Today’s Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) had their beginnings in the jungles of Burma during World War II. There, the upstart 1st Air Commando Group waged an unconventional and unorthodox war against the Japanese, often operating behind enemy lines. The Air Commandos were an irreverent, unruly band of mavericks who cared little for the spit and polish of military life but fought courageously. They operated independently of the rest of the military chain of command and felt free to introduce new ideas to warfare – among them, a new kind of flying machine called the helicopter, one of which would perform the world’s first helicopter rescue.

In 1943, when new pilot 2nd Lt. Carter Harman and a few others accepted an unusual assignment to the Sikorsky plant in Stratford, Conn., the new craft was being routinely called a “whirlybird” or an “eggbeater.” Harman learned to fly one of the newfangled machines, called the YR-4B, and then took it halfway around the world to Burma.

The Air Commandos’ chance to test the new machine came when Tech. Sgt. Ed Hladovcak, the intrepid sergeant-pilot known as Murphy (“Do you see anybody around here who knows how to pronounce Hladovcak?”) crashed in an L-1 Vigilant liaison plane, along with three British soldiers.

The Air Commandos’ chance to test the new machine came when Tech. Sgt. Ed Hladovcak, the intrepid sergeant-pilot known as Murphy (“Do you see anybody around here who knows how to pronounce Hladovcak?”) crashed in an L-1 Vigilant liaison plane, along with three British soldiers.

Hladovcak and the trio of His Majesty’s soldiers were miles behind Japanese lines. Another liaison plane, an L-5 Sentinel, pinpointed their location but could not land in vegetated terrain crisscrossed by paddy fields. Harman and his crew chief, Sgt. Jim Phelan, were 500 miles away in India when they received the message: “Send the eggbeater in.” The R-4 would have to carry extra gas and would be able to lift only one survivor at a time.

It was the sort of thing these early, special ops airmen were good at. Independent, untidy, at times arrogant, and commanded by a mere colonel who answered only to Washington – Philip “Flip” Cochran, the real-life model for Terry and the Pirates – the Air Commandos constituted the personal air force of Brigadier Orde C. Wingate, the unorthodox British commander in the CBI. Their tools were the P-51A Mustang fighter, B-25 Mitchell bombers packing a 75 mm cannon in the nose, the L-5 Sentinel liaison aircraft, the Waco CG-4A glider, the trusty C-47 Skytrain and, now, the R-4.

“There was a small group of us, three pilots and half a dozen crew chiefs and others, including Jim Phelan, and this new gadget called a helicopter was pretty interesting. Sikorsky acted as a training school and graduated the first class of Army Air Forces helicopter pilots. In October 1943, I became the seventh Army pilot ever to solo a helicopter.”

“Irreverent?” asked Col. Fleming Johnson, an Air Commando veteran: “Hell, we were damn near insubordinate half the time. We wouldn’t have shined on anybody’s parade ground. We weren’t good at snapping salutes or saying, ‘sir.’ And regular Army officers didn’t understand that we were different.”

Upstarts who would have failed a white-glove inspection were the norm among the Air Commandos. “Irreverent?” asked Col. Fleming Johnson, an Air Commando veteran: “Hell, we were damn near insubordinate half the time. We wouldn’t have shined on anybody’s parade ground. We weren’t good at snapping salutes or saying, ‘sir.’ And regular Army officers didn’t understand that we were different.” In fact, Cochran, Johnson, and the other Air Commandos were more than different: They were the point of the spear.

The L-1 Vigilant crash took place on April 21, 1944. “Maybe the L-1 had been flying too low,” Hladovcak acknowledged later. “Who was to say? The L-1 was a sturdy aircraft used for operations behind Japanese lines. It performed well. But when my L-1 went down in a rice paddy, an embankment caught the plane’s fixed landing gear and snapped it off, ending any prospect of that particular L-1 ever flying again.”

