Taking the Hump

A review of Caroline Alexander's 'Skies of Thunder '

Few modern authors hoping to sell large quantities of books to the trade market have ventured into the confusing world of inter-Allied relationships in the Far East during the Second World War. You will know that these are subjects I have covered in various books, not least Among the Headhunters and A War of Empires. I am delighted to say that Caroline Alexander has done it with aplomb in her excellent and thoroughly researched Skies of Thunder, setting out the bewildering complexities of the American, British and Chinese relationship during the long war against the Japanese. I hope the book does well; it certainly deserves to. The world Alexander describes so well is one that still remains largely opaque to even those who pride themselves on being well-read on the subject of the Second World War. The war had begun for China in 1931 but, apart from Nanking in 1937, it remains largely a closed door to Western readers.

A C46 over The Hump, Life Magazine

Alexander sets out to tell this story through the medium of the Burma Road. Its a subject I know well, having tramped around the vastness of the Upper Brahmaputra for many years, marveling at the enormity of the Hump project and of the political and practical determination to make it work. The Hump, for me, encapsulates the greatness of the American mind in the Second World War. Nothing was impossible.

Ledo airfield, February 2024

The words ‘Burma Road’ capture in fact the entirety of Allied strategy with respect to China between 1940 and 1945, and Japanese strategy too for that matter. Between 1940 and 1942 it was the means by which American Lend Lease supplies reached the Kuomintang government in Chungking, and for this reason was the primary Japanese target in Burma. Keeping this lifeline alive even after Rangoon had been captured in March 1942 became something of an article of faith to Roosevelt during the period 1940-1945, driven undoubtedly by his his own family history and because of America’s sentimental conception of China in its own cultural imagining. The result was a promise to build a new road from Ledo in the Upper Brahamputra Valley, across the remote Patkai mountains into the equally remote Hukawng Valley in northern Burma. While this vast and unparalled enginering effort was being undertaken an even more extraordinary effort was being organised by virtue of American willpower, engineering expertise, industrial muscle and organisational skill to fly supplies across some of the most dangerous and climatically challenging terrain on earth – the Hump. Alexander tells this story sympathetically, bringing in the stories of the largely untrained young American men thrown against the terrors of this air route from India to Yunnan. The men who flew this route were pioneers of a new age, their work reminiscent of the old ‘49ers, or those who had opened up the West, requiring pluck, grit and personal sacrifice. The American journalist Eric Sevaraid, who flew on part of the jouyrney in August 1943 before being forced to jump from his dying airplane, mused lyrically on the courage of these young men, most of whom were ill-trained and ill-prepared for what awaited them:

They measured the far horizons and calculated the heavens with their stubby schoolroom pencils. They peered through the majestic avenues of castellated cloud and wiped their dime-store colored spectacles. Their young eyes looked into the depths of mysterious seas and regarded the unfolding of the vast continents which showed on their faces the laboring of God’s time and the hands of men, while they munched a wad of Wrigley’s Spearmint, fingered the newly sprouted mustache, and wondered about its effect in Lauterbach’s drugstore back in Des Moines. They knew the lines and corrugations of the ancient earth as they knew the palm of their hands, and took them equally for granted.

Little did they know that by a 1945 estimate, at least a third of all the supplies ferried across the Hump ended up in Japanese hands, the result of Chinese graft.

Amidst these difficulties and privations can be added the Wild West of the political environment that existed between Chiang Kai-shek, his family and advisers, with those attempting to deliver US and Allied strategy in China. Big characters occupied this world, and Alexander describes them well: Stilwell, Chiang and Madame Kai-shek, Claude Chennault and a host of others. This deeply researched and brilliantly told story is a perfect mix of historical analysis and narrative description. It is strongly recommended.