The China-Burma-India (CBI) theater of the Second World War gets far less attention than the battles in Northwest Europe, Italy, the Eastern front, North Africa and the Pacific. Author Caroline Alexander in her new book Skies of Thunder presents a riveting, faced-paced account of the action there both on the ground and in the skies that would make for a best-selling movie.
The characters are fascinating: Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who simultaneously fought the Japanese and China’s communists and other warlords, and who convinced Franklin Roosevelt that he could lead China to become a postwar pillar of security and peace in Asia; US Army General Joseph Stillwell, military adviser to Chiang and a cantankerous, foul-mouthed Anglophobe, who hated the British as much as he hated Chiang; British General William Slim, commander of the 14th Army and tasked with recapturing Burma from the Japanese, described by Alexander as a “consummate professional” who was “revered by his men and peers as the exemplary soldier’s soldier”; General Claire Chennault of “Flying Tigers” fame, who embellished his achievements and was accused of conducting unlawful smuggling operations; Major General Orde Wingate, who led the Chindits (Burmese hill tribes) who operated as “raiding parties” in the jungle to disrupt Japan’s lines of communication along the Ledo Road; General Frank Merrill of “Merrill’s Marauders”, who helped capture the strategic town of Myitkyina and its vital airstrip; General Albert Wedemeyer, who replaced Stillwell and forged better relations with Chiang and his armies; Lt General William Turner, who later in the war directed operations over the hump, and who Alexander credits with getting the best out of his men and planes; and American newsman Eric Sevareid, whose plane went down in the jungle and who was rescued by Naga tribesmen.
But the heroes of the book are the pilots and crews of the US Army Air Force who flew supplies to the allied CBI ground forces over “the hump”. Alexander notes that the Air Force estimated that some 1,700 airmen crashed and died on these incredibly dangerous missions, though the real number is probably closer to 3,800. The mission of the soldiers and airmen in the CBI theater was to “keep China in the war”, and thereby tie down hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops who would otherwise have been able to fight against the US Army and Marines in the Central and Southwest Pacific campaigns. There was also talk about helping Chiang’s armies take back important Chinese airbases from which US bombers could attack mainland Japan.
The hump was also called the aerial Burma Road. Between December 1942 and the end of the war, the US airmen carried an estimated 776,532 tons of supplies from bases in India to China. At least 600 transport planes crashed in what Alexander describes as “the worst flying weather in the world”. The hump air route started in Assam, crossed the Hukawng Valley and the Irrawaddy River, past Likiang, and onto Kunming. When the Japanese took Myitkyina in Burma, it forced American pilots and crews to fly “above the jungles of Japanese-occupied Burma and through the most hazardous flying conditions in the world”.
The hump’s hazards derived from the dark jungle terrain and the weather in the mountainous regions, which included the world’s highest peaks in the Himalayas. Alexander describes the weather confronting the pilots as “seasonal thunderstorms, monsoons, and ice”, along with “fierce winds [that] blew out of the heart of Asia across the mountains and the high tableland of Tibet, while from the west a subtropical jet stream blew continuously at high altitude”.
The collision of these torrents of wind with the unyielding barrier wall of the Himalayas created tumultuous roller coasters of wind-wave effects.
Alexander was able to interview some veteran pilots of the hump who described the harrowing flights, with ice forming on planes’ wings, wind forcing planes up and then down at furious rates of speed, and the darkness rendering pilots blind through the horrible weather. And when planes crashed and pilots and crews survived either by bailing out or miraculously surviving the impact, the downed airmen had to deal with the Burmese jungle.
Underfoot, the dank earth was blanketed with decayed vegetation, and from foliage at all levels—around, beside, above, and on the trail—leeches—brown ones, green ones, tiger-striped ones—sniffed for blood, stretching, even propelling themselves toward their prey.
There were also insects, including mosquitoes that carried malaria, as well as sand flies and snakes. Some crash survivors were “gored by water buffalo”, while others were impaled by elephants on the jungle’s outskirts.
In the end, with Japan’s defeat, the hump flights diminished, though some continued until late 1945. Alexander writes that the supply flights over the hump inspired the Berlin airlift in 1948-49. China did not fulfill Roosevelt’s dream of becoming a stable postwar ally keeping the peace in the Far East, instead it returned to fighting the civil war that had preceded Japan’s invasion. And the wreckage of American aircraft that succumbed to the hump’s terrain and weather are to this day strewn throughout the Burmese jungle.