Moment in Time (June 24, 2021)
When Frank L. Higgs, then known as “Junior,” graduated from Grandview Heights High School in 1926, he became intrigued with airplanes and flight. After attending Hanover College and Ohio State University, where he was nicknamed “Dude,” he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and was deployed to China as an aviation instructor. Higgs resigned his commission in 1941, right after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so that he could play a more active part in the war.
Frank “Dude” Higgs poses in a photo taken by Life magazine’s Clare Boothe Luce in front of his Chinese China National Aviation Corp. transport airplane in 1942, when Luce was on assignment in Burma for the magazine. Higgs flew Luce and others from Lashio, Burma after the Japanese threatened the eastern coast.
When he left the Air Corps, he went to work for the China National Aviation Corp. as a chief pilot. A few days after he went to work for CNAC, he participated in the evacuation of Chinese civilians from Hong Kong after the Japanese invasion there.
Under cover of night, Higgs flew planes with up to 80 passengers (the plane’s capacity was 25) to safety in China. He flew transports over Burma and was credited with saving China's Madame Sun when he flew a daring rescue flight there. The mission was recounted in the William Leary book about the CNAC, called “The Dragon's Wings”:
"The first aircraft, a DC-3 piloted by Frank L. Higgs, roared off Kai Tak's runway at 7 P.M. for Namyung, a small airfield about 200 miles north of Hong Kong."
Higgs and nine other pilots, including many ground personnel, managed to salvage five planes, filled in crater holes on the airfield and flew as many people as possible to safety in free China.
At other times he transported such celebrated people as Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang, as well as Wendell Wilkie, when he was touring China as a candidate for U.S. president. One of his favorite passengers was American author, politician, later U.S. Ambassador to Italy and rabid anti-communist Clare Booth Luce, who devoted several paragraphs to their encounter in a story she had written for Life magazine. He flew her on a rescue mission from Burma when the Japanese were threatening with invasion.
Many of his experiences were immortalized in Ohio State classmate Milton Caniff's cartoon strip, "Terry and the Pirates," in which Higgs was depicted as "Dude Hennick.” (the Hennick name referenced a popular business near Ohio State called Hennick’s.)
On Oct. 20, 1945, Higgs was flying between Shanghai and Canton, supposedly with some bankers aboard (and much gold and currency). The plane crashed into a mountain, killing all aboard. A newspaper clipping from Manila said 20 passengers were aboard. Many experts viewed the crash as sabotage, but that was never confirmed.
When Luce heard of the crash, she wrote to her friend Milton Caniff:
“I was so very, very sorry to learn about his death… he was an exceedingly gallant fellow. I shall always feel a sense of gratitude to him for the hitchhike he gave me out of Burma in the (Joseph) Stilwell retreat days. Things might have been different with me if he had not come into Lashio on the bombed-out field and taken me to Kunming."
He is shown in this photo taken by Luce, standing in front of the Douglas transport with his Army-issue semiautomatic firearms. The inset photo is of Higgs standing in front of the family home on Lincoln Road when he was in high school. Higgs was honored several years ago as one of Grandview's distinguished graduates.