John R. Alison, 98, Ace Fighter Pilot in World War II, Dies
DENNIS HEVESI
June 9, 2011

John R. Alison, an ace fighter pilot in World War II who helped organize and lead a broad American air campaign that enabled British forces to bog down the Japanese in the jungles of Burma, died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 98.


John Alison, left, after a 2008 Air Force presentation.


John R. Alison, center, in front of an Air Commando B-25.

His son David confirmed his death.

Mr. Alison, a retired Air Force Reserve major general, was a lieutenant colonel in what was then the Army Air Forces in late 1943 when Gen. Henry Arnold, commander of the Air Forces, assigned him and another lieutenant colonel to organize Operation Thursday, which is credited with having helped protect India from invasion by the Japanese. The other lieutenant colonel was Philip Cochran, the model for the character Flip Corkin in the popular comic strip “Terry and the Pirates.”

The two young officers came to General Arnold’s attention for their exploits before and in the early years of the war. Colonel Cochran, who died in 1979, had been a successful fighter group commander in North Africa.

Colonel Alison, who would go on to qualify as an ace by taking down seven enemy planes, was the pilot who demonstrated the capability of the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk to the Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, when he came to the United States in 1940 to buy planes for the fabled American volunteer group the Flying Tigers.

In his book “Way of a Fighter” (1949), the commander of the Flying Tigers, Gen. Claire Chennault, recalled that “Alison got more out of that P-40 in his five-minute demonstration than anybody I ever saw before or after.” When he landed, General Chennault said, members of the Chinese delegation “pointed at the P-40 and smiled, ‘We need 100 of these.’ ‘No,’ I said, pointing to Alison, ‘you need 100 of these.’ ”

General Arnold decided he needed the two lieutenant colonels because the British, under Maj. Gen. Orde C. Wingate, had faced calamitous conditions in 1943 when they first tried to pin down Japanese occupation forces in Burma. Without air protection, the British had slogged hundreds of miles into the jungle and been forced to leave their wounded to die on the trails.

At General Wingate’s behest, Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide American air support for another incursion. The two officers were authorized by General Arnold to acquire as many aircraft and men as needed to insert British forces behind Japanese lines, to set up airfields to supply them and to evacuate the wounded.

“They wrote the playbook to do this on the fly, because nobody had ever done this before,” said Douglas Birkey, director of government relations for the Air Force Association, which promotes education about air power. “Cochran and Alison are considered the grandfathers of the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command” — its elite combat unit.

Several hundred men and 348 aircraft — including C-47 transports, Waco CG-4A gliders, P-51 fighters and B-25 bombers — were assigned to the mission.

On March 5, 1944, 80 gliders were towed by the transports, two attached to each transport, over 8,500-foot mountains. They delivered 539 British soldiers and 66,000 pounds of equipment to a gully-pitted glade 165 miles inside Burma, known as Broadway. The operation ran for six days and nights, bringing in 9,052 troops, 1,282 pack mules and half a million pounds of supplies.

“In terms of guarding India, it was tremendously successful because the Japanese were distracted by having to deal with the guerrilla incursion,” Mr. Birkey said. “This really did mark the last point at which the Japanese could have expanded their empire in Asia.”

Colonel Alison led the mission on its first day, landing a glider bearing 15 soldiers in the glade.

Among his many decorations are the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Order presented by King George VI of Britain.

John Richardson Alison was born in Micanopy, Fla., on Nov. 21, 1912, to Grover and Edelweiss Alison. His sights were set after a barnstormer took him on a flight as a teenager, his son David said.

Besides David, Mr. Alison is survived by his wife of 60 years, the former Kathleen Arcidiano; another son, John; and three grandchildren.

Soon after graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in engineering in 1936, Mr. Alison enlisted in the Army Air Forces. He was sent to London in the spring of 1941 as a technical adviser to the Royal Air Force. But he wanted to be in combat, and in July 1942 he was assigned as deputy commander of the 75th Fighter Squadron in China.

Two years after the war, when President Harry S. Truman appointed him assistant secretary of commerce for aeronautics, The New York Times wrote, “As Major Alison, according to dispatches in July 1942, he scored one of the most spectacular individual performances by the Air Forces in China by shooting down two of three Japanese bombers out of a nine-plane squadron that was raiding Hengyang in Hunan Province.”

nytimes.com