FAIRBANKS — At his home off Chena Hot Springs Road, with its sweeping view of the valley, Walter Eberhardt starts his story by unrolling a map.
It’s a world map, curled and worn with age, that shows the route a then 22-year-old man took when he left the family farm in the fall of 1942 and traveled across the world to join the U.S. Army Air Corps in the China-Burma-India theater of World War II.
Hand-drawn lines on the map detail the route the Idaho farm boy, who never got past an eighth-grade education, took to the airfield at the base of the Himalayas. Unlike many other soldiers, who crossed oceans aboard ships, Eberhardt travelled by plane.
The lines start in Idaho and show stops in exotic places like Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Brazil, Ascension Island, Nigeria, Khartoum and Karachi. But for the now 91-year-old man, the route didn’t carry the same sort of adventure as it would today with a war as his destination.
But for Eberhardt, the war was another job to be done. And his job, as a parts supply sergeant, was to make sure there were parts for planes that flew supplies and soldiers over “The Hump,” a treacherous route between supply lines in India and the fighting lines in China that crossed the Himalayas.
His story is one that wasn’t fought with bullets or bombs, but with supply trucks and hard work.
Before the war Before being drafted in 1942, Eberhardt grew up on the family farm near Le Nore, Idaho. At 22, he had only an eighth-grade education from a one-room schoolhouse, had never traveled more than 100 miles from home and never flew in an airplane.
“I didn’t have any experience other than raising cattle,” he said, but added that he had a knack for learning new things. “I’ve always been able to do most anything I wanted to do.”
He is one of 11 children, with five sisters and five brothers. Two brothers also served in other branches of the military. When he joined on Sept. 24, 1942, Eberhardt was inducted in Salt Lake City and flown to St. Petersburg, Fla., before landing in Atlantic City, N.J., for basic training.
He said he never gave much thought to the situation, the dangers of war or the time away from home. He just had a job to do.
“I never really ever gave it a thought, in war you go do what they want you to do,” he said. “You have a job to do and that’s what they want you to do, you take it as it comes. As a farm boy, you did most anything that came along.”
Serving during wartime Eberhardt spent 26 months at the airfield in Chabua, in northeast India, where he was responsible for getting replacement parts and supplies for the C-46 transport aircraft that flew supplies and soldiers around Japanese blockades and into China.
“That was only way they kept China in the war,” he said. “We were the supply line for getting China in the war.”
The grueling route over the Himalayas was steep and spotted with the vigilant Japanese fighters that brought down many aircraft. Supplying parts for damaged planes and getting new ones ready for the flight was a full-time job for Eberhardt.
“Everything that made up an airplane‚ all the engine parts and the whole works, tires, parts of the wing everything, we handled all of that,” he said.
It was a constant grind in the humid, hot and wet tropics of northeast India, where bugs and snakes posed a constant threat and he had to take iodine tablets to ward off dehydration. Any sort of adventure or fun was quickly dashed when temperatures soared over 100 degrees and bugs brought the risk of disease.
“We were out in the boonies, out in the jungle, no recreation of any kind,” he said. “It wasn’t a picnic.”
There were the occasional movies, projected onto the side of a tent and watched in the rain, a cobra he killed outside his tent and the rare trips into the nearby village where he couldn’t eat or drink anything for fear of illness.
He had three birthdays while deployed, and those days passed just like the rest of them.
“Never thought of a birthday party, there was a war going on,‚” he said. “We got up in the morning and did our job‚ 365 days a year‚ just another day at work, there wasn’t any celebrations, just another day, just another day.”
But aside from the humid monotony of the airfield, Eberhardt was lucky to avoid the encroaching nearby conflict. The airfield he served at was bombed before he got there, but Allied fighters kept the Japanese planes away during his time.
And Eberhardt and his fellow soldiers were lucky enough to avoid the bloody 1944 Japanese U Go Offensive into northeastern India that brought fighting within dozens of miles of his airfield and resulted in the Battle of Kohima.
While his time there was marked by the rare meal above the weevil-filled bread and rations and botched aircraft crash-landing at the site, Eberhardt was thankful for the relative calm of his service.
“I was living day by day,” he said. “It helped me through my growing up and my lifetime by picking up a lot of different things.”
After the war
After a return flight that included stops in a whole new array of exotic cities, such as Cairo‚ where he saw the Sphinx and the pyramids, Tripoli and Casablanca, Eberhardt returned to the family farm in Idaho, where he might have picked right up where he left off, on the farm.
But after the war, Eberhardt’s place on the farm had been filled by his brothers. He worked in a box factory for some time, but within a year of returning, Eberhardt was on his way to Alaska, where his future wife, Dorothy Herning, lived.
If it wasn’t for the war, Eberhardt said he was unsure where his life would have taken him.
“Hard telling, I would’ve probably ended up farming or raising cattle. Who knows, I would’ve probably ended up on the farm,” he said, “working and learning different things as I went along‚ I never went for school for any trades or anything like that. Everything I got I picked up by going through life.”
They raised two sons while he worked as an airline mechanic and worked on the homestead. Dorothy died in a propane accident in 1969.
For 17 years, Eberhardt lived alone, working the homestead, before marrying his current wife, Mary, in the mid-1980s.
Walter returned to the airfield in India in 1997, on a trip to retrace part of his route with Mary, where he said he was treated as royalty by the local people. The Chabua airfield, which has since been developed into a military base, didn’t look the same as it had more than 50 years before.
Today, his time as a parts supply sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps is remembered in dozens of small, black-and-white photos of airplanes and the tents that he called home for more almost three years.
“I accomplished a lot more things since I had gone into the service,” he said, “got to see a lot more stuff. I accomplished something.”
Contact staff writer Matt Buxton at 459-7544.
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