The Hump Course
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Fourteen years of Anti Japanese War: the real secret photos of the 30 China War
The picture is time of solidification, let the picture lead us experience behind the moment of each character and the voice of history and. These photos, we look back at history, the best window to reflect on the war. - 1- The most beautiful girl in the Anti Japanese War You In April 1938, the Japanese occupation of Anhui and the county, the female soldiers caughtChengbenhuaOnly 24 years old, she was in charge of the resistance. The Japanese a few degrees to torment her and tied her to a city and Atlantic outside the arena, let her watch their shot caught Chinese. When she knew the Japanese to kill her, her hands crossed without fear, to his bosom, contemptuous smile, and let the reporters to her and took a photo. After the shoot, several Japs like mad with a bayonet on the assassination of Cheng Benhua - 2- Chinese American Chen Ruidian, the "September 18 Incident" after returning effect You 1937-1939, he is shot down 8 enemy planes. In combat, his plane had three were downed by enemy planes, but all jump lucky survivors. The last time when it was hit by the fuel tank fire, the air force in the famous Mestizo handsome to be after large area burns disfigured, sent to the United States to heal. The injury, still hard to attend the "Hump flight" to the victory of the Anti Japanese war. - 3- Country broken mountains and rivers in You This photo was taken in front of Japanese, is prepared to meet the challenge of Japanese soldiers, guns and cannons all on a single military vehicles, this car alone Chinese chariot, is rushed to the Japanese positions...... Travel writer Sasu saw after the first reaction is: "the country broke in the mountains and rivers"! - 4- The famous "dead word flag" You Sichuan, Wang Jiantang volunteered to get his father, king of exhortations, unexpectedly is a dead word flag: white median wrote a big word "death"! - 5- Aid to the northeast of the Northeast Group You Shanghai youth composed of more than and 300 to go to the Northeast Anti Japanese mission horse". Colonel Zhang Shaojie farewell speech to the crowd to farewell at the train station: "unless we die, we will never come back! (pay attention to the coffin next to) - 6- Recruit Zhu Wenhai You Zhu Wenhai is an army of only half of the recruits, was hit by Japanese Scouts (1939), when you and I also worry about acne on his face and the girl next door, he has been on the battlefield, gave their lives for their country, the history of solidification he sacrificed a moment and his name. - 7- Bombing of Chongqing You During the Anti Japanese war in Chongqing, the Japanese bombing of Chongqing, China from February 18, 1938 to August 23, 1943, lasted for 5 and a half years. Japan for the implementation of the Chongqing air raid, following Germany in April 1937 in the Spanish Civil War of Guernica (Guernica) after the bombing of civilians, the history of the first implementation of the strategic bombing. - 8- avoid You The Japanese aircraft bombing in the Jiangyin River China flat Sea Navy cruiser, the picture can be seen in the flat sea ship in full speed to avoid the Japanese machine throwing bombs. - 9- Hunan, Hengyang: 5000 skulls You Hunan, Hengyang, this figure tells you how Japanese is insane! - 10- Avoid fried You During the Anti Japanese War, foreign institutions once used the Nazi flag to avoid the bombing of Japanese planes. - 11- Erhu fiddle You Japanese officers and erhu is China girl - 12- Ashes of the dead You The Japanese soldiers hanging urn in front of his chest - 13- Historical portrait? You Japanese magazines during the war - 14- Don't destroy pirates, never survive You The Fifth Army marched to the front support of the 19 army. This is before the war, the 261st brigade all officers and soldiers in the "not destroy Japanese crown, signature oath oath on the survivors. - 15- Come back You A - 28 in the Japanese Songhu war commander Shirakawa Yoshinori took ship to the coffin to lie. - 16- Heroic You The photo China soldier cut down, death, gun in the bosom, playing in his hand. - 17- National flag You The girl scout Yang Huimin in four lines warehouse battle (known as the "eight hundred heroes battle") was the most intense 28 midnight, the