“Today an estimated 594 transport planes lie strewn on mountainsides and in jungles across the old Hump route.”

By Caroline Alexander

IN NOVEMBER 1940, William Langhorne Bond embarked as a passenger on an historic flight. The tireless operations manager of the China National Aviation Corporation, or CNAC, a firm co-owned by the Chinese national government and Pan American Airways, took off from the small town of Lashio in what was then northern Burma. It was a reconnaissance flight. Piloted by veteran aviator Hugh Woods, Bond’s Douglas DC-3 flew west to survey the Naga hills on the Indian-Burma border. The plane then turned east towards China, passing over a 14,000-foot ridge that rose like a hump beneath its path. It next headed southeast over the 18,000 foot Likiang mountain and then on to Chungking, the new seat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government situated on the Yangtze River.

Only months before Bond’s flight, Japanese forces had captured French Indo-China and along with it one of China’s few remaining communication lines to the outside world. With all Chinese ports in Japanese hands, military aid to China could now come only by way of the increasingly vulnerable Burma Road or—it was hoped—by air.

William Bond’s reconnaissance flight was carried out to see just how feasible an air route really was, for, as he wrote, “there had never been an airplane flown over this part of the World before.”

Bond’s assessment of the route was recorded in a series of reports read in Washington:[1]       

“The country… is high and rugged and the country west and north of this route, where the freight planes frequently would be forced to fly during air raids, is even worse. The weather is usually bad and the country is notoriously windy. Winds of forty to seventy miles per hour prevail most of the year. In clear weather flights would have to be at altitudes of from twelve thousand to fourteen thousand feet.  To the west and north of the course, but within seeing distance or about one hundred miles, are peaks and ranges more than seventeen thousand feet in height.”

Flying conditions had been mostly clear for Bond’s flight, but, he noted, “if the weather should be much worse, with bad cross winds or a bad icing condition, or if the tops of the clouds should be two or three thousand feet higher than we saw, then it would be extremely dangerous and costly and very nearly impractical.”[2]

Bond’s flights and subsequent reports represent the first steps towards what would become the U.S. Air Forces’ historic airlift to China, an operation that airmen quickly dubbed “flying the Hump,” one of the brashest, most dangerous, and arguably ill-advised undertakings of the Second World War.

The activation of the Hump operation was the direct outcome of a pledge President Roosevelt made in April 1942, as Japanese invaders surged towards the Burma Road, promising that “no matter what advances the Japanese make, ways will be found to deliver airplanes and munitions of war to the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.”[3]

The ostensible reason for the airlift, then, was to help the Nationalist government, or Kuomintang fight the occupying Japanese. Doing so would also tie up Japanese forces in China that might otherwise confront Americans in the Pacific. Yet a wide variety of U.S. observers had by this time reported that the Nationalist armies were in fact doing very little fighting, and that Chiang was saving his forces to battle his Communist rivals at war’s end. Seemingly unperturbed by these reports, Roosevelt had kept his eye firmly on the objectives of the postwar world, in which was envisioned a close alliance between the United States and a grateful China that, under U.S. guidance, would evolve towards democracy.

“One of the most effective ways of encouraging China and deterring Japan would be to go out of our way in giving evidence of friendship, close collaboration and admiration for China,” Roosevelt’s economic adviser Lauchlin Currie had reported to the President, following an investigative visit to the country.[4] The Hump operation was intended to give such evidence. Tension between the practical and the symbolic objectives of the airlift were to complicate an already astoundingly complicated logistical operation.

The American airmen, mechanics and ground crew tasked with honoring the Presidential pledge arrived after long journeys by sea, train and air to the province of Assam in northeast India, where newly established air bases had been built within old British tea estates or on tracts of land freshly gouged from the jungle. It was immediately apparent that theirs would be a hardship post. Living quarters were primitive, being thatched huts, or bashas, made of bamboo with beaten earth floors, food was basic, and open pits served as latrines. Although surrounded by mountains, the airfields lay in the lowlands of the Brahmaputra River valley, where temperatures soared to well over 100 deg. Fahrenheit, while during the long monsoon period, from May into October, the bases were awash with steaming mud. Diseases such as dysentery and malaria were common. Insects and other creatures emerged from the shadows of the nearby jungle, and when darkness fell with tropical abruptness, unfamiliar and unnerving noises wafted to the bases. After an uneasy night in the sodden bashas, pilots and crew woke before the dawn praying for good weather.

As William Bond had indicated, if the weather was poor, flying “would be extremely dangerous and costly and very nearly impractical.” Yet the Hump route drove through the turbulent convergence of three major air systems. From the west and east blew the moist, warm, high pressure masses spawned by the Sea of Bengal and the South China Sea; from the north frigid, dry lows swept down from Siberia and the mountains and high plateau of Tibet.[5] This unique convergence spawned the titanic thunderstorms, monsoons and ice that were chronic along the Hump route. The first aircraft casualty, logged on Sept. 22, 1942, was attributed to ice.[6]

As aircraft crashes and losses mounted, airmen began to speak with dark humor of “the aluminum trail” of wreckage that shadowed their route across the Hump, and most airmen had their own “worst flight” stories.[7]

From pilot Paul Quinett: [A]t daybreak one morning we entered a solid cold front at 16,000 indicated. Our wing boots had been removed and as there was no de‑icing fluid available, we flew bare. Suddenly the entire plane began to vibrate . . . What we saw was a thick build‑up of clear ice  . . . The altimeter took a nose dive and I or­dered the crew to prepare to bail out and I would remain and at­tempt to get rid of the ice, as we were by this time, I was certain very close to the mountain tops.[8]

