He had been in charge of the airlift operations
in Southern China during World War II.
The U.S. had its own China/Burma/India theater,
where we supported the Nationalists,
you know, the Chiang Kai-shek forces,
the Kuomintang, against not only the Japanese,
but there was still a quasi civil war going in China
during that time, but because of the mountains
of Burma and Southern China,
if you look at the terrain,
it's just tremendously mountainous,
and you can see photographs of the roads,
what they called the Burma Road,
well, it goes, yeah, just like this.
To get 10 miles, you'd have to drive around 150 miles,
you know, just back and forth,
up and down to these mountains.
So General Tunner was the guy in charge of planning
and executing the airlift operations that we conducted
to supply the Chinese and American
and British forces in Burma.
I'm sure we learned many principles
and you know, what worked and what didn't work
during that time, so we could apply them more successfully
on a larger scale that was needed during the Berlin Airlift.