Survival Struggle in the Jungle

“Murphy” and the three Brits crawled, thrashed, and climbed until they were deep inside jungle foliage half a mile from the wrecked plane. For hours, it seemed there was no one friendly in the area. Murphy and the Brits hunkered down, watching as Japanese soldiers scoured the wreckage of the L-1, secured the crash site, and fanned out. As the day progressed and the heat became insufferable, the voices of patrolling Japanese came closer. Their uniform leggings were visible through the undergrowth.

In mid-afternoon, one of the 1st Air Commando Group’s smaller L-5 Sentinel liaison planes flew overhead and dropped a note. The message referred to the sharp slope behind Murphy. It read: “MOVE UP MOUNTAIN. JAPANESE NEARBY.”

“I figured I could see my mother and do some writing,” he remembered. “Someone said, ‘You want to volunteer?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I went to the Sikorsky plant at Stratford to learn about the R-4 helicopter.

In the crashed L-1’s cargo pit were three Japanese ceremonial swords Murphy had picked up from a battlefield in a souvenir hunt. If the Japanese found those swords first and then captured Hladovcak, there was going to be hell to pay.

Every bit as unlikely as the Air Commandos around him, Harman must have seemed an improbable person to salvage the situation. “I was a journalist before the war,” Harman said. “I reported on music for The New York Times. When the war started I had already done some flying in a Piper Cub and a Waco biplane. Not eager to be in the infantry, I joined the Army Air Corps and went to Texas. I was in flying class 43-C, and after getting those silver wings I became an instructor in biplane trainers.”

Harman’s undoing was an opportunity to be assigned to Stratford, Conn., close to home. “I figured I could see my mother and do some writing,” he remembered. “Someone said, ‘You want to volunteer?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I went to the Sikorsky plant at Stratford to learn about the R-4 helicopter.

Harman’s hope to be close to home was short-lived. The Air Commandos asked for and got three YR-4B helicopters, transported halfway around the world on C-46 Commando transports, with Harman and Phelan part of the team that traveled from Stratford to the China-Burma-India theater.

“The YR-4B helicopter came with a canvas-covered stretcher that you could slide inside the aircraft to carry a litter patient,” said Harman. “To prepare the helicopter for what was going to be a marathon journey, I threw four jerry cans of extra fuel in the unused co-pilot’s seat. (There was no one in India or Burma who could serve as a co-pilot, and the weight of another crew member wasn’t going to help, anyway.) I put the litter stretcher behind the seats.”

Recalled Harman: “Our mechanics assembled the helicopter out-of-doors in the heat and grit at Lalaghat, India, with few tools and no equipment. Tragically, on the first flight of a helicopter in India on March 21, 1944, the YR-4B crashed, killing one of our small group of pilots, the – first man to die in a U.S. helicopter in a combat zone.” Another of the scarce helicopter pilots was wounded in action while flying a conventional aircraft. As of April 1944, Harman was the only qualified helicopter pilot in the China-Burma-India theater.

“The YR-4B helicopter came with a canvas-covered stretcher that you could slide inside the aircraft to carry a litter patient,” said

On April 21, 1944, Air Commando boss Cochran sent radio instructions for Harman to proceed with a helicopter to Taro in northern Burma. It was a tall order.  Taro was 600 miles from Lalaghat, way beyond the YR-4B’s usual range of 100 miles.

“The YR-4B helicopter came with a canvas-covered stretcher that you could slide inside the aircraft to carry a litter patient,” said

Harman. “To prepare the helicopter for what was going to be a marathon journey, I threw four jerry cans of extra fuel in the unused co-pilot’s seat. (There was no one in India or Burma who could serve as a co-pilot, and the weight of another crew member wasn’t going to help, anyway.) I put the litter stretcher behind the seats.”

