Calcutta Docks Supply Officer

My father spent three and a half years in India during World War II, working as a supply officer at the Air Force Ex-Transit Depot on the waterfront in Calcutta.   When I was a boy he talked about his time in India but I hadn't realized there was a photographic record until I ran across negatives to these pictures six years ago, several years after dad died.  I know he didn't take all these pictures because he's in several of them. The negative envelope said this was in 1945.

Dad is the small man in the center of the picture.    He told me about the industrious, intelligent, and poor Indian laborers who worked for him on the docks.

He was an officer and spoke with admiration about the enlisted men who ran the heavy machinery for him.   Although he was in charge of his crew, he said he'd tell them what task needed to be done, then ask his men - the specialists - how to do it.

Containerization was already a concept although large wooden boxes were then the standard.

Dad is in this picture too, highlighted to the right of the crates.

He didn't mention loading supplies onto train cars but that is what's being done here.

He did talk about trucks.  He described driving trucks like the one on the right up the Burma Road.   He said the irony for him was that he spent three years unloading vast quantities of supplies, much of it destined for China, only to have his return to the States delayed so he could oversea the destruction of the supplies remaining at Calcutta.  The government feared the surplus supplies would hurt the U.S economy.