LAST ISSUE: Cedric Mah flew the Burma Hump from 1944 until the war’s end. In August. he carried a Japanese delegation on their way to discuss surrender terms with China.

It was not like the war against the Japanese. It seemed at first that it would be. because there was little clear indication when one war ended and another began. During the Second World War the brothers Mah were among a fiercely-dedicated band of flier.~ who helped China hold a wall against 14 years of Japanese invasion, and their reward was survival and victory. In the civil war that followed, it gradually became clear that they were on the losing side. The communists, the first truly Chinese government since the old emperors, won the hearts 01 the people. The nationalists, propped up by American aid, were corrupt from the highest Guomindang officials to the lowest soldiers and pilots.

The war didn’t end. Japan formally surrendered on September 2, 1945. but by this point the American policy makers were more concerned about stopping the advance of communism. The defeat of the Japanese in Manchuria was seen as an opening for the USSR to occupy China, and in late September the United States landed 60.000 US Marines at Tianjin and sent them racing for the Great Wall to guard northern China. Cedric Mah, still shuttling load after load over the treacherous Burma Hump. was dispatched north to the Siberian border.

Mao Zedongs communists, bolstered by captured Japanese ammo dumps. transferred their operations to China’s three northeastern provinces. The nationalists returned to their pre-war capital of Nanjing. Uneasy allies against the Japanese. the communists and nationalists turned on each other. Civil war broke into the open. In October Ced Mah was over Kaifeng. air-dropping supplies along the Yellow River as the nationalists struggled to hold the cities and maintain their lines of communication. In November he helped transfer government ministries from Zhongquing (Chungking) to Nanjing.

American General George Marshall thought he had brokered a peace between the rival forces. His peace was destined to a very short life, but in November US Air Transport Command began the demolition of their wartime installations, their hangars and runways. When the Burma Hump was abandoned as a supply route. Cedric Mah had flown 337 round trips and accumulated 6.000 hours of air-time
In April. 1946. he went home.

Yet the Mah brothers were not finished in China. In late 1946. with civil war now raging. the CentraI Air Transport Company (CATC) was formed, a subsidiary of Lufthansa Airlines Under the guidance of longtime Mah friend Moon Chin, the CATC pioneered overseas routes for airlines, into French Indo China. Burma and CaIcutta
Albert Mah arrived it Shanghai in October 1946. and Cedric was not far behind. For three years the Mah brothers flew for the CATC , supplying the nationalist troops from the early years of Guomindang ascendance to the last resistance against the communists. In the tangled politics of the time, the CATC and CNAC. both government-controlled airlines. competed on parallel routes. The communists were more organized, and by the end of 1947 were turning the battle. In November 1948 Manchuria was lost along with a nationalist army of half a million men. By the end of 1948, the Guomindang were collapsing.

In November 1948 the communists had won Shandong in central China. and on November 6 had begun the campaign that would end at the battle of Huai-Hai (near Xuzhou). The CATC pilots made continuous airdrops on the nationalist positions. On January 9. 1949. Albert, Cedric and a pilot named Len Parish guided the last three planes over the target area. Albert dropped his load first, and circled at 5.000 feet as a position marker for the others. In the growing dusk the brothers agreed to signal each other with a flash of landing lights. but that brought a hail of tracer fire from the ground. The communists were closing in.

At 6:00 a.m. on January 10. as the communists launched their final offensive, the Mahs were two of over 400 pilots flying to the Yellow River. A call for grid co-ordinates brought no response. Al Mah. writing a paper for Concordia University some 25 years later, recalled the radio conversations among the pilots. Some pilots over the target area are complaining to the radio operator on the ground that if they fail to drop their load, they won’t get paid. Some had dropped anyway despite knowledge that the Communists will get their load. Our immediate concern, too, is that this trip is wasted only because we might not be paid. What a confusing reaction, completely devoid of rectitude or sense of cause. We’ve become passionately subjugated to our own avarice, like almost everyone we know in China.

