Like most young men of his generation, Max served in the military during World War II. He was selected to train as a pilot, training in the BT-13 and later in an AT-10, preparing to be a bomber pilot. Following graduation and commissioning at Ellington Air Force base, he was assigned to a B-26 Bomber Squadron at Barksdale Field in Shreveport, Louisiana.
However, when Max received his final orders, he learned he would be doing something different. He would be deployed to a base in Chittagong, in Southwest India, close to the border of Burma. Once there, he would fill the need for combat cargo pilots in the China-Burma-India Theatre. To prepare for this new assignment, he was sent to Bergstrom Air Field in Austin, Texas, to train for four months on the Curtiss C-46, the airplane used for combat cargo missions.
Here’s a short passage from the book that illuminates some of his experiences:
Then in late January 1945, 2nd Lieutenant Max Carr left for Chittagong, where he soon found himself flying "over the hump" of the Himalayan Mountains. To the Max is a first-person historical account of one pilot who survived the treacherous conditions of weather, limited instrumentation, and enemy fire to fly 283 successful combat missions.
The FAA defines Dead Reckoning as the process of estimating a global position by advancing a known position, using direction, speed, time, and distance of travel. Before modern radio technology and electronic navigation, pilots had to figure out where they would be at a certain time if they held the speed, time and course of their current flight pattern. Sometimes these calculations proved accurate; other times not. Without aids during inclement weather, these combat cargo pilots lived with constant uncertainty about their calculations—Dead Reckoning was all they had. They never knew the conditions or the direction of the winds that would blow them off their plotted course.
Max explains Dead Reckoning this way: “Today, pilots have sophisticated instruments to let them know where they are, where they’re going, and what’s ahead. But when we were flying over there, we would look at the map and say, ‘We’re flying from point A to point B. Our destination is, say, thirty-seven degrees from where we are.’ Then we would just fly thirty-seven degrees on the compass. However, that didn’t take the wind direction and velocity, which were unknown, into consideration.”