Pasighat, A World War II museum would soon be opened here, the district headquarters of East Siang in Arunachal Pradesh, Chief Minister Pema Khandu announced on Monday.
“A HUMP museum is under construction in Pasighat and scheduled for inauguration in March,” Khandu said at the opening of the 5th India Reserve Battalion headquarters here.
The museum would be inaugurated by US Ambassador Kenneth Ian Juster, he said.
Arunachal Pradesh was on the flight path used by US aircraft ferrying supplies from hundreds of Indian airfields to Chinese armies trying to hold invading Japanese soldiers.
Several wreckage have been reportedly sighted in the past several years. The Americans believe more than 400 US servicemen and women went missing over the Himalayan “Hump” in this frontier state of Arunachal Pradesh during World War II.
Khandu said the World War II museum would display machineries of the World War II, recovered in the state.
The Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) had contracted out logistics to a local entrepreneur for finding HUMP flight wreckage, Khandu said.
The DPAA is an agency of the US Department of Defense whose mission is to recover missing personnel, listed as prisoners of war (POWs), or ‘missing in action’ (MIA), from all past wars, conflicts and from countries around the world.
The Allied pilots were forced to fly the perilous route in April 1942 when the Japanese army cut off the main road between Burma and China, and the operations continued until near the end of the war in 1945.
In all, Allied pilots ferried some 650,000 tonnes of fuel, ammunitions and equipment over the mountains to re-supply the Chinese government and other anti-Japanese forces.