From USAAF accident reports: Sept. 15, 1943. AIRCRAFT: Type and model: C:46. Place: East of Ft. Hertz Co-pilot Statement concerning ship No. 41-1-2309: On Sept. 15 at about 8:15 our right engine started icing up. We were at about 19,500 ft. and started to lose altitude. Both engines started cutting out so at 16,500. [Pilot] Idema ordered us to put on our chutes. We all got our chutes on and were in the back going to jump out when the plane made a violent maneuver and threw us to the floor. In the excitement it is difficult to determine who left the ship in order . . . We landed in the mountains and a few miles from some native villages and were treated well.[9]

The introduction in May 1943, of the new and more capacious C-46 aircraft had contributed to these crash statistics. With its 76-foot length and 108-foot wingspan it was the largest twin-engine aircraft flying the skies, but it had been brought to India before being fully tested and, as the Air Force official history put it, was found to be “a killer,” with faulty hydraulic systems and engines that had a tendency to fail, ice over, or catch fire. Within five months of their delivery some 20 per cent of all C-46s had been lost.[10]

Also contributing to the high accident rate was the fact that many new pilots were not “the cream of their classes,” as Training Command had pledged, but young pilots with no experience of multi-engine flying, or flying over mountains or in weather, or indeed with instrument training.[11] “Many of us went out with no training, and none in the C-46,” recalled Jeff Arnett, who had come to India with the Air Transport Command as a co-pilot. On one occasion he and a fellow pilot were instructed to pick up a new aircraft in Agra, and only on arrival at the airfield learned it was a C-46. “We had to figure out how to open the door,” he recalled. “We looked at the manual, taxied back and forth once or twice, then took it to Calcutta, then over the Hump.”[12]

Gradually various weaknesses were addressed. Programs were established to train pilots and other crew; radio ranges were established to aid navigation, and 14,000-mile long shuttle service known as “the Fireball Express” carried critical parts and equipment from the U.S. to Assam. But no recourse existed to counter the most critical dangers: the terrain and the weather.

At the start of the Hump operation Chiang Kai-shek had demanded, and been promised, that 5,000 tons of supplies would be flown every month to China. As the fledgling airline struggled, often unsuccessfully, to reach this goal, the goal posts were moved—first to 7,500 monthly tons then to 10,000. The recapture of a key air base in August of 1944 allowed a safer, lower, and more southerly route, and by the end of the war Air Transport Command planes were ferrying an average of 41,482 tons a month over the foothills of the Himalayas.[13]

Today an estimated 594 transport planes lie strewn on mountainsides and in jungles across the old Hump route. Clearly, Roosevelt’s ambition of the U.S. fostering a close relationship with post-war China was not achieved. Yet although the airlift was created specifically to bolster the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, it is a striking fact that the Hump mission is now venerated in present-day China.

Clayton Kuhles, a mountaineer who has dedicated himself to searching for the remote crash sites, recalled an experience from one of his Chinese expeditions.

“When the guest house owner learned who I was and why I was there, he refused any payment from me,” Kuhles said. “He instructed his staff that everything for me is ‘on the house.’ They were so happy to have me there searching for the missing Hump aircraft.”

For Kuhles’ host, it seems, only the big picture counted: that American airmen had died for China.

Caroline Alexander is the author of Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World. She writes frequently for The New Yorker and National Geographic, and she is the author of four other books, including The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition, which has been translated into 13 languages.

Footnotes

[1] William M. Leary Jr., The Dragon’s Wings: The China National Aviation Corporation and the Development of Commercial Aviation in China. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1976135.

[2] Leary, 135.

[3] John D. Plating, The Hump: America’s Strategy for Keeping China in World War II. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2011:80

[4] “Mr. Lauchlin Currie to President Roosevelt,” FRUS Diplomatic Papers, 1941, The Far East, Volume IV, Document 57: 81-95.

[5] Plating, 56f; Craven, Wesley Frank and Cate, James Lea. The Army Air Forces In World War II: Volume Seven, Services Around the World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958: 324f.

[6] Weaver, Major Herbert and Rapp, Sgt. Marvin. The Tenth Air Force 1942; Army Air Forces Historical Studies: No. 12. Reprint of 1944 report; Manhattan, Kansas: Sunflower University Press, 1980:78

[7] For number of enemy attack, Plating, 151; for number of crashes, USAAF, Aircraft Crashes, Sept./42—July/1945”. Call # 312.3912-2, IRIS # 00181544 (read on Reel A3072, frame 1132-1246), in the USAF Collection, AFHRA, Maxwell AFB AL.

[8]Paul Quinnett, “It Seemed a Lifetime,” in Hump Pilots Association, China Airlift-“The Hump,”– China-Burma-India, vol. 1. Dallas, Texas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1981: 179.

[9]USAAF, Aircraft Accident and Incident Reports, (44-9-15-520), MICFILM 46255.

[10]For aircraft specs and dimensions, see “CBI Aircraft,” Hump Pilots Association China-Burma-India, China Airlift-The Hump, Dallas, Texas: Taylor Publishing Co: 1.146-167.  For “a killer,” see Craven and Cate, VII.4f.; 25.   For defects, see USAAF, Historical Section of the India-China Division, “A History of the India China Wing for the Period June through December 1943.” Call # 312.01, p. 236, IRIS # 00181446, in the USAF Collection, AFHRA, Maxwell AFB AL. The lengthy list of defects is given over many pages. For statistics, see Plating, 69

[11] Craven, and Cate, VII, 126f.

[12] Interview with Jeff Arnett, May 27, 2020.

[13] Average obtained from monthly tonnage figures August 1944 through August 1945, taken from USAAF, India- China Division, Air Transport Command. “ATC Statistics on Hump Tonnage, 1942– 945.” Call #312.3081‑2, IRIS #00181528, in the USAF Collection, AFHRA, Maxwell AFB AL