Hump-Happiness

Last year, at a jungle base of the Air Transport Command far up in Assam province on the Burma border, a group of soldiers whipped together a vaudeville show. It was named from a form of war neurosis peculiar to the region where the hazards of flying the Hump are in every man's mind--Hump-Happy. Last week Hump-Happy was on tour. From its purely local start, it had humped through hundreds of performances on the jungle circuit. From Burma's border to the African Gold Coast it is the Army's No. 1 entertainment item.

When Hump-Happy was first tried out, men came out of the fever-ridden jungles to see it. Hump-Happy's hairy-chested girls and hairy-chested jokes hit them just right. Within a few weeks Hump-Happy went on tour, has been on the move ever since.

Bamboo Music Hall. Major Clark Robinson organized the show in Assam while constructing a crude movie theater known as the Bamboo Music Hall. Robinson, a former New York scenic designer (Radio City Music Hall, the Roxy Theater), got the help of Private Al Roth as stage man- ager, gathered talent as he could find it. Props were made from whatever came handy.

The show is as simple as K rations, as nostalgic as its cowboy songs, as lusty as a. G.I. bull session. (Chesty brunette to castaway sailor: "I'm going to give you something you haven't had for a loong time." Sailor: "You mean--there's a bottle of ice-cold beer on this island?") On the Road. At one bomber base a number of planes had just been lost when the show arrived. "The girls--Red Cross girls and nurses--came into the theater crying, and some of the fellows were drunk. But when we got through they were laughing, and we heard that they laughed for weeks afterward."

The show had its own casualties. Last December Major Robinson was killed in a plane accident while flying over the Hump. "It was bad. . . . We felt we just couldn't play--how could we be funny, and laugh, on the same field where the Major had died? . . . That was our first baptism of 'the show must go on' routine." After the death of Major Robinson, the new C.O. was Lieut. Jack Yule, a former professional actor (in Hump-Happy, he works the spotlight).

The first road show was arranged for by a general who assigned the actors to two weeks' detached duty. The time was extended again & again. The show is not officially recognized and the men have no travel orders. But because others want to see them, the Air Transport Command flies them in to the lonely places. They prefer playing such places because they lived at one themselves, and they know how it is.

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