A radioman and wire chief from Buffalo who helped keep the airlift over the Himalayas flying — the lifeline that kept China in the war.
Dominic Henry Barone was born on 9 February 1916 and grew up at 11 Chestnut Street in Buffalo, the son of Joseph and Mamie Barone. He finished Hutchinson Central High School in 1935 and went to work as a millwright’s helper at the National Biscuit Company — Nabisco — keeping the great ovens and automatic feeders running. One of his own records notes, almost proudly, that each oven “bakes approximately 7 tons of pastry per day.”
In August 1942, with the country at war, a Buffalo attorney named Christy Buscaglia put his regard on paper, recommending the young man “for aviation training” and calling him a “capable and conscientious young man of good habits and fine character.” It is the first sign of where Dominic was headed: into the air war.
Dominic entered active service in early September 1942, processed through the 1213th Reception Center at Fort Niagara, just north of home. (His papers carry two close dates — 25 August and 8 September 1942 — most likely his induction and report-for-duty dates.)
One of the first things a new soldier did was take out government life insurance. On 9 September 1942 Dominic applied for a $10,000 National Service Life Insurance policy and named the two people back on Chestnut Street: his mother Mamie as principal, his father Joseph as contingent. A 26-year-old private’s quiet way of looking after the people he loved before shipping out.
The Army Air Forces sent Dominic to radio school at Truax Field in Madison, Wisconsin — a course in Morse code and radio-mechanic theory. It was the skill that would define his war. A transport aircraft without a working radio was deaf and blind; a network of airfields without working wire was silent. Dominic learned to be the voice and ears of both.
Before voice nets and satellites, the long-distance language of war was Morse — a rhythm of short and long signals tapped by hand. An operator who could send and receive cleanly under pressure was worth his weight in gold on a flight line where weather, terrain, and enemy fighters all conspired against the men in the air.
In June 1943, secret Air Transport Command orders out of Boca Raton Field, Florida sent Dominic and his shipment of airmen to the India-China Wing at Chabua, in Assam, India — the cluster of tea-country airfields at the foot of the Himalayas that launched the airlift to China. By September 1943 he was a Corporal with the 301st Transport Squadron, 29th Transport Group, India-China Wing (APO 467).
Home reached him there in envelopes addressed to “Cpl. D. Barone … A.P.O. 467 c/o Postmaster, New York City.” One, from a girl back in Buffalo in the autumn of 1943, is a gentle goodbye — she had been “going with another” for four months. War was being fought in the sky over Assam; it was also being quietly lost and won in the mail.
This is the heart of his war. Dominic served with the India China Division of the Air Transport Command — the organization that flew “the Hump,” the airlift over the eastern Himalayas from the airfields of Assam into China.
When Japan overran Burma and captured Rangoon in early 1942, it cut the last overland supply route into China — the Burma Road.2 To keep China’s armies fighting and tie down the Japanese, the Allies had only one way left to deliver fuel, weapons, and supplies: fly them over the mountains.3 The China-Burma-India theater is often called the “Forgotten Theater,” yet its whole purpose was that single, vital mission — keeping China in the war.1
The Hump was among the most dangerous flying of the war: overloaded transports, violent weather, ice, and 16,000-foot peaks, around the clock. The men who kept the radios working and the lines open were what made that round-the-clock operation possible.
Dominic’s trade put him squarely inside that machine. His service record lists him as a radio operator and mechanic — qualified on the C-47, C-46, C-49 and B-25 — and later as a wire technician, supervising the telephone and telegraph systems that tied the airfields together. He moved among the Division’s base units in Assam (the 1337th and 1348th AAF Base Units) and rose to Sergeant. He kept a copy of the Hump Express, the Division’s own newspaper, dated March 1945 and printed at headquarters in Calcutta.
It was hard country to be well in. The same newspaper he saved describes the atabrine program fighting malaria across Assam and Bengal — a reminder that, between flights, the enemy was also the climate, the mosquito, and the monsoon. At some point Dominic himself was hospitalized; his old coworkers back in Buffalo, hearing the news, sent a stream of cheer cards across the world.
We know, in unusual detail, exactly what Dominic did — because the newspapers told it, and his hometown did too. To his wire crew he was “The Whip”; to most everyone else he was simply “Mike.” A unit paper even ran a cartoon of him: “Sgt. Dominic Barone — the Construction Chief of the Wire Crew… just finished his second big wire installation in the CBI.”
Back in Buffalo, the Nabisco plant ran a little newsletter for its servicemen called The Chatter, written by a woman the men called “Aunt Gertie,” and one issue put “Nicky” Barone — their name for him — front and center. It introduces him as the Wire Chief who “supervised most of the intricate connection work” for what it teasingly dubbed the “Burma Telephone Co.” His crew, it says, “not only stretched the wires, but hacked their way through the jungles to bring back telephone poles.” They shaped the logs, dug the holes, set the poles, and strung the wire for a new exchange — the airfield’s nervous system, built by hand, in the heat.
Behind the flight line lay another world. Dominic passed through Calcutta, the sprawling rear base of the theater, and kept an American Red Cross “Burra Club” tour booklet describing its sights — Government House, the Ochterlony Monument, the Kalighat Temple, the white-marble Victoria Memorial. It walks a young soldier through Hindu custom and Sikh history with real curiosity. His letters mention Karachi, too. For a young man from Chestnut Street, it was the far side of the earth.
He did not forget home. Every month a $50 Class E allotment went from his pay to “Mrs. Mamie Barone” in Buffalo — discontinued only in August 1945, as he prepared to come home. And he was, by his own letters, the one developing the photographs: “the prints are getting out OK,” he wrote. The negatives in this collection are very likely his own eye on Burma and India.
By the late summer of 1945, with the war ending, Dominic had earned his way home under the Army’s points system. “All men with 50 points or 18 months overseas will be eligible for discharge,” he wrote — and he had “54 points and 18 months.” Around him, the airfield was already being dismantled: in one letter, every building but Operations, the mess hall, and the telephone exchange had been torn down. He cleared his unit in Assam, signed the theater’s departure and censorship certificates, and read the AAF’s little Coming Home manual on the long journey back.
On 26 October 1945 he was separated at the Separation Base, Rome Army Air Field, Rome, New York — a Sergeant, three years and a world away from the millwright’s helper who had left Chestnut Street. That December, even TIME magazine wrote to welcome him back as a civilian.
His discharge certificate, which would list his exact decorations, has not yet turned up in this collection. Based on his documented service — honorable duty overseas in the India-Burma theater, 1943–1945 — he would typically have been entitled to the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, and most likely the Good Conduct Medal. We’ll confirm and correct this if the certificate surfaces.
Among his papers were his own prints — the people and places he chose to keep. Friends and fellow soldiers outside their basha huts, a riverside, a crowd posing in the sun, a young woman back home beside a car, and, tucked in among them, the little prayer card he carried.
Decades later, in the Buffalo of the 1980s and ’90s, there was a restaurant called Flying Tiger’s that Dominic loved. The Flying Tigers were the most famous American airmen of the China-Burma-India war, and the airlift Dominic served kept their cause — the air war over China — supplied and alive. A man who had spent his youth on a flight line in Assam, choosing that place, again and again, for so many years.
Some of what we carry from a war we never say out loud. We just keep going back to the Flying Tiger.
