High flye Er
From bombing missions to training pilots, life’s a constant high for this ‘poster boy’ for active ageing.
IT was December 1941 in Hong Kong, but for Ho Weng Toh and his friends from Malaya, festive celebrations were far from their mind.
Ipoh-born Ho, then a 21-year-old student in a Hong Kong university, watched as the British surrendered Hong Kong to the Japanese on Christmas day, after 18 days of fighting. With the surrender, the group of Malayans became war refugees.
Ho had arrived in Hong Kong in 1939, barely a year after Japanese forces fighting China in the second Sino-japanese War had marched into Guangzhou, the capital of Hong Kong’s neighbouring Guangdong province, on Oct 21.
Returning home was not an option either, because the Japanese occupied Ipoh on Dec 26, a day after Hong Kong fell. Within two months of landing on the beaches of Kelantan on Dec 8, 1941, the Japanese had conquered the whole of Malaya, including parts of Singapore.
Ho and his friends decided that escape to unoccupied China was their only way out.
“China was huge and the Japanese did not have full control over the entire country. Our goal was to reach Chungking, Chiang Khai Shek’s (head of the Nationalist Army) headquarters after the fall of Nanjing and Shanghai. It was like an oasis for war refugees,” the father of three says at his home in Pasir Ris, Singapore.
“From Hong Kong’s New Territories, we walked to Weichow, crossed the Tungkwong river, then took a truck to Siew Kwan before ending up in Pingshek, where the Sun Yat Sen University was located. I enrolled myself there,” adds Ho, who found himself struggling to survive daily. At that point, his citizenship status was that of “a British protected person of the Federated Malay States”.
The former student of St Michael’s Institution, Ipoh (from 1927 to 1938) ended up a bomber pilot by chance.
“I saw a newspaper advertisement looking for cadet air force pilots – General Chiang was looking for pilots to fight the Japanese. Joining the military was a way to feed oneself, so I signed up. I went for an entrance examination and a medical screening at Guilin. A few months later, a letter came saying I had passed.”
In the winter of 1942, the recruits were sent to an air force training school to Yiping, a place beset by bad weather and constant Japanese bombings.
“We also lacked fuel. After that, the authorities decided to train us in Lahore (then still part of India).”
Ho’s batch became the first Chinese air force cadets to be trained as pilots in Lahore. The trainees were later transported to the United States, where they underwent a year’s intensive training to become either fighter or bomber pilots.
Looking back, he says the months of tough discipline did him good. “I was once a Boy Scout, but the military was nothing like that. The marching and classes were like crazy, but they toughened me up.”
There were five phases of training, with each phase lasting two to three months. “It was a very stressful period. The moment you fail, you were sent back to China. I dared not even think about failing because I would then have to rejoin the mass of guys who were without a job.”
After the “one-year miracle”, graduates from the US Air Force training were shipped back to China in 1943.
“We reported for duty in Chungking, and I was later based in Hanzhong (Shanxi province). I was attached to the First Bomb Squadron of the Chinese American Composite Wing under the command of Claire Lee Chennault, who was better known as the leader of a group of fighter pilots called the Flying Tigers.”
From his base, Ho carried out various bombing and strafing missions over an area known as the China-burma-india Theatre (CBI), the name used by the United States Army for its forces operating with British and Chinese Allied air and land forces during WWII.
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The communists eventually defeated the Nationalists and, by 1949, the latter were forced to retreat to Taiwan. After a brief stay in Hong Kong, Ho returned to Malaya with his family in 1951 and joined the expatriate-dominated Malayan Airways based in Singapore. He was one of its first local pilots.
His flying skills were put to good use during the height of the Malayan Emergency in the mid-1950s, when he had to make salary drops for plantation workers in terrorist-infested parts of Johor, like Layang Layang. When newspapers for Malaya were still printed in Singapore (eg, the Nanyang Siang Pau), he used to drop them in the major towns too.
In 1954, when Singapore became self-governing, Ho opted to be its citizen. In 1963, he began teaching trainee pilots with Malaysian Airways, and was a key figure in training pilots for both countries through Malaysia-singapore Airlines (MSA).
The separation of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965 led to the creation of two different airlines – Singapore Airlines (SIA) and the Malaysian Airline System (now Malaysia Airlines) – under the control of the respective countries. Ho joined SIA, where he became a training captain on the F-27, DC-3 and Boeing 737. By the time he retired in 1980 as the chief pilot, he had logged more than 20,000 flying hours.
The sprightly Ho turns 92 today. He remains in good health and is mentally sharp. He lives with his eldest son in Singapore and meets up with friends regularly for swimming, billiards, snooker and bridge.
He is undoubtedly a poster boy for active yet graceful aging. Last October, Singapore’s Council for Third Age (www.c3a.org.sg) awarded Ho and six others “The Active Agers Award 2011” for their can-do spirit and zest for life.