When coalition aircraft streaked into the skies over Baghdad on January 17, 1991, beginning the air campaign that would become Desert Storm, the lineage of special operations air power they embodied stretched back nearly fifty years — to a jungle airstrip in Burma, a brigadier general named Orde Wingate, and two of the most unconventional officers the United States Army Air Forces ever produced. The story of the First Air Commando Wing, and of the men who created it, is one of the great untold stories of American military aviation. At its center stands Major General John "Johnny" Alison — pilot, ace, administrator, and the man who arguably did more to shape the concept of air commando operations than anyone in American history.
Two Officers Unlike Any Others
The partnership that created the First Air Commandos began with Colonel Philip Cochran, an officer so colorful that Milton Caniff immortalized him as "Colonel Flip Corkin" in the beloved Steve Canyon comic strip. Cochran was that rarest of military personalities — a man of genuine physical courage and almost reckless personal initiative who also possessed the organizational intelligence to translate individual audacity into institutional capability. Before Project Nine, he had already demonstrated his unusual qualities by catapulting P-40s off Navy ships into North Africa in 1942, and by leading what became known as the "Joker Squadron" in the bitter fighting over Southern Tunisia — performances that caught the attention of General Jimmy Doolittle and, through Doolittle, of General Henry "Hap" Arnold himself.
Alison was a different kind of exceptional. Where Cochran was extroverted and theatrical, Alison combined quiet professional competence with genuine tactical brilliance. As a Flying Tiger pilot flying P-40s in China, he had shot down eight enemy aircraft — making him an ace several times over by any standard. He was also a gifted administrator, the kind of officer who could manage the logistics of the impossible while simultaneously flying the mission himself. When Arnold needed a second officer to match Cochran's operational energy with administrative capability, Alison was the obvious choice.
Arnold's Order: Project Nine
General Arnold's tasking order for the project that would become the First Air Commandos was itself characteristic of his command style at its most creative: "To hell with the paperwork — go on out and fight." The mission was to create an entirely new kind of air force unit, purpose-built to support Brigadier General Orde Wingate's Chindit long-range penetration groups in Burma. Wingate was planning to insert his forces deep behind Japanese lines and keep them there — supplied entirely by air, supported by air, and ultimately extracted by air. No existing USAAF unit had the equipment, training, or doctrine to support this kind of operation. Arnold told Cochran and Alison to create one from scratch.
The equipment list that Cochran and Alison assembled was extraordinary for a single unit. They received fighters — P-51 Mustangs for long-range escort and ground attack. They received light bombers — B-25 Mitchells configured for close support. They received transports — C-47s for supply drops and personnel movement. They received gliders — the CG-4A Hadrian, capable of carrying a jeep, a howitzer, or a full infantry squad. And they received something that had never been used in combat before: the brand-new Sikorsky R-4 helicopter — the world's first practical military helicopter — four of them, for casualty evacuation and rescue from positions that even light aircraft could not access.
Operation Thursday: The First Air Assault
The operational debut of the First Air Commandos came on the night of March 5, 1944, with Operation Thursday — the mass glider insertion of Wingate's Chindits into the Burmese jungle far behind Japanese lines. It was the first large-scale combat glider assault in United States history, and it succeeded under conditions that would have broken lesser units.
The challenges were formidable. The landing zones, identified by aerial reconnaissance, turned out to be more hazardous than anticipated — one primary zone (code-named "Broadway") was partially blocked by logs that the Japanese may have placed deliberately. Alison, characteristically, flew one of the lead gliders himself to assess conditions firsthand. The operation continued through the night, inserting more than 9,000 Chindits with their equipment, animals, and supplies into positions from which they immediately began disrupting Japanese lines of communication.
The operation's success was decisive. Japanese forces found themselves attacked from directions they had assumed were secure. Supply lines that had been considered immune from Allied interference were cut. The psychological effect on Japanese commanders — who had believed the jungle terrain gave them an impenetrable strategic buffer — was substantial and lasting.
Wingate himself did not survive to see the full fruition of his strategy. He was killed in an air crash on March 24, 1944, three weeks after Operation Thursday. Cochran and Alison carried on. The unit continued to operate, continued to insert and support Wingate's successors, and continued to demonstrate that air power could enable ground operations in terrain that conventional military thinking had declared impassable.
The Legacy: Air Commandos as a Permanent Concept
Cochran returned to the United States after Operation Thursday to help develop new tactics for the P-47, eventually rising to the rank of General. Alison rose to Major General, playing a key role in the postwar development of the United States Air Force — which came into independent existence in 1947 partly because the lessons of World War II had made a strong case for air power as a separate institutional domain.
But it is as the First Air Commando that Alison is most importantly remembered. The concept he and Cochran created — a self-sufficient special operations air unit with organic fixed-wing, rotary-wing, transport, and combat capability, trained to operate in denied areas with minimal logistical support — was the template for everything that followed. Air Commando units served in Southeast Asia, where they pioneered the armed helicopter and the counter-insurgency air mission. They served in the Middle East, Central America, and Africa. Every Air Force special operations unit that has deployed since Desert Storm traces its institutional lineage to the planning sessions in which Johnny Alison and Phil Cochran figured out how to build an air force that could fight where no air force had ever fought before.
The title is simple, accurate, and permanent: The First Air Commando.