ENID — When the United States joined the Second World War, Henry Buller had no way of knowing the role he would play in history’s largest armed conflict.

In early 1942, Buller was farming family land near Orienta in Major County and preparing to marry his sweetheart, Clarabelle. Three years later, he had flown more than 250 hours over “The Hump,” flying cargo missions across some of the world’s roughest terrain in the Himalayas.

Buller, now 92, was drafted into the Army in September 1942, three months after he and Clarabelle were married. He was reluctant to leave his new bride and the life he loved on the farm, but he said the Army wasn’t going to wait.

“I didn’t have any choice ... I had to go,” Buller said. And he did go, like more than 16 million other Americans who answered the call to serve in World War II.

Buller reported after induction to Fort Sill, where the Army was to decide his fate in the war.

“I got there to Fort Sill and they gave us all these tests to decide what to do with us,” Buller said. “Finally, they decided to draft me into the Army Air Corps.”

A physical revealed an old knee injury, earning Buller a “limited duty” stamp in his service record that would restrict him from most combat assignments.

Buller reported for training at Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas, and was selected to serve as a radio operator. He went on to complete eight weeks of radio operators’ school in Reno, Nev., and then began flying on training missions.

Buller remembers those training missions, which paired the young radio operators and navigators with equally young and inexperienced pilots, as some of the most dangerous flying he saw in the war.

In years to come, Buller would fly on dozens of missions over the Atlantic, North Africa and the Himalayas, but he remembers one cross-country training flight before he ever left the United States as the closest he came to meeting his end in the service.

Buller was part of a training crew on a round-trip flight between Fort Worth, Texas, and Indianapolis. Things went fine, he said, until they attempted to take off from Indianapolis to return to Fort Worth.

“The aircraft lifted off the runway about four feet, then dropped back down in an air pocket,” Buller said. The B-24 Liberator, loaded down with 1,000 gallons of aviation fuel, came back down with too much speed, too much weight and not enough runway.

“Both pilots locked the brakes, burned up the brakes and the tires, and we went through the fence, through a bar ditch, broke off the engines and ended up squatted in an alfalfa field,” Buller said. The wreck left the crew dazed in a mangled airplane leaking highly flammable fuel.

Buller said he and the rest of the crew had to escape by crawling through a broken window on the co-pilot’s side of the cockpit.

“We all got out of there safely, but none of us crew members wanted to go flying with those pilots again. We all wanted bus tickets home,” Buller said. But, the Army had other plans for Buller and his crew mates.

“They said, ‘If you don’t fly with them right now, you’ll never fly again,’” Buller said. “Well, the next morning those pilots were back at the controls and we did fly back to Fort Worth.”

The plane got off the ground without trouble, only to run headlong into the largest storm Buller would see in more than three years of Army flying.

“We were on our way back to Fort Worth, and this storm was so big we couldn’t go over or around it, and we didn’t have fuel to turn back. The pilot just called back and said, ‘We’re going to have to go through it,’” Buller said.

“The lightning flashed so bad all my radios were sparking to the fuselage,” he said, and the turbulence was so intense he “thought the wings were going to break off.”

The crew escaped that scrape with death over Texas, and Buller soon completed his training.

Buller and thousands of other newly minted aircrew personnel then were divided up at Army replacement centers. Most of the airmen would be sent to fill squadrons in Europe, Africa or the Pacific. Buller was one of a relatively small number of men selected to serve in an area unknown to most Americans at the time: Jorhat, India.

Located in the Assam Valley in northeastern India, Jorhat would become the staging base for thousands of resupply missions over the Himalayas into Japanese-occupied China.

Japan had overrun Burma in the spring of 1942, cutting off the last land routes to resupply Chinese nationalist troops fighting under Chiang Kai-shek. Keeping those troops in the fight was crucial to America’s advance in the Pacific, as the Chinese were tying up hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers.

Gen. Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, also depended on cargo flights over the Himalayas for crucial supplies, particularly aviation fuel. The AVG consisted of volunteer aviators flying American P-40 fighters, in most cases the sole air threat to Japanese troops on the ground in China.

Early in the war, there were few known air routes over the Himalayas, and even fewer planes and pilots in the area capable of making the trip.

The Army’s Air Transport Command (ATC) took on the task of building air supply routes over “The Hump” in 1942. In that first year, ATC crews delivered a little more than 1,000 tons of cargo per month over the Himalayas. By war’s end, Gen. William “Hap” Arnold had bolstered ATC’s assets in India, Burma and China to 722 aircraft and more than 84,000 men. Those crews, including Buller, were delivering 44,000 to 70,000 tons of cargo a month by 1945.

