CHENGDU: Huang Duoneng, a retired college teacher from the capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province, still remembers the first time he took a plane 61 years ago.

"I flew from the Xinjin Airport in Chengdu to India on July 9, 1944 to fight the Japanese army," the 80-year-old recalled.

From the winter of 1943 to late 1944, more than 2,000 students in Chengdu joined the Chinese army and fought in India and Myanmar, defeating the 18th Division of the Japanese Army, which was well known for its forest combat, and opening the Sino-Indian highway, the Chinese war zone's only available route to the outside world.

Now less than 100 of them survive, and Huang is one of them. Together with two other veterans, Huang talked to the media in Chengdu about their battlefield experiences

Huang was 19 and in the third grade at a senior high school in Chengdu when he joined the army. "Like me, many students joined the army without telling their parents. We only wanted to expel the Japanese invaders from our homeland," Huang said.

Holding a cloth belt to stabilize themselves, Huang and other students sat on the floor of the plane's passenger compartment. Soon after the plane took off, Huang fell asleep. But he awoke suddenly, as he had difficulty breathing the thin air when the plane was crossing the Himalayas.

After a more than five-hour flight, the plane was about to land at an Indian airport. "The compartment suddenly became so hot that it was as though we were in a sauna," Huang said.

With his ears buzzing, Huang could not hear when he got off the plane. After taking a shower, he received a British uniform and some supplies.

Huang and most of his fellow students started working in an artillery battalion. Huang took charge of a 75-millimetre cannon. Horses and donkeys pulled the battalion's cannons. With the arrival of the young students, automobiles started to be introduced. There were some 120 autos for 500 soldiers in the battalion.

"Most of us spent one month learning to drive, and became good at it," Huang said.

In a battle fought in Myanmar in December 1944, Japanese soldiers mounted a surprise attack against the battalion's position and Lan Zhiyuan, chief of the machine gun squad defending the position, was killed.

"As the position was likely to be destroyed, Chen Yulin, a student in charge of a cannon, adjusted the cannon and fired, killing many Japanese soldiers and safeguarding the position," Huang said.

Like Huang, Li Jiuling, also a veteran of battlefields in India and Myanmar, learnt how to drive, and travelled along the Yunnan-Myanmar Highway during the war.

Li, 90, a retiree from a construction company in Chengdu, recalled that he and others started building a highway in a large virgin forest full of rivers and lakes in Myanmar in December 1943.

"Engineers from the US and Chinese armies built the highway in the forest and all of us lived in tents. Once a soldier on sentry duty was swallowed by a boa constrictor and his fellow soldiers had to kill the snake and cut open its belly to save him," Li said.

In March 1944, Li's engineer squad destroyed the headquarters of the 18th Division of the Japanese Army, seizing its official seal, flags, horses and army supplies and gear.