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It isn’t difficult to imagine the reaction from the crew of the RAF Dakota parked on the apron at Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport when, in early 1944, Walter Fletcher showed up on their manifest. Even before the war, airlines had been wary enough of his vast bulk to count him as two individuals on any flight he boarded. And this wasn’t any old flight. Fletcher was bound for Kunming, China, and, with the Burma Road closed, the only way in was over ‘The Hump’, the most perilous air route of WW2. At this stage of the conflict the Japanese may have been heading for defeat, but they still clung tenaciously to great swathes of China, which they invaded in 1931, and South-East Asia. So, in order to supply Chiang Kai-shek’s army, US air force bases, various Allied guerilla units and British operations in China (the latter were especially keen to make sure that Hong Kong was returned to them and so kept a large diplomatic and commercial presence), an ‘air bridge’ had been set up between India and Yunnan province.

This meant the twin-engined freight planes (C-47s, aka the Dakota, and C-46s) of the American’s Air Transport Command and the RAF would battle between soaring Himalayan peaks, through ice-storms and hundred-mile-an-hour winds, skirting black, broiling thunderheads which could flip them over and rip their wings off like a schoolboy torturing a moth. And that was without the added risk posed by marauding Japanese fighters.

Since 1943 The Hump had also been known by the Americans (who operated the majority of the flights) as the Aluminium Trail, after the number of downed planes scattered on the mountainside, their crumpled fuselages glinting in the high sunlight. They formed an illuminated flightpath to and from China. So, given the hazardous nature of the undertaking, and the critical power-to-weight calculations needed to get over the highest of the ranges, a twenty stone passenger like Walter Fletcher was the last thing a crew needed.

Yet getting Fletcher to China was a top priority. This mountain of a man was a member of the Special Operations Executive, the subversion and sabotage organisation set up by Churchill himself; he was crucial to the clandestine war in the East. His mission was neither cloak nor dagger; it was pure commerce, albeit commerce of a decidedly shady kind.

With the British government’s full blessing, Walter Fletcher was about to embark on what became known, for no obvious reason, as Operation Remorse, the largest black market currency deal ever known. The idea was simple: at the time the British were forced to source the Chinese National Dollars they needed to pay for their various military missions and businesses through the Central Bank of China at a punitive exchange rate. Yet, out on the street, the same currency could be had at a much more favourable rate on the black market. Of course, Her Majesty’s Government could not be seen to sanction such clandestine trading (which was illegal under Chinese law), with its representatives operating down in the gutter with gangsters, speculators, thieves and corrupt officials. Walter Fletcher, however, who was described by Hugh Dalton, Churchill’s Minister for Economic Warfare, as ‘a thug with good connections’, had no such compunctions. In fact, when he boarded that Dakota at Dum Dum, Fletcher was being flown right into his element.

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