girl scout Yang Huimin put the flag wrapped in the body, risking his life, crossed the line, across the Suzhou River, the flag for the eight hundred heroes, the fearless feat shocked Chinese. - 18- Cheer You The four line alone there are many people holding period, regardless of the danger every day, crowded in the Suzhou river for me in the cheer - 19- Military conference You Kappa returned to Hankou to Hankou after a few hours with Evans and Finn Haiut attended the supreme military council to convene a meeting of the Jiang Jieshi. - 20- Yingzi You The night of 20 May 1938, the air force to Japan and Chinese throwing leaflets per 100, the Japanese Air Force Expeditionary team victory of fourteenth squadron captain Xu Huansheng. - 21- Zhongshan ship You In October 24, 1938, Zhongshan ship in Hubei Jinkou and enemy fighting after sinking into the river, Captain SA morotoshi 24 soldiers killed. - 22- Dare-to-die corps You Death squads in Taierzhuang repeatedly tug, Jones played a role, the night they recovered a lot of lost ground. - 23- Levee You Jiang Jieshi in order to stop the Japanese attack in the Huayuankou burst of the Yellow River dike. The dam caused a striking effect, but the Japanese attack only paused a few weeks, however, millions of Chinese are homeless. (shot in Robert Kappa) - 24- home You High temperature -9 months of July 1938 with the Japanese bombing of Hankou, the inferno, a woman in the house was in ruins. - 25- War correspondent You Robert Kappa is one of the most famous war photographers in the twentieth Century. In 1938, Robert Kappa came to China Chinese, witnessed the Japanese aggressors invaded, shooting a lot of exposing the crimes the Japanese invading army news photos. - 26- Gas You Japanese system for Japanese military use 93 durable gas tank. - 27- brother You My father was killed by the Japanese, the elder brother of his brother, tears trickling down cheeks. - 28- The classic moment of the hump route You During the war of resistance against Japan, China was a backward agricultural country, and all the important materials needed for war were imported. The Japanese invaders took a fancy to the key, cut off from the sea to the land Chinese every international traffic line. In desperation, in May 1942, by the U.S. Army Air Forces and civil aviation Chinese jointly opened a air supply line from India to Assam Tingjiang, through Burma to Kunming, Chongqing Chinese. This route, along the way to fly over the Tibetan Plateau and Yunnan Guizhou Plateau Mountain, transport aircraft load only when flying to 3500 meters, not up to the required height, only walking in the valley, the flight route sections of ups and downs, which is named after the hump. As a "lifeline" to support China's battlefield, the development of the hump route is closely related to the strategic cooperation and mutual support between China and the United States, and has made an indelible contribution to the final victory of the war against japan. 1942 to 1945, more than 1 thousand transport aircraft rely on this route to break through the blockade of Japan, the Chinese battlefield transported a large number of personnel and materials. - 29- General Yang Jingyu You At the beginning of 1940, in a battle of Jinchuan horse bones in the mountain, Yang Jingyu's army casualties greatly. At that time, he left only a dozen soldiers, hunger, cold, fatigue, but also to deal with the enemy from all sides surrounded by. Yang Jingyu was to deal with the enemy, fighting for five days. At last, the two guards were killed. In February 23rd, he came to Jilin County, southwest of the village of Meng Jiang security three Wei Zi, is already dead beat. 4 pm, more than 100 enemy Yang Jingyu being followed up on a plateau surrounded by the enemy, only 50 meters apart, never surrender, his hands shot, killed and wounded more than and 20 of the enemy. At 4:30, Yang Jingyu in the hands of a gun, gun back, he died, only 35 years old. Yang Jingyu died after the Japanese discovered his stomach is full of grass, bark and cotton, but no grain. The picture shows the Japanese general Yang Jingyu's body. - 30- repatriate You After the war, a large number of Japanese repatriated, repatriated Japanese people waiting for boarding check, China officers were repatriated Japanese clothing looking for contraband.
