When I greeted Dr. Lander at his door, I was amazed at how little he had changed over the years. Dr. Ernest M. Lander, Jr was one of my favorite professors at Clemson University.

Now, at age 93, his mind seemed to me as sharp and clear as it was when I was in his classes in the seventies.

Dr. Lander was born in Calhoun Falls. He was conscripted into the service in 1942; half way though his doctorate progam. He was turned down for poor eyesight.

But as the war progressed, according to Dr. Lander, the army lowered its standards and he was placed in a special training unit at Fort Jackson. His task was to help recruits get “up to snuff” because the army would not take anyone below a fourth grade level.

His schedule consisted of schooling solders in the morning and work detail in the afternoons.

December of 1943 found Dr. Lander teaching aviation cadets advanced math classes, such as trigonometry. Dr. Lander worked with the Army Specialist Training Program for about six months.

At one point in his service he was given the option of being stationed at Ft Bragg, N.C., or serving overseas. He opted for overseas service because it certainly sounded more exciting to him than Ft. Bragg, and after a brief stay at the Overseas Replacement Depo in Greensboro, N.C., he found himself on his way to Assam, India.

Dr. Lander was on a ship for 42 days to India via Los Angeles. There were two ships in the convoy and they stopped over at Melbourne, Austrailia.

The base in India was a jumping off point near the Burmese border. The men who sent supplies into China were noted for “flying the hump,” that is, crossing the Himalayas, a risky aviation feat to be sure.

Dr. Lander says the first B-29 bombers to hit Japan would fly out of Calcutta, over the hump, hit Japan and then back to China to refuel.

The Chinese and Japanese were at war and had been since 1937 and the US was supporting the Chinese war effort against the Japanese.

The Allied strategy was to keep China in the war so as to occupy hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops on that front.

Nearly 1000 men and more than 600 planes were lost “flying the hump” berfore the war’s end. “Flying the hump” continued until 1945 when the Burma Road was re-opened.

When the war was over in 1945, Dr. Lander organized activities for the soldiers as they waited their turn to be transported back to the states. They eagerly picked up the progress of the post war world by listening to Armed Services Radio.

Another part of Dr. Lander’s duty was to publish a daily news sheet for the troops that included news from home, war news and other items of interest. He ran picture shows and set up a school for soldiers to improve themselves.

The school quickly became unofficially dubbed, “Lack of Points” University.” This hapless name came about because when the war was over, those with the hightest points were sent home first and of course those with fewer points were “stranded” sometimes for months awaiting passage home.

Dr. Lander worked with the USO and the Red Cross, helping soldiers by providing entertainment, organizing and distributing correspondence to and from home and organizing intramural sporting activities such as volleyball and softball.

Dr. Lander remined me of the fact that for security reasons, all outgoing correspondence was checked by each soldier’s superior officer.

One soldier had both a wife and a girlfriend. The unlucky sergeant had written letters to both. His superior officer purposely switched the two letters and once the letters arrived back in the states, needless to say, according to Dr. Lander, “all hell broke loose.” The guilty sargeant was court-martialed and the letter-swapping lieutenient was punished by a week’s confinement in the brig.