Buller was assigned to fly in the 1352nd Squadron, a composite squadron of C-47 and C-54 cargo planes alongside converted B-24 and B-25 bombers.

“When we finally got to Jorhat, there were all types of planes there to carry cargo,” Buller said.

When he arrived, Buller was issued survival gear and notified it was unlikely anyone would be able to reach him and other crew members if their plane went down.

“They issued us a .45 pistol, but it was just to shoot animals,” Buller said. “If the natives showed up, we knew just to throw that thing away.”

He and other aviators sewed a patch on the back of their flight jackets that read, in Chinese, ‘I am an American soldier. Give me food and water.’”

“We knew it would take about 30 days to walk out of the jungle, and we would need the natives’ help,” Buller said.

It was not uncommon for ATC crews to go down in the Himalayas and the hundreds of miles of jungle on either side of the mountain route. Between 1942 and 1945, 600 ATC aircraft and more than 1,000 men were lost on the Hump route.

“That was the roughest flying in the world up there. There’s nothing but tundra and trees, and the air is so thin ... it’s tough, but we had good planes,” Buller said. He fondly remembers the venerable C-47 as “the safest planes that ever flew.”

Most of Buller’s cargo flights carried 55-gallon barrels of aviation fuel to resupply AVG fighters in Kunming and Chungking, China.

“They needed the gasoline, and we were just doing our job,” Buller said. “We had good planes, good crews and we didn’t have any problems.”

Buller also took part in cargo flights carrying Chinese workers and mules to work on the Burma Road, a land route from Burma to southwest China.

At the conclusion of the war Buller’s squadron transitioned to conducting search and rescue (SAR) missions over the Hump route, looking for the remains of planes and crew members lost during the war.

But, even with the war over, flying over the Himalayas remained treacherous, a fact made evident when a plane carrying men home crashed in the mountains.

“It had 44 boys on it, and the pilot didn’t fly high enough over the Himalayas and it crashed,” Buller said.

He was chosen to serve as radio operator on the SAR flight, coordinating efforts on the ground to search for the downed plane.

“Two local jungle boys started from the bottom and walked up that mountain to the crash site,” Buller said. “When they finally got to the crash site, bears were eating on the people and guys were hung up in the trees ... that crash site was just terrible.”

There were no survivors, and no way to remove the bodies from a crash site that couldn’t be reached by mules or Jeep.

“They called us and said they wanted picks and shovels to bury the bodies,” Buller said. He later returned and helped drop the picks and shovels, along with 44 mahogany crosses, to the workers on the ground.

“There wasn’t anything else we could do for those boys,” he said. “For all I know, they’re still there.”

Buller came close to joining the men left on the Himalayas on another SAR mission, flown with two young and inexperienced pilots eager to make a name for themselves.

“I saw these two young boys I thought were pretty young to be pilots,” Buller said. Shortly into the flight the pilots veered from their flight plan into forbidden territory.

“After a while they called back and said, ‘We’re tired of this and we’re going to fly over Mt. Everest,’” Buller said. He said the pilots wanted to be the first ATC crew to fly over the mountain, which towers more than 29,000 feet above sea level.

“There’s no way that plane could fly over that mountain, and they should have known that,” Buller said. “That B-25 was shaking so bad I thought it was going to come apart. I finally called them and told them someone was going to have pick us up off the mountain if they didn’t quit.”

The pilots relented and gave up the attempt to top the mountain.

“They knew it wasn’t allowed and they just did it anyway ... they were just boys,” Buller said.

Shortly after that ill-fated flight, Buller said he got “the answer to my prayers” — a flight home.

“When the base was closed the commander was told he could pick his own plane and crew to fly home,” Buller said. “I had flown with him on a few missions and he chose me to be his radio operator.”

Buller had his ticket home, but he had only 246 flight hours over the Himalayas, four hours short of the points required to go home.

“I went to base operations and said, ‘How about giving me the next flight over the Himalayas.’ I hadn’t walked five minutes out of there to my tent when this guy came running and asked, ‘Are you the guy who wants to fly over the Himalayas?’”

He completed that last flight, to retrieve a sick soldier from Mandalay Bay, and earned the points he needed to return home.

Buller remembers the long flight back as his most interesting and enjoyable flight in the service.

The flight took the C-47 through 10 legs over 11 days, finally landing in Miami on Jan. 5, 1946.

“The flight home was very, very interesting because it was all good weather and perfect flying conditions,” Buller said.

Buller made it the next day to Oklahoma City, where he was reunited with Clarabelle.

The couple went on to run a dairy farm for eight years, after which Buller worked as a route driver for Gold Spot Dairy until he retired in 1982. They still reside in Enid and enjoy following the lives of their three children, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.