Over the Hump
BY STEPHAN WILKINSON AUTUMN 2016 • MHQ MAGAZINE In 1942, the U.S. Army Air Forces’ brand-new Air Transport Command began running the most audacious airlift of World War II: flying “the Hump” over the foothills of the Himalayas ON AUGUST 2, 1943, CBS WAR CORRESPONDENT ERIC SEVAREID and a small group of American diplomats and Chinese army officers climbed aboard a Curtiss C-46 Commando transport plane at a U.S. Army Air Forces base in Chabua, India. Sevareid wanted to report firsthand on an ongoing mission to get gasoline and other supplies to China in support of Chiang Kai-shek, whose forces were fighting the Japanese. The USAAF’s brand-new Air Transport Command had been struggling to run the most audacious and dangerous airlift operation ever attempted—flying “the Hump,” over the foothills of the Himalayas—and Sevareid wanted to report on the operation. China had gone to war with Japan in 1937, but by the time the United States entered the Pacific War, Japan had sealed off China from any source of supply. Its ports had been conquered, and the last rail connection with the Soviet Union, a distant and pitiful lifeline, had been closed in 1941 by a Soviet-Japanese neutrality treaty. The infamous Burma Road lasted a while longer, but when the Japanese captured the port of Rangoon, the Burma Road was left with no supplies to carry. Flying over Burma (today, Myanmar)—a 261,000-square-mile swath of mostly mountainous terrain the size of Texas—was the only way. As the C-46 climbed high above the Patkoi Range, the aircraft that pilots had dubbed “the flying coffin” suddenly lost its left engine, and it soon became clear that the plane was going to crash. “I stood in the open door of that miserable Commando and declared, ‘Well, if nobody else is going to jump, I’ll jump,’” John Paton Davies, one of the American diplomats, later wrote. “Somebody had to break the ice.” Sevareid followed Davies, but only after grabbing a bottle of Carew’s gin. He and 19 other men landed in the jungle—the C-46’s copilot did not survive—near a village that was home to a notorious tribe of headhunters, the Nagas, who, amazingly, hosted and fed them until help arrived 22 days later. Most likely because of the VIPs aboard the flight, intensive search-and-rescue efforts were mounted, including parachuting a flight surgeon to the marooned party. That was the beginning of serious search and rescue along the Hump routes. Before “the Sevareid flight,” crews and occasional passengers were pretty much on their own in the Burmese jungles and mountains. On their 80-mile trek back to civilization, a native guide explained the Hump to Sevareid in a way that perfectly encapsulated its astonishing expanse: “India there,” he said, pointing in one direction, and then, pointing in the other, “China there.” The Second Sino-Japanese War occupied the attention of 1,250,000 Japanese troops stationed in Southeast Asia and China itself. It was a huge commitment by the Japanese, but they faced a Chinese force of more than three million. That Chinese army did little—the war had essentially become a stalemate—but was nonetheless a threat, and that meant those million and a quarter Japanese soldiers couldn’t be sent to Guadalcanal or anywhere else in the South Pacific. President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that Chiang Kai-shek, the supreme commander of most of China’s army—Mao Zedong led the rest—was his guy, and Chiang needed American support. Roosevelt imagined a superpower role for China after the war, and he wanted to be on good terms with the generalissimo. Chiang kept demanding more supplies, and Roosevelt kept sending them, at least until he became increasingly disenchanted with the Chinese Nationalist dictator. But was that really the reason for flying some 500 to 560 miles over the Hump? To supply the Chinese and keep them in the war, thus pinning down all those Japanese troops? That has been the popular explanation for decades, but it is far from the whole story. The Hump was a myth in many ways. Even the description “over the Himalayas” stretches the truth, for none of the several Hump routes overflew mountains that were technically part of the Himalayas. Yes, some of them crossed the Patkai and Santung Ranges, which forced a minimum cruising altitude of 15,000 feet, especially when flying by instruments in poor visibility, and that left no margin in the event of an engine failure in a twin-engine C-46 Commando or Douglas C-47 Skytrain or even a four-engine Consolidated C-87/C-109 Liberator Express. The Himalayas, though, were part of what percolated the extreme weather and jetstream-strength winds that were the routes’ severest challenges. The flood of memoirs, war stories, and reminiscences from members of the Hump Pilots Association (some 5,000 at its peak) was unequaled among such postwar alumni groups, and its annual conventions seemed to increase the significance of the feats they reported. “Every time we meet,” one former Hump pilot recalled, “the Himalaya Mountains get higher, the weather gets worse, and there are more Japanese fighters in the sky than there were in the whole fleet.” The men who flew the Hump were near the bottom of the Army Air Force food chain; indeed, ATC, the abbreviation for Air Transport Command, was often said to mean “Allergic to Combat” or “Army of Terrified Copilots.” Those terrified copilots got