Arunachal Pradesh - Hot As Hell

TRACKING THE REMNANTS OF A WWII B-24 LIBERATOR THAT CRASHED DEEP IN THE FORESTS OF ARUNACHAL

- Shahwar Hussain

WHEN I was six years old, my father took me to watch a movie named ‘Aces High’. I was far too young then to know who the actors were, but the action in the blue skies mesmerized me. It was a movie set in World War I and depicted the heroics and tragedies of the fighter pilots who fought for supremacy in the skies.

I saw the movie years later and the scenes where the aircraft, like S.E.5s, Avro 504K, and Eindeker engage in deadly dogfights kept me wide-eyed again.

Those were the days where the pilots flew without any parachutes and there were scenes where the pilots slipped out of a shattered and burning aircraft and plummeted to a horrible death. Those few scenes were rather vivid to my young eyes and I had a newfound respect for the airmen.

Commando and war comics fed my appetite for war stories. Closer to home, I learned that my uncle was dropped behind enemy lines in Singapore but was captured by the Japanese Army and was POW until the war ended.

The Northeast was the only WWII theatre in India. Some of the bloodiest battles were fought in Kohima and Imphal—battles that changed the course of the Great War. It is in this area that the Allied forces lost over 500 planes, mostly American, between 1942 and 1945. The mountains and dense jungles of Northeast India conceal a huge number of these fallen aircraft and Arunachal Pradesh accounts for the maximum number of these crashes.

The jungles have held on to their secrets for over 70 years and are not about to reveal them so easily. If you want to get to these crash sites and wreckages badly, you will have to be prepared to spend days in the jungles in the company of leeches and wild animals, walk for days, eat some basic food and sleep in tents.

And I wanted to get to the planes badly, very badly.