters were after them.

‘How many?’ de Kantzow had asked.

‘Fifteen,’ said the voice from the ground. ‘Oh, and they’re just above you.’

When I discussed this moment many years later with Syd’s elder sister, Eve, now eighty years old, in her little house in Sydney, she glanced fondly at a silver-framed portrait of her brother in CNAC uniform on a sideboard and said, ‘Syd was a real daredevil, you know.’ On this flight, the Australian daredevil saved the Generalissimo’s life as well as his own. Throwing the DC-3 into a dive, Syd dropped through a mass of cloud heading into a tangle of mountain gorges where his camouflaged plane would be as good as invisible to the Zero pilots, deftly zigging and zagging through horrendous cliffs until the Japanese went home in disgust. Never mind that Madame Chiang was sick and his other passengers were half-dead with fear, he had saved them and the plane. ‘He had nine lives, I think,’ Eve said.

As a reward for this daredevilry, his widow Angela is inclined to believe, as well as for a number of hazardous air-drops of rice, salt and medicines he made to Chiang’s soldiers cut off by the Japanese in Burma, Syd de Kantzow was awarded Nationalist China’s Order of the Flying Cloud. It was one more decoration in a family that in its time had won quite a few.

Syd was born in 1914, ‘on the day the HMAS
Sydney
sank the
Emden
,’ Eve says. ‘That was the reason for his first name. As for his second, the de Kantzows were Swedish, possibly of Polish origin. My nephew went to Sweden a few years ago and saw a family there called
von
Kantzow, they’d written to Syd in Hong Kong, having seen his name in some aviation lists.’ According to Eve, a Charles Adolphus de Kantzow, married to a London girl called Emma Bosanquet, was Swedish ambassador to Portugal for many years until his death in 1867. This de Kantzow was a Chevalier Baron of St George in the Portuguese peerage and had a chestful of Swedish orders as well; one of his sons (Syd’s great-uncle) served with considerable distinction
in the Indian Army, surviving the Mutiny (but because of his almost foolhardy courage, only just) and ending up as a lieutenant-colonel.

There had been at least one literary de Kantzow. Eve interrupted our talk to bring me a neatly bound volume of poems published in 1906 with the title
Noctis Susurri
(Sighs of the Night) and written by Sydney de Kantzow’s grandfather, Alfred, when he was a lieutenant in the 22nd Madras Native Infantry. One of them was called ‘The Himalayas’:

It is very far from Kipling or Swinburne, admittedly, but when I talked with Eve de Kantzow about just such things – sheer descents, ravines, the Hump – it seemed appropriate to Syd, the aviator grandson.

‘Syd’s friends died one after the other,’ Eve said. And she added something of immense sadness: ‘Old in the head, Syd was. Old for his age.’

We sipped weak whisky and water under Syd’s framed portrait, under Eve’s unsmiling brother with the handsome, quick-eyed face that was not quite Robert Taylor’s, not quite Ronald Colman’s. On the table between us we spread out old newspaper photographs of those dark, strenuous days of war – pictures of half-naked black GIs, shining with sweat, labouring in Calcutta docks; of elephants lifting ammunition crates with their trunks; of Hump pilots in sweat-stained khaki shirts and cowboy boots, arms round each other’s shoulders, pinning on smiles for the cameraman from
Life
magazine. They were pictures of a time that seemed a very long way from this small house in the Sydney suburb of Vaucluse, with Chinese flower prints and an old Cathay Pacific calendar with a Thai dancer on its walls, and an old lady pouring me Red Label, clinking glasses, and turning the album’s pages. Here on those pages were C-47s over Shangri-La – tiny, twin-engined aircraft that shifted 650 tons of arms, ammunition, spare parts, trucks and men across the roof of the world from Assam to China. Were the thousands of high-cheekboned scarecrows, like extras in a
multi-million
dollar Cecil B. de Mille production, really Chiang’s coolies, levelling mountains to make airfields for the Americans? The pictures of General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell reminded me of a dyspeptic Grandma Moses, and General Claire Chennault, the American hero of the Flying Tigers, of a middle-aged John Wayne.

You could fit Roy Farrell into this game of ‘match the film star’ and label him James Stewart – except that, although he is tall and lean, Farrell is by no
means laconic. Roy could be a shrewd but very genial Texan rancher rather than what he is – the son of the postmaster-general of a small town called Vernon that lies four hours’ drive west of Dallas. Talking with Roy evoked the same sense of unreality I had felt with Syd’s sister Eve. It was a long way from the cobras, mud and sticky heat of Dinjan to Farrell’s air-conditioned room in the motel on the roaring Dallas–Fort Worth parkway.

Unlike Syd, Roy Farrell was not a veteran pilot when CNAC took him on in Burma. Far from it. According to a letter he wrote to me which he hoped would ‘set the record straight’, he had his first solo flight in his own Piper Cub at Singleton Field near Fort Worth on 7 January 1942, less than two years before he joined the Hump circus. He joked that ‘The cockpit was very crowded. I had a bumblebee in there with me.’ Despite the bumblebee, he was awarded his Commercial and Instructor’s Licence on his twenty-sixth birthday, and later his ground school rating for instructing navigation and meteorology. ‘I tried to get in with CNAC that summer, but to be hired as a pilot you had to have 1,400 hours of flying time of which 100 hours had to be in an aircraft of over 200mph. I had to do something about that. So I bought a 1929 Laird single engine, open-cockpit plane with a 220mph Jacobs engine in which I would get my hours of
heavy
time. A few months later I got my instrument rating from American Flyers in Forth Worth. So with that, Owen Johnson of Pan American Airways – he came through recruiting for CNAC – hired me. I left Miami for CNAC and the Far East on 7 October 1943.’