little respect during the war but made sure the world heard about their exploits afterward. Inevitably, some of what they broadcast was myth and much was exaggeration. That said, they operated overloaded airplanes, some of them mechanically flawed and poorly maintained with no source of spares, and did it in the world’s worst instrument-flying weather. Westerly winds sometimes reached 150 miles an hour (typically inflated by pilots in later years to 200 and even 250), and 115 miles an hour was not unusual. A trip in a C-47 from China back to India could see groundspeeds of 30 miles an hour, according to some Hump reminiscences, and pilots cruising at 16,000 feet might find their aircraft carried uncontrollably to 28,000 feet, then suddenly back down to 6,000. The weather was at its worst from February to April, with fierce thunderstorms and heavy icing. May to September was monsoon season with even worse thunderstorms. October and November meant good weather, which brought out Japanese fighter planes, and December and January brought heavy winds, turbulence, and icing. It didn’t help that Hump route charts were outdated and inaccurate, with many exaggerated height callouts. Some Hump pilots went to their graves believing they had seen a mysterious mountain taller than Everest—a peak of 32,000 feet looming far above them when they suddenly broke out of clouds into the clear. Sometimes the media were responsible for the exaggeration, for journalists everywhere knew that if they needed colorful copy, all they had to do was sign on for a Hump run. IN THE EARLIEST DAYS OF THE HUMP, before Pearl Harbor, the route was flown not by the U.S. military but by an airline: CNAC, the China National Aviation Corporation, a cooperative endeavor between the Chinese government and Pan American Airways. Its pilots—mostly expatriate Americans and Brits flying Douglas DC-3s, some of them U.S.-provided—were the best mountain pilots in the Far East, and their skill and experience showed when the Army Air Force Ferry Command (ATC’s predecessor) began to fly the route in 1942. CNAC aircraft often carried more than double the tonnage that their Army Air Forces partners felt safe hauling aboard identical aircraft. The experienced CNAC pilots initially made flying the Hump look easy, but nobody yet realized that future operations would be flown by ill-trained newbies with no mountain- or weather-flying hours. The Ferry Command’s early pilots were also skillful, though they lacked relevant experience flying over such terrain or in such weather. The first 100 were airline pilots who held AAF Reserve commissions. But when Hump tonnage began to build and a substantial fleet of cargo planes had arrived in India, the demand for pilots grew rapidly. AAF flight schools churned out as many as they could, but the best of them chose to fly fighters and fast medium bombers; for a new aviator in his early 20s, glory lay in combat, not in flying freight. Despite the occasional presence of Japanese fighters, the Hump was officially declared a noncombat operation, with lower pay scales and more demanding rotation-home criteria. The Hump transports were easy but only occasional prey, since Japanese fighters would have to spend time, effort, and gas to find one airplane at a time. In October 1943, the Japanese stationed a swarm of Nakajima Ki-43 Oscars at Myitkyina (pronounced “Mitchinaw”) in northern Burma, tasked to interdict the Hump routes. This worked briefly—four Hump transports were downed—until Lieutenant General Claire Chennault, commander of the famous Flying Tigers, proposed launching a small group of up-gunned B-24s along one route. The Oscars found the Liberators and casually attacked, thinking they were unarmed C-87s, and eight of the Ki-43s were shot down. Air Transport Command got the least capable flight students from the training classes; many arrived in India with minimal instrument–flying skills, some without multi-engine training. When possible, they were paired for training with airline pilots, many of whom were stunned by their lack of competence. By the end of 1942, 35 percent of the Hump operation’s new pilots showed up in India with just 27 weeks of flight training. During spring 1943, nearly a third of the AAF pilots force-fed to the China-Burma-India Theater were only single-engine rated. Even experienced crews got into trouble over the Hump. General Henry “Hap” Arnold was flying the Hump with a hand-picked crew aboard his personal Boeing B-17 in February 1943 when they turned a two-and-a-half-hour trip into a six-hour epic. Befuddled by lack of oxygen, the crew made enough navigation errors to put themselves over Japanese-held territory. One small category of service pilots, however, were happy to log hours flying modified civilian airliners. After the war they would be at the head of the line leading to the door marked “Airline Captain,” even then a glamorous and well-paid job. IN THE HUMP’S EARLY DAYS—from its inception in early 1942 through the spring of 1943—the U.S.