The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World
At seventeen thousand feet and halfway from India to China, pilot Joseph Dechene had lost both his aircraft’s engines to ice. His lumbering C-46 cargo plane was now a glider. With white, ice-laden clouds pressed tight against the glass of its windows, the cockpit was like the inside of a bathysphere, a contraption of glass and metal churning in an abyss. The violence of the winds aloft had blown the plane so far off course that the pilots and radio operator had no idea where they were, knowing only that the peaks of high mountains were somewhere close below. Shining a light through the cockpit window, they could see ice building on the wings, but as they did a lurch of turbulence, the worst the experienced senior pilot had ever encountered, heaved the plane upward “like an express train,” as he reported. “We came busting out the top of the thunderhead at 20,000 feet with twenty-four tons of airplane and no engine.” Above the clouds, he got the engines running again and so, eventually, safely concluded another trip over the Hump. “The Hump” was the name that U.S. airmen gave to one the most perilous aviation missions of WW2: flying transport planes overloaded with fuel, materiel and other supplies over the eastern spur of the Himalayas, from India to China, in the little-known China-Burma-India (CBI) theatre. The Japanese capture of Burma (now Myanmar) in April 1942 had closed the Burma Road, the last land route into China, whose ports were already in Japanese hands. President Roosevelt had pledged that no “matter what . . . ways will be found to deliver airplanes and munitions of war to the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek,” and with the closure of the Burma Road the only remaining way was by air. Unfortunately for the U.S. airmen who had to fly it, the 800-mile route from northeast India to Kunming, China passed through a unique convergence of extreme weather systems—warm, moist air from the east and west and frigid winds from the north. The combination of high terrain and violent weather proved deadly, and soon a trail of wreckage lay scattered across mountainsides and jungle beneath the flight path, which airmen dubbed “the aluminum trail.”
The ostensible rationale for the airlift was to support Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, or Kuomintang, in its fight against Japan, and to hold in China Japanese forces that might otherwise confront Americans in the Pacific. Yet numerous U.S. observers had long reported that the Nationalist armies were in fact doing very little fighting, and that Chiang was harbouring his assets to battle Communist rivals at war’s end. Seemingly unperturbed by such reports, Roosevelt had kept his eyes firmly on his objective for the postwar world: 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. 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. Surrounded by mountains, the airfields lay in the lowlands of the Brahmaputra river valley, where temperatures soared to well over 38 degrees, 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 flying weather.
Contributing to the Hump route’s high accident rate was the fact that many new pilots were not “the cream of their classes,” as the US Army Air Forces’ 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. “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 air field 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.”
A glimpse of airmen’s experiences over the Hump can be gleaned from multiple sources—official incident reports, a log of crashes, diaries, memoirs, flight club newsletters, and histories of the CBI:
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.
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.
By the end of the war the U.S. Air Forces’ Air Transport Command had ferried an estimated 776,532 tons over the Hump. Officially, 594 transport planes were lost in the airlift, a figure that is almost certainly incomplete given the less than rigorous record-keeping. Estimates of crew killed or missing range widely from 1,659 to 3861, and an astonishing 1,200 are estimated to have survived bail-outs over the mountains and jungle; the number who did not survive is not known.
Advances in technology have left the aviation epic behind. Military transports now carry payloads of 85 tons, against the Hump’s ‘giant’ C-54 aircraft’s typical six-ton payload, while the payload of the Soviet Antonov An-225 Mriya is an astounding 253 tons. All the elemental features that made the Hump route so formidable are unchanged—the monsoon and winds from Asia still slam against the Himalayas—but aircraft today just soar above them.
Caroline Alexander is a historian and the author of Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World.