 

The First Helicopter Rescue

Harman continued: “Once I was set to go, I took off to cover the first leg of the flight to Taro. That meant climbing above mountain peaks that loomed to 5,000 feet – in theory, the ceiling of the YR-4B – and visually navigating to Dimapur. I landed safely at Dimapur and filled the gas tanks from my own jerry cans before beginning the second leg of the trip, aiming for Jorhat. That was a bomber base where our boys were flying B-24 Liberators.”

Harman said he was comfortable operating alone. It took about 24 hours to reach Taro. “‘It’s time for a break,’ I told one of the soldiers there. I went for a dip in a mountain stream and washed my clothes as best I could. I was still wearing the summer khakis I’d brought halfway around the world.”

“It took me until April 25 to reach Aberdeen,” said Harman. “Previously, I had been stopping to refuel from jerry cans I was carrying. At Taro, mechanics installed an extra fuel tank borrowed from an L-5 inside the fuselage of my helicopter, but still I would have to set down whenever I wanted to transfer fuel, so this last leg might be an overnight trek. I didn’t know it yet, but Aberdeen-based L-5s were pinpointing Hladovcak’s location on the ground. The Commandos were planning to use the YR-4B and me for the pick-up.”

A radio message arrived from the 1st Air Commando Group base in Burma known as Aberdeen, a temporary airstrip deep inside Japanese territory. The base was home to L-1 Vigilant and L-5 Sentinel liaison airplanes piloted by sergeant-pilots like Ed “Murphy” Hladovcak and used for air rescues. Survivors who were brought to Aberdeen via L-1 or L-5 were transferred to larger aircraft for evacuation to India. It was all being done under the noses of the Japanese.

The message consisted of four words: “SEND THE EGGBEATER IMMEDIATELY.” That meant proceeding from Taro to Aberdeen, 125 miles to the south – beyond the limited range of the YR-4B.

“How difficult could it be for the Japanese to find one exhausted, hungry American sergeant-pilot and three injured British soldiers? But the sounds came and went. The Japanese did not appear.”

On the ground, Murphy’s mind was racing with thoughts of being captured by the Japanese. “On April 24, a strange series of sounds cracked in the air,” said Hladovcak. “It was gunfire, or was it? How difficult could it be for the Japanese to find one exhausted, hungry American sergeant-pilot and three injured British soldiers? But the sounds came and went. The Japanese did not appear.”

The next day, the three British soldiers were much worse. Their wounds were becoming infected. The heat refused to subside. There were insects everywhere, especially mosquitoes, known to carry a virulent strain of malaria.

Harman landed the YR-4B at the Air Commando base at Aberdeen on the morning of April 25, 1944. He was told that the four downed men led by Hladovcak were holding out and had not been found by Japanese troops. L-5 Sentinels were dropping supplies and messages to Hladovcak, aiming at a white parachute he’d draped across the rice paddy. That brilliant white cloak, however, was probably going to make him visible to the Japanese.

It was an ad hoc solution, the kind of improvisation for which Air Commandos and their successors, AFSOC folk, would always excel.

An L-5 dropped a message to Murphy telling the sergeant-pilot about a spot where a liaison plane could pick up Hladovcak and the three British soldiers. It was a sandbar on a river nearby. British commandos had secured a small sector of the bank, enough space for an L-1 or L-5 to land. At Aberdeen, they knew that none of the four men could reach the riverbank on their own power. They believed, however, that Harman could bridge the gap. It was an ad hoc solution, the kind of improvisation for which Air Commandos and their successors, AFSOC folk, would always excel.

 

Mechanical Issues

Said Harman: “I worried about the often unreliable 200 hp Warner piston engine that powered my YR-4B. I wondered if I could get to the clearing where the men were waiting. My YR-4B would lift them to the riverbank, where liaison planes could take over. Since I could only carry one man at a time, I would make four round trips. Helicopters were still new and we were still learning that they did not like hot weather. They didn’t like Japanese soldiers, either. My YR-4B was exceedingly vulnerable to any kind of gunfire.

