Don Flickinger

The Patkai Mountains are small for the Himalaya: Only 12,552 feet at their highest. But on August 2, 1943, they proved too mighty for U.S. Air Transport Command’s Flight 12420. The Curtiss C-46 Commando (aircrews nicknamed it the “Flying Coffin”) was flying the Hump, a sometimes terrifying route from Assam in East India over the Himalaya to Burma and China. Among the twenty-one passengers was Eric Sevareid, a CBS News correspondent on his way to report on the situation in China.

As the overloaded plane strained to clear the Patkai range, its left engine lost oil pressure and shut down. The pilots turned the plane around and began limping back toward India but the now-overloaded right engine burst into flames, too. As the plane veered toward the ground, the entire crew strapped on parachutes and jumped into the steaming Burmese jungle below.

Twenty of the twenty-one survived the jump, but many were severely injured. The battered crew took refuge in a local village where the Indigenous Naga