Pasco veteran remembers flying 'The Hump'

Flying high above a treacherous stretch of the Himalayan Mountains during World War II, Ken Prescher remembers cockpit temperatures dipping to minus 30 degrees - or worse.

If the incapacitating cold wasn't enough to make pilots delivering supplies to China address their mortality, the hazardous eastern end of the Himalayas, known as "The Hump," certainly was.

Countless pilots and other servicemen lost their lives attempting to clear the world's highest mountains.

To some, the China Burma India conflict is now known as "the forgotten theater of World War II." But Prescher, 88, who survived the war and later headed a manufacturing company that flourishes to this day, will never forget.

"It'll always be there," he said of the memories. "At one point we were moved to an [outpost] in India. There were about 12 men in there. Fairly often, a pilot wouldn't come back. We'd have to bundle up his foot locker and send it off to his family."

A Wisconsin native, Prescher was the son of an engineer in the U.S. Naval Department. He was living in Washington and working as a surveyor when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He remembers listening with his family as President Franklin Roosevelt described the sneak attack over the radio.

Like many young American men, Pearl Harbor helped spur Prescher to put his life on the line for his country. The song "Silver Wings" was popular, and Prescher was inspired to become a pilot.

"It was unbelievable," he said. "We sat and listened to that radio for a long time."

Sixty-eight years later, Prescher's wife, Stella, an Ocala native, also recalled the "total shock" of the ambush as if it happened last week. She was a young USO hostess when she met Prescher at a mixer in her hometown.

While Stella stops short of describing their relationship as love at first sight, it didn't take long for the couple to marry. After all, in Ocala at the time, young servicemen being primed for war duty were seen as "royalty" in the North Central Florida city.

"I thought, 'Oh, he's a cadet!' " she said recently. "While he was in Ocala, we dated."

He and Stella eventually raised three children. They now have six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren with another on the way. They have been married 66 years.

They live comfortably in the Tampa Bay Golf & Country Club off State Road 52, where several of Ken Prescher's wartime medals (two Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals, among others), photos and other mementoes decorate the well-kept home.

For Prescher, life after World War II has been blessed. His company, Westomatic Manufacturing, thrived with plants in Tampa and Dothan, Ala. Not the retiring type, Prescher still oversees some aspects of the business, which has moved to Costa Rica.

But serving in World War II all those years ago is something that will always help define his life - and, on some days, monopolize his thoughts.

Seemingly stoic, Prescher speaks of his experiences with the straight-forward candor common among military personnel.

While flying over The Hump, he once saw lightning pierce one of the plane's wings.

Another time he had to pull his service gun on a crew chief who panicked during an electrical fire on board, further threatening the plane's personnel.

He often had to remain calm while navigating The Hump, where flying through inclement weather was about as routine as losing radio contact with friendly voices, and the pilots weren't necessarily safe on the ground, where they were targets of air raids by Japanese bombers.

In his year of service in the China Burma India theater, Prescher estimated that he flew over the hazardous Hump nearly 200 times. Despite severe down drafts that could pull a plane down 1,000 feet in the blink of an eye, he never crashed.

He was one of the lucky ones.

"We lost more pilots and planes, per capita, than they did in Germany, because of the weather and the ... Zeroes,' " he said, referring to Japanese fighters that tried to shoot down planes.

After his duty in the China Burma India theater, Prescher delivered C-46 airplanes to Australia. It was there, walking back to his base along a war-torn beach one night, that Prescher felt as though he was being watched.

He squinted to look around the blood-spangled landscape, but there was no one there - nobody living, anyway.

It's a vivid memory that Prescher doesn't like to recall.

Not that he has a choice.

"For lack of a better word [it was] ghosts," he said with tears in his eyes. "It was a very strange feeling."