-run operation was what some likened to a civilian flying club run by its pilots. They decided when they would fly, what route they’d take, and how much cargo they’d carry. They were their own schedulers, dispatchers, and weather forecasters, and, not surprisingly, flights were often canceled because of bad weather or the threat of Japanese interception. That lasted until the arrival of Brigadier General Thomas Hardin, a former TWA vice president who took over the Hump command in August 1943. “From now on, there is no weather over the Hump,” he immediately decreed, telling the flying club pilots to suck it up or join the infantry. Hardin flew the Hump, sometimes solo and regardless of the weather, in a worn-out North American B-25 medium bomber that he had somehow appropriated, and he arrived unannounced at the various ATC bases in India and China with his hair on fire, sacking and reassigning officers whenever he found laxity and incompetence. Hardin came to be feared and respected by the most aggressive of his pilots and hated by the malingerers. He asked more of his aircraft, maintainers, and crews than anyone had imagined was possible, and he was responsible for demanding and getting record tonnage delivered to China—first 10,000 tons a month, then almost 24,000. Hardin was also responsible for a terrible Hump safety record; he admitted that setting new tonnage-delivered records was more important than bothersome safety procedures. During just one seven-month stretch during his tenure, there were 135 major accidents and 168 crew fatalities, half of them night-flying crashes. Hardin had initiated after-dark flying over the Hump, saying “airplanes don’t need to sleep.” At one point, every thousand tons flown into China cost three American lives. Hardin lasted just 13 months and was replaced by another brigadier general, William Tunner. Tunner would become famous as the orchestrator of the 1949 Berlin Airlift. Under Hardin, Hump pilots were allowed to rotate home after logging 650 hours. A typical flight took about three hours in good weather, and some crews flew three missions a day in order to build hours as fast as they could, flying some 2,000 demanding hours a year—twice the amount that the Federal Aviation Administration today allows airline pilots to log annually. And, not surprisingly, tired crews crashed. Tunner changed the deal to 750 hours and a minimum of 10 months in theater. Morale suffered some, since living in fetid accommodations at bases in India for almost a year was a cruel sentence, but safety improved. THE HUMP MISSIONS OPERATED WITH AN IMPERFECT MIX of aircraft. Initially there was the indomitable Douglas C-47/C-53, the two military versions of the DC-3. Pilots called it “the rocking chair of the air” because it was so easy to operate, but the early-1930s design had limitations. It was difficult to load with bulky cargo, struggled to reach operational Hump altitudes, and carried a relatively small load. Along came the Curtiss C-46 Commando, a whale of an airplane that carried 70 percent more cargo than a C-47 and boasted two of the finest and most powerful piston aircraft engines ever produced: 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R2800 radials. The C-46 could munch mountains for breakfast, but it was deeply flawed. Still under development as a pressurized airliner, the military Commando was hastily sent to India when it should remained in testing. At one point, a group of early C-46s was returned with a list of more than 700 major and minor glitches that needed correcting before further production. The C-46’s biggest fault was tiny leaks in wing fuel tanks and lines. Such leaks weren’t unusual among complex multi–engine airplanes, but in the Commando, they were fatal. Curtiss had failed to vent the juncture between wing and fuselage, so the gasoline pooled there instead of quickly evaporating. Random fuel-pump sparks caused 20 percent of all Hump C-46s to explode in flight. (Wing roots weren’t vented until after the war.) In an attempt to turn a bomber into a cargo plane for the Hump routes, Consolidated Aircraft put a flat floor in its B-24, removed the guns and bomb racks, and called the result the C-87 Liberator Express. But the B-24 had been designed to carry a stable load in a small area on the airplane’s center of gravity: bombs in fixed, vertical bomb racks. When Hump crews flew C-87s randomly loaded with a variety of cargoes, few ever found a sweet spot where the airplane felt comfortable, stable, and in trim. The army also tried to turn the B-24 into a Hump tanker, dubbed the C-109, with big flexible bags full of gasoline in the hold. It was difficult to land at the 6,000-foot-high airfields in China and soon acquired the name Cee-One-Oh-Boom. One C-109 blew a tire on landing, exploded, and wiped out three other Liberator Expresses. In his book Flying the Hump, ex-China-Burma-India pilot Otha C. Spencer wrote, “All the pilots on the base wished [it] had wrecked the whole fleet.” It was the arrival of the Douglas C-54 Skymaster in February 1944 that turned the Hump operation into the largest, most efficient airline in the world. The Skymaster was the militarized version of the DC-4, the first large, four-engine American airliner, and it had the cargo volume of a railroad boxcar. The C-54 didn’t have the high-altitude performance to fly the “High Hump” routes, but in May 1944 British and American forces captured the Japanese fighter strip at Myitkyina, thus eliminating any opportunity for the Japanese to interdict the less extreme “Low Hump” routes. The C-54 did quite nicely at 12,000 feet and carried far more cargo per trip than even the porky Curtiss Commando. It was also safer than its four-engine predecessor, the Liberator Express, and its tanker