“I flew from Aberdeen to the sandbar riverbank, where I made the rendezvous with an L-5 Sentinel. Then, the L-5 led me to the clearing where Hladovcak and the three British were struggling to stay alive. I did not see any Japanese troops, but was told they were all around us. I wondered if the engine and helicopter would hold together trying to pull off a job that was more rigorous than anything they had been designed for.”

“I wondered if the engine and helicopter would hold together trying to pull off a job that was more rigorous than anything they had been designed for.”

“I got there first,” said Harman. “Hladovcak climbed on board. I put the aircraft into a hover. Now, the troops swarmed directly beneath us and for a moment the YR-4B threatened to seize again. The helicopter sank back toward the jungle. Then, I was able to get the YR-4B to full power and we climbed away from those men with rifles.”

Later, Harman was told that Hladovcak “went crazy” when he saw the “eggbeater” arriving. Murphy had, of course, never seen a helicopter before. Harman was pushing the YR-4B to the limit when he landed in the clearing in a swirl of flying dust and pieces of greenery. Murphy loaded the most seriously injured British soldier aboard. The YR-4B strained, vibrated – and took off. Harman was able to make it to the sand bar where a liaison plane flew the British soldier to safety.

Said Harman: “I hauled out a second British soldier, still searching the jungle canopy for Japanese troops. We reached the riverbank, and that’s when everything went wrong.

“The Warner engine seized. There was a clunking sound and a lot of vapor around the engine. It had overheated on me and it wasn’t going to start. I was going to have to spend the night on the sand bar. I didn’t see how our luck could hold out much longer, and I wondered if that was the night the Japanese would overrun Hladovcak and the remaining British soldier.”

It was a long, lonely night for Harman. The liaison pilots warned him there might be weather problems on top of everything else the next day. When morning came, there was low cover, but nothing to prevent flying if only the engine would start. It did. Harman was able to pick up the third British soldier and get him to safety. Edward “Murphy” Hladovcak was now alone in the clearing in the jungle.

Murphy held out. Harman was able to go in again. As the YR-4B approached the lone Hladovcak, soldiers broke out of the treeline about 1,000 feet from him, some with their rifles held in the air. “It’s too late,” thought Harman. “After all this work, it’s too late.” Hladovcak was shouting out loud about Japanese troops bearing down on him.

“When I bounded off the ground with Murphy on board, we were escaping from our own guys,” Harman said.

“I got there first,” said Harman. “Hladovcak climbed on board. I put the aircraft into a hover. Now, the troops swarmed directly beneath us and for a moment the YR-4B threatened to seize again. The helicopter sank back toward the jungle. Then, I was able to get the YR-4B to full power and we climbed away from those men with rifles.”

Harman took Murphy all the way back to Aberdeen. There, they were told that the troops who’d swarmed beneath the helicopter were, in fact, friendly Chindit irregulars who had been intent on rescuing Murphy. There were Japanese nearby, but Harman never actually saw them. “When I bounded off the ground with Murphy on board, we were escaping from our own guys,” Harman said.

The first helicopter rescue was the beginning for rotary-wing aviation, for the Air Commandos, and for what would become Air Force Special Operations. Harman spent several more weeks with the 1st Air Commando Group and retrieved several people who needed rescuing. Then, the last R-4 helicopter was damaged beyond repair. But in early 1945, another helicopter arrived in the theater.

That helicopter performed yet another rescue, one that sometimes is erroneously cited as history’s first helicopter rescue. On Jan. 26, 1945, Capt. Frank Peterson flew an R-4 to evacuate a wounded weather observer, Pvt. Howard Ross, from a 4,700-foot mountain ridge in the Naga Hills of Burma. Peterson flew with a co-pilot, 1st Lt. (later Lt. Col.) Irvin Steiner. That was a very early helicopter success, but it came eight months after Harman flew the first such mission, paving the way for the special operations helicopter missions of today.