Hunter’s Fountain

Some 85 years ago this week, the 10,000-ton Dutch Java-Pacific Lijn/VNS passenger steamer SS Jaegersfontaine pulled out of San Francisco on 10 July and, steaming West across a wide and nervous ocean, arrived a little over 8,000 miles away at Rangoon in British Burma on the 28th, making it in a handy 18-knot average. Built in 1934 at Nederlandsche Scheepsbouw Mij NV, Amsterdam, Jagersfontein means “Hunter’s fountain.” She was a lucky ship, but it was a quirky kind of luck. Among the accumulated cargo and passengers aboard Jagersfontein on her July 1941 trip to Rangoon were 300 young American men, most slim with sharp eyes and short hair, all civilian employees of the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, or CAMCO. Among them were 99 pilots and 201 assorted ground crewmen and support personnel. Nine of the latter were Chinese-American mechanics specifically recruited from New York and San Francisco’s Chinatowns and rushed through a quick school at Allison Engine Works in Indianapolis…