version, whose accident rate was 500 percent higher than the C-54’s. By early 1943, U.S. brass hats, including AAF chief Hap Arnold, were beginning to doubt the value of the Hump operation. Arnold felt the airlift could certainly be ramped up to accomplish what it had set out to do, but he saw little point in spending lives, material, and effort simply to sustain the will of the Chinese. Many felt that Chiang was husbanding his acquired supplies for use against Mao, not the Japanese. That was a turning point for the Hump operation. Under the cover of aiding China, the ATC program quickly changed course to become the major source of supplies for the Twentieth Air Force, which was planning to bomb Japan with its B-29s from Chinese airbases. China had now become a launch pad, no longer of interest as a postwar partner. But ultimately, the Twentieth flew just nine Boeing B-29 missions from China against the Home Islands before it moved to huge airfields in the Marianas. The postwar Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that those few missions “did little to hasten the Japanese surrender or justify the lavish expenditures poured out on their behalf through a fantastically uneconomic and barely workable supply system.” For every four gallons of avgas delivered to the Twentieth, Hump transports burned three and a half. Still, during 1944 the Hump flights grew exponentially in terms of tonnage, organization, and operational sophistication. They became quite simply the world’s biggest international airline—750 aircraft and more than 4,400 pilots. Between August 1944 and October 1945, the Hump delivered almost 500,000 tons of material from India to China. Chiang got less than 20,000 tons of it—three pounds of every 100 that crossed the Hump. The Twentieth Air Force got gasoline and ordnance; Chiang all too often got wine, decorative shrubbery for his house, Ping-Pong tables, office supplies, condoms, and such. Roosevelt died in April 1945, and his successor, Harry Truman, shared little of his warmth toward Chiang; nor did Truman believe that Nationalist China would play an important postwar role. China quickly became a decidedly minor player in Allied strategy. RELATED CONTENT FROM OTHER HISTORYNET MAGAZINES “The Hump: Death and Salvation on the Aluminum Trail,” by David Sears (World War II) Book Review: Hump Pilot: Defying Death Flying the Himalayas During World War II, by Nedda R. Thomas (Aviation History) Book Review: The Hump: America’s Strategy for Keeping China in World War II, by John D. Plating (World War II) The Hump operation showed that a substantial amount of cargo could be airlifted anywhere, under the worst flying conditions, as long as those in charge were willing to pay the price in men, aircraft, and money. What it didn’t prove was that such an undertaking was useful. As a logistics operation, the Hump flights were a failure. The cost in aircraft and crews was enormous. Loss estimates vary between 468 and 600-plus airplanes (the AAF did not record every crash), but the best one seems to be 590 aircraft lost with 1,314 crewmen. General George C. Marshall felt the Hump had negative value: “The over-the-Hump airline has been bleeding us white in transport airplanes….The effort over the mountains of Burma bids fair to cost us an extra winter in the main theater of war.” Historian Barbara Tuchman has written that the Joint Chiefs seriously considered abandoning the project but decided that the United States couldn’t afford the implied defeat or the loss of China’s sycophancy. She too believed that the Hump cost an extra winter of war in Europe. It is hard to take seriously the claim that 650,000 tons of supplies over four years did much to support an army of three million Chinese, particularly when Chiang squirreled away most of it for future battles against the Communists. Moreover, basing heavy bombers at Chinese airfields that had to be air-supplied was a baffling logistical decision. When a single bombing mission burned 700,000 gallons of avgas and required 1,000 tons of bombs, it only made sense to base B-29s on islands that could be supplied by ocean freighters and tankers. In the end, though, the Hump had much to do with establishing the United States as the world’s airline leader. The War Department bought over 1,000 C-54s, 3,000 C-46s, and 10,000 C-47s—and many of them were sold as surplus to become American airliners after hostilities ended. The United States began the postwar period with the airplanes, the pilots, and the air-transport management skills to build a worldwide airline system, all developed at least in part by flying the Hump. MHQ STEPHAN WILKINSON is a longtime automotive and aviation writer and a frequent contributor to HistoryNet magazines. PHOTO: CBS war correspondent Eric Sevareid (with hat) jumped for his life from a Hump flight and spent 22 days in the Burmese jungles; also shown are American diplomat John Davies (left) and William Stanton of the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare (center). Bettman/Getty Images