The 400-plane armada was recalled: the decisive battle of the civil war had been fought. The brothers Mah continued on a gruelling schedule through the closing days of nationalist China. Bejing fell in January. Cedric Mah flew the last flights out of Nanjing before it fell to the communists in April. and out of Shanghai before it fell on May 25. The People’s Republic 01 China was proclaimed on October 1. 1949. Recognizing the People’s Republic as the lawful government. the British government at Hong Kong impounded all nationalist aircraft thai had gathered there. The brothers Mah went home to Canada. Their involvement in China’s troubler history was over, and they transferred their hard-won experience as pilots to Canadian skies.


Al Mah and the family Follows


Laurie and Betty Greenhalgh were Shanghai friends of Albert Mah. The family had been P.O.W.s during the war, and Laurie Greenhalgh looked after the Shanghai waterworks in the final years of nationalist domination in China - between the defeat of the Japanese in 1945 and the ascension of the communists in 1949. Sentiment in China by 1949 had swung around to open sympathy for the communists, and as the nationalists fell the Greenhalghs were convinced to stay and manage the waterworks. They became caught there for years.

‘I left Shanghai on May 14,’ Al Mah says. and Ced flew the last plane out on the 21st. Before that Dawn had made her way to Hong Kong. and I told Laurie and Betty that I’d watch out for her. She was just in her mid-teens. 15 years old. or something like that. She was in the Seamen’s Home, and I took her to Mr. and Mrs. Wong’s house. I lived with the Wongs for quite a whilethey were old enough to be my mother and father - and they put Dawn up at first. At that time in Hong Kong there were no places to stay: you had bank managers living on park benches, and things like that. I went to the Harbour View Hotel, and managed to get her this little cubby hole, like a bathroom. It was really small. Dawn used to say that when she got into bed, the doorknob got into bed with her. She hated it there, and she never wanted to go home at night, so I’d take her out dancing - to the Ritz. and places like that. It would be 3 o’clock in the morning, and she had a job to go to the next day, but she still wouldn’t want to go home.”

“I brought her over here.” Mah says. and then had to go back to Taiwan during the Korean War. She learned to act, and was rooming with a girl named Nancy Deale. My friend Lorne Green went and married Nancy in December 19611. and when they moved down to New York Dawn went and roomed with them down there,

Dawn Greenhalgh had completed education at her high school Montreal High. and had studied acting under Eleanor Stuart (who also coached Christopher Plummer arid John Colicos), In New York she studied under Herbert Berghoff and Ute Hagen. and in 1953 returned to Canada for the inaugural season of the Stratford Festival and then tOUted with its offshoot. Canadian Players. During that tour she met her future husband. Ted Follows (whose film credits over the years include 1953’s Rob Roy, Highland Rogue. 1974’s The National Dream.and 1993’s minisenes JFK: Reckless Youth), Greenhalgh’s acting credits have been stacking up since the 1950s - she helped found the Neptune in Halifax and Theatre Plus in Toronto. acted in the regular TV series Strange Paradise and guested in such series as Wojek. King of Kensington, Flappers, and Street LegaL TV movies Conspiracy of Silence and Journey Into Darkness. and films,

Ted Follows and Dawn Greenhalgh had four children. Daughters Megan and Samantha are actresses -Megan. of course, providing the definitive portrayal of Anne of Green Gables. Daughter Edwina is a writer, and son Lawrence Follows is the producer of such stage hits as Forever Plaid and I Love You! You’re Perfect! Now Change! Al Mah remains close to the Follows family. In the summer of 1998 he accompanied Dawn and her four children on a rediscovery of China. They travelled to visit the internment camp where Dawn and her family had been held as prisoners of war by the Japanese, and introduced the Follows children to the sights and sounds of China at war in a time long ago. Fittingly enough, as Mah and the family crossed the Atlantic the aircraft featured a movie starring Dawn Greenhalgh.


NEXT ISSUE: In Prince Rupert. the War had brought a surge of growth. Earl and Alex Mah as wartime managers of Sunrise Grocery, began supplying the commissary at Prince Rupert Drydock When they encountered problems with their bread supply, they bought Princ Rupert Bakery - which, as Baker Boy, remains in the Mah family today.