It had not been quite as orthodox as all that, however. A whimsical footnote to this honest testimony relates that on its second or third flight, the 1929 Laird blew a cylinder and for the next several months it sat totally immobile in its hangar because Roy could not find the spare parts. Nevertheless, he admits, as it were with a wink, ‘The aircraft and engine dutifully had logged in their logbooks over 400 hours (a little over the necessary hundred hours) of flying.’ How lucky! But we can see, as he intends us to, that Roy Farrell was certainly not an experienced flyer when he arrived in Dinjan to fly CNAC’s DC-3s.

‘The first look I got at the cockpit of a DC-3 (or C-47) lasted about twenty seconds – I sneaked in to a Braniff DC-3 on the ramp at Fort Worth. I was overwhelmed by all the instruments, gauges and switches. The second look I got was on the C-47 flight from Calcutta up to Dinjan. My third look was shortly after at the field at Dinjan and I was in the co-pilot’s seat with Cliff Groh as captain.’

What followed might make a few scenes in a Woody Allen film. ‘Cliff called for me to open cowl flaps when he started the engines. A Piper Cub
doesn’t have cowl flaps and I didn’t know what he was talking about, so he reached over me and trailed the flaps. He ran the engines up and did a thorough cockpit check just as dark settled in, and he called for me to release the handle for raising the lever that lifted the landing gear. Again, Piper Cubs didn’t have retractable landing gear so I didn’t know what in hell he was talking about….’ Roy laughs at his amateurishness. ‘At the end of my first trip to Chungking I heard one Chinese mechanic shout to another, “Whaddya know – he made it!” The second trip the same guy hollered, “Hey – he made it again!” – that shows you. Anyway, all co-pilots had to have thirty-two round trips to check out – to be passed – as senior pilot. I did them in time.’ In all he made 523 trips over the Hump.

Farrell easily recalls the terrible coldness of the Hump. ‘Freezing! No heaters. To make things worse, my beautiful fleece-lined jacket didn’t meet with my pants.’

And how some people even found time for smuggling: ‘One night I found gold bars and a few thou’ dollars in US stashed in the C-47’s bulkhead padding.

‘“These yours?” I said to the co-pilot and the radio officer, both Chinese.

‘“Oh, no, Captain. Not mine.”

‘“Good. Then they’re all mine,” I said and stuck them under my seat. ‘Well, it was very cold, but oddly enough I could see the co-pilot streaming with sweat, the radio officer, too. So I said, “Look, boys. I know it’s yours, all this. But listen, if anyone smuggles anything on
my
plane,
I
do. Please tell all your friends that. If not there’ll be trouble. Plenty trouble.” And I gave the loot back to ’em. We got on fine after that.’

Political bigwigs smuggled for much bigger stakes, as Syd de Kantzow found out when an engine caught fire as he was taking off from Chungking, obliging him to make a forced landing in the Yangtze River. Mail, diplomatic bags, all the cargo went to the river bed. Divers finally brought up a huge sum of waterlogged currency, currency Chiang Kai-shek’s people were spiriting out of the country.

In that fevered time money itself became unreal. Pilots earning $2,000 a month with nowhere to spend it took to heavy gambling. A dangerous way to kill boredom.

‘We’d play five dollars a point at gin rummy,’ Farrell says. ‘That’s pretty damn high. In one game you could lose twenty thousand, fifty thousand dollars.’ Imagine the whine of mosquitoes in a stifling hut, the heavy monsoon raindrops bouncing like bullets off the iron roof. ‘Money had little meaning because you didn’t know who’d come back from the missions next day and who wouldn’t. After the war, the returning GIs and pilots went to
the gambling houses at home and that’s when they learned the value of money. The hard way.’

After a pause he said, ‘See, those CNAC people weren’t much good at anything but flying. Not much good at making a living.’ He laughed. ‘They were really the biggest bunch of renegades….’

They were renegades at just the right place at just the right time. And two of them at least had their heads screwed on the right way. Roy Farrell in Dinjan and Syd de Kantzow in Calcutta were men who knew how to make a living.

‘Guess where we came together?’ Roy said.

I tried to guess. In Calcutta over curry at the Grand Hotel? At Dinjan in some airless Nissen hut, with a radio pulsing to Glenn Miller’s Big Band, Artie Shaw’s clarinet, the voices of Dick Haymes or the Andrews Sisters? There would have been pin-ups tacked to three-ply cupboard doors – Betty Grable in the famous tight sweater; Dorothy Lamour, Polynesian in her sarong; a pouting Lana Turner, very blonde under a strong studio light….

‘Tigers,’ Roy said, grinning. ‘Tiger-hunting, that’s where we met. In Cooch Behar, an Indian state near Calcutta; Bayah, the maharajah, had a palace there. He was a great friend of Syd’s. Tiger-hunting, golf, drinking: luxury. Bayah even gave us wine with rubies ground up in it. It’s an aphrodisiac, the Indians say.’