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Pilots Who Flew ‘The Hump’ Over the Himalayas Have Harrowing Stories to Tell By Nedda Thomas Editor’s note: The following is an edited excerpt from Nedda Thomas’ book, “Hump Pilot: Flying Over the Treacherous Himalayas During WWII,” which recounts the wartime exploits of her father, Ned Thomas, a World War II pilot who flew the dangerous route over world’s highest mountain range. No Hump run over the Himalayas was entirely predictable, but it was always a round trip due to the dearth of fuel in China. Kunming constituted the main Chinese terminus, but Ned Thomas flew into Luliang, Chanyi, Yunnanyi, Li-chiang and other far-flung outposts, landing overburdened planes on primitive airfields and dirt runways that sucked sand into engines and wreaked havoc with the plane’s mechanics. Of this enormous territory pilots flew, the Himalayas formed the northwestern wall. To the south, the Indian Ocean moated them in. East and nose ahead lay occupied China. Flyers departed India’s Assam Valley, radioed for weather sightings across the Hump from Fort Hertz in Burma and kept flying on a wing and a prayer. “Turnaround to Kunming,” Ned remembers, “could be eight hours or 10, depending on winds. We were cruising maybe 150 mph, dealing with heavy loads and a lot of resistance. If we were lucky, we had a cockpit heater that worked.” The aircraft in the foreground is a C-46 transport, originally designed as a commercial plane to carry a crew of five men and thirty-six passengers. The more distant plane is a P-40 fighter, distinguished for its effectiveness in middle-altitude work with the Royal Air Force in England and Africa. | Photo credit Library of Congress They didn’t always have heaters, but they did have leather jackets layered with extra clothing beneath because cabins turned into flying freezers over the mountains. Ned often waited to turn on his cockpit heater until the return leg with an empty cargo, given the dangers of stray sparks in a plane awash in high-octane fumes and leaks from 55-gallon fuel drums. “We could take the E-route going out, that’s the lower Hump, maybe flying 16,000 to 18,000 feet,” he said. “The Easy Route reopened with the liberation of Myitkyina (Burma). … Coming back with empty planes, we flew the … route farther north. It’s higher and more difficult. Nowadays planes are pressurized from 7,000 feet. Without pressurization or oxygen, we didn’t customarily take passengers at those altitudes.” At least the engines had oxygen, thanks to life-giving turbos. “As you go higher, you have less air and oxygen. … The air gets rarified and engines have to labor harder to operate. … Before turbochargers, as you went higher the engine eventually stalled. “Then we’d be dropping down through a hole in the clouds to land in China, and most of the light below was from lanterns. Like a scene from the Stone Age.” The statistics told a terrible story. Half of the Chinese did not survive to age 30. Poverty, disease, brutality and abuse was the status quo. Drought or rainfall determined every harvest, and usually the Japanese were there to pillage first. Bare hands and rudimentary tools scratched subsistence from the soil. Oxen help load C-46s in Nansin, Burma, in late 1944. | Photo credit National Archives Flying over scenes that would have looked familiar to Ghengis Khan, Hump planes threaded their course to assorted bases deep in China along a narrow skyway about 50 miles wide that could extend a 1,000 miles in length, depending on the destination. The Hump was many routes, as it fanned out east of the mountains. Some 13 bases lay on the Indian side, and officially included distant Karachi, a city in modern-day Pakistan. Distances flown could expand or contract in response to the advancing or receding of the Japanese. Flights debarked from India’s soggy Assam Valley and quickly climbed to arctic conditions. At the first major ridge, vegetation thinned away and jagged peaks emerged through the clouds. According to Lieutenant General William H. Tunner, who commanded the airlift supply operation from India to China, at least 400 Hump planes went down during the 3½-year operation. Somberly, he wrote: “We had lost planes all through this area, and had never again heard from many of the crews. … Perhaps they had perished in the crash. If they had parachuted out, they may have been caught in the treetops, or injured in the fall to Earth. They could have starved [or] wandered aimlessly in the dense undergrowth until they dropped with exhaustion. They could have been found by native tribes, and been mistreated, murdered or turned over to the Japanese.” Ned’s ability to focus and compartmentalize wasn’t always easy, but it gave him an edge and he used it. What degree of fear or dread did he experience flying over these jungles? “I don’t think you dwell on things like that. In the air, you’re intent on monitoring your flight pattern and instruments. …We were all aware of planes being lost over the Hump. For the jungle, we had chits (notes) in local dialects printed on silk so they wouldn’t disintegrate, promising a reward to natives for returning us to a place where we could be rescued.” Army personnel load a plane with vital military equipment before flying over the Hump in January 1945. | Photo credit National Archives Embedded deep in this savage terrain of jungles and ridges, several great rivers roared through canyons. On each side of the range, water was obscene and rank, the diseases were exotic and insects and animals stood ready to chomp into a man. In addition, it was not reassuring to see service crews in China routinely siphoning fuel from Hump aircraft before they flew the route back to India. With no allowance made for the unexpected, returns could be cliffhangers for pilots as they watched their fuel gauges tremble. What about enemy attacks? The Japanese onslaught abated greatly when they were driven farther south into Burma. The real danger they posed sat straight below. Japan’s foot soldiers spread thick as tar over the terrain, their patrols everywhere, their presence dictating the limited and dangerous air routes planes could fly. With good cause, encounters with them on the ground were more feared than aloft. Pilots often felt they’d rather have taken their chances with Nazi captors than fall to the cruelty of Japanese infantrymen. But one foe never let up. Killer weather was what enemy pilots faced daily. The best weather—best being in the loosest possible sense of the word—occurs between November and March, before the arrival of the monsoons with their opaque fogs and blinding sheets of rain, which could put runways underwater and periodically shut bases down. From March into summer, the conditions could nix any visibility. It wasn’t unusual for pilots to be unable to distinguish the tips of their wings. Weather was an everlasting puzzle that constantly tricked American meteorologists on the scene. Reconnaissance, too, was primitive. Most reports relied on pilot debriefings or radio reports along the way. Word of major storms usually arrived too late to be useful, and the rapidly shifting conditions were impossible to anticipate. Tunner said “the weather on the Hump changed from minute to minute, from mile to mile.” “The wind stream was always precarious,” Ned affirms. “It created updrafts and downdrafts. Those were what was terrible. We were flying a lot of gasoline, one of the worst things you can mess around with. The fumes were all over the plane. You smelled them in the cockpit till you got on your oxygen [mask].” A frightening mystery rose out of the Hump experience and its weather. Based on accounts of several pilots, a monstrous unnamed summit towered somewhere north of the flight path and crested higher than Mount Everest, 29,029 feet above sea level. Men blown off course by fierce storms found themselves hurled inside a harrowing updraft, and came out at 30,000 feet to confront a giant. The threatening pinnacle was first sighted by two Chinese National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) pilots as they attempted to map an early route across the range. Later Hump pilots also saw it and gave credible accounts of being flung far too close for comfort. Did an immense mountain really rise somewhere amid countless others? Were pilots blown there like mariners swept over an unsailed sea, into the unexplored reaches of a remote place? Had their altimeters played them false? Ned Thomas, who was first in his primary flight class to solo, poses with a PT-17 after completing training at Douglas Army Airfield in Georgia. | Photo credit Photo courtesy of Nedda Thomas Ned explained the enigma simply in the level-headed terms. “With different atmospheric conditions, your altimeter will vary as you move from one pressure situation to another,” he said. “You’re always resetting your altimeter on a flight, to reflect these differences. … As you go from one pressure situation to another, ground control will tell you the setting, and you use a knob on the dial to adjust your altimeter. You can get a false altitude reading if you don’t keep changing your setting. Of course, we didn’t have any way to get that information over the Hump because no stations existed in the mountains.” Plainly put, their altimeters hadn’t malfunctioned, they just weren’t reset for changes in pressure conditions. Ned’s take on the mystery reflects the knowledge of an instrument pilot, and something of his temperament, too. Things had to make sense. He needed to keep his head and deal with the world he was in. He had cause. They knew about inexperienced flyers sent into the Hump, recent cadets out of flight school, or mature men with minimal training in the instruments needed for high-altitude flying. Some had never flown the C-47 or the bigger C-46. Deployed as copilots into what was viewed as a backwater war, forgotten while their country pursued a policy of “Europe first,” they took to the highest peaks and worst flying on earth in unfamiliar aircraft, while ground control talked them through basics like adjusting their flaps. Ned came in with a newer breed that received more training before arriving in theater. “You had to know the plane you were flying. The history of aviation went back maybe a few decades, but Hump flying was the big unknown. No one ever flew under these conditions. It was a new world.” —Nedda Thomas is a Virginia-based author and Ned Thomas’ daughter. This story originally appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of On Patrol, the magazine of the USO. You can send a message of support and thanks directly to service members via the USO’s Campaign to Connect. Your messages will appear on screens at USO locations around the world.
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 The Hump route was an unlikely route for regular flight operations due to high terrain.
2 Moreover, the U.S. Air Force Transport Command considered the Hump route too dangerous and unflyable.
3 This reopened access to Kunming by truck in early 1945 and the recapture of Myitkyina also shortened and flattened The Hump air route.