Deadly skies: the WW2 mission to fly over the Himalayas

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Deadly Skies: The WW2 Mission to Fly Over the Himalayas"

Release Date: May 29, 2025
Host/Author: Immediate Media
Guest: Caroline Alexander, Author and Historian
Produced by: Jack Bateman

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Introduction to the "Hump" Mission

The episode delves into one of World War II's most perilous and lesser-known aviation missions: flying over the Himalayas, famously known as "The Hump." Caroline Alexander discusses her new book, Skies of Thunder, which sheds light on the extraordinary challenges faced by young, often undertrained pilots tasked with navigating this treacherous air route.

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Contextualizing the Burma Road and Geopolitical Stakes [02:35 – 06:05]

Ellen Evans sets the stage by asking Alexander about the Burma Road's significance.

Caroline Alexander explains that the Burma Road was initially a strategic effort initiated by Chiang Kai-shek in 1935 to combat communist forces in China. However, the road's importance escalated when Japanese forces occupied Burma in 1942, effectively blockading China. President Roosevelt's pledge to supply China necessitated the creation of an "aerial Burma Road," leading to the audacious mission of flying supplies over the Himalayas.

"We're talking today about a remarkable aviation mission during World War II in an arena of the war that's not so often covered." [02:35]

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Feasibility and Challenges of the Aerial Burma Road [06:05 – 14:03]

Ellen Evans inquires about the mission's feasibility.

Alexander outlines the daunting 800-mile flight from Assam, India, to Kunming, China, through some of the world's most difficult terrain. Despite initial assessments deeming it feasible, the mission faced severe weather challenges due to the convergence of massive air systems—warm, moist air from the South China Sea and dry, icy blasts from the Tibetan plateau and Siberia. Additionally, the lack of advanced navigation systems made the journey even more hazardous.

"These pilots were essentially flying blind for most of the journey until they come into Kunming." [10:20]

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Pilot Demographics and Training Deficiencies [10:20 – 14:26]

Contrary to expectations, many pilots assigned to The Hump were inexperienced. With a shortage of seasoned aviators—most experienced pilots were engaged in combat missions—young and relatively untrained men were thrust into this critical role. Efforts to bolster pilot expertise included sending commercial airline pilots for intensive training, but many pilots had minimal flight hours.

Alexander highlights the psychological toll and stigma faced by these "hump pilots," who were often relegated to the lower echelons of the Air Transport Command and self-referentially dubbed themselves the "Forgotten Bastards of India."

"These were very young, inexperienced pilots... they were part of the Air Transport Command, the acronym for which was ATC." [14:03]

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Technical Limitations of Aircraft [14:26 – 19:48]

The primary aircraft used was the DC-3, affectionately known as the Dakota in Britain. While stable and forgiving, the DC-3 had limited carrying capacity and was plagued by mechanical issues, including fuel and hydraulic leaks. Subsequent iterations, like the C-46, introduced larger cargo capacities but were susceptible to catastrophic failures due to ice accumulation on the wings.

"The DC3 was an astonishingly stable aircraft. It felt like the pilot's friend." [14:26]

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Life in the Jungle and Survival Challenges [19:48 – 30:53]

Alexander paints a vivid picture of the grim living conditions for the pilots on the ground. Housing was rudimentary, with bamboo thatched huts vulnerable to monsoon rains, insects, and diseases like malaria and dysentery. The jungle's oppressive environment further exacerbated the pilots' stress, compounded by the psychological burden of believing their efforts were futile as supplies were often lost to the black market or fell into Japanese hands.

"Pilots were equipped with these little jungle survival kits... which often had been plundered in China." [19:48]

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The Severide Incident: A Story of Humanity and Survival [30:53 – 36:34]

One of the most compelling narratives discussed is the Severide incident, where Erich Severide, an American correspondent, survived a crash over The Hump. Despite the plane's failure, 20 out of 21 passengers survived the bailout. The survivors faced immediate danger in the jungle, but their rescue was facilitated by the indigenous Naga people, showcasing remarkable humanity and cultural cooperation.

"There were extraordinary stories of one person who went to look for a downed plane... People brought him things." [30:53]

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Psychological Impact: Humpitis [36:34 – 44:38]

Alexander introduces "Humpitis," a unique psychiatric disorder emerging from the extreme stress of flying The Hump. Symptoms included severe morale collapse, anxiety, and trauma, leading some pilots to refuse future missions or suffer debilitating mental health issues. The stigma surrounding Humpitis was significant, often resulting in pilots being reassigned or court-martialed.

"Humpitis... is a collapse of morale, sometimes extreme to the point that people broke down and just refused to fly." [36:34]

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Lessons Learned and Historical Significance [44:38 – 41:03]

In concluding the episode, Alexander emphasizes the importance of recognizing this hazardous mission's historical significance. She underscores the necessity of aligning ideology with intelligence, cautioning against allowing wishful thinking to override critical assessments. The enduring legacy of The Hump mission is reflected in the respectful relationships between American pilots and their Chinese counterparts, even decades later.

"Ideology and wishful thinking must never override intelligence... it is one's duty to pay attention to that intelligence and act accordingly." [44:38]

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Conclusion

Caroline Alexander's exploration of The Hump mission in Skies of Thunder offers a poignant glimpse into the bravery, challenges, and psychological toll experienced by the pilots who dared to traverse one of the most dangerous air routes in history. The episode not only highlights a forgotten chapter of World War II but also serves as a testament to human resilience and the complexities of wartime logistics.

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Notable Quotes:

• "These were very young, inexperienced pilots... they were part of the Air Transport Command, the acronym for which was ATC." [14:03]
• "Pilots were equipped with these little jungle survival kits... which often had been plundered in China." [19:48]
• "Humpitis... is a collapse of morale, sometimes extreme to the point that people broke down and just refused to fly." [36:34]

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Further Reading: To delve deeper into this gripping narrative, listen to the full episode of the History Extra podcast or read Caroline Alexander's Skies of Thunder.

Transcript

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[Caroline Alexander]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Stories of the Second World War are dominated by Dunkirk and D Day, but did you know that one of the war's most treacherous missions took place in the skies over the Himalayas? In this episode, author and historian Caroline Alexander joins us to discuss her new book, Skies of Thunder, which uncovers the extraordinary ordeal of the young, often under trained pilots who flew the so called hump navigating cargo planes from India into China across one of the most perilous air routes on Earth. Caroline was speaking to Ellen Evans.

[Ellen Evans]

We're talking today about a remarkable aviation mission during World War II in an arena of the war that's not so often covered Caroline, before we go into the aerial mission proper, I hoped we could give some vital context for our listeners in understanding where we are in this story. Could we start with the Burma Road? Where are we in the world and what's happening geopolitically? And why is this transport route so important?

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

Well, the legendary Burma Road was a remarkable feat. It's called the Burma Road, but it was instigated from China. And in the background to this is that in 1935, Chiang Kai Shek, who was head of Nationalist China, had wished to build a supply road in southern southwest China to help his battle against the communists. So it began as a kind of self serving military mission and it went pushed out a few hundred miles towards the Burma border and then stopped. Then, however, in 1937, the Japanese, who had been encroaching on China from the early 1930s, turned into sort of all out occupation. And Kaik realized that all of his coasts and ports had been blockaded. These were now in Japanese hands. And so there was a real danger that China was going to be entirely blockaded. And so the thought was right, we'll build a backdoor route and it'll come through, push west into Burma, British Burma. At this time, Myanmar. Today. I'm going to be using the terminology of the era just to sort of keep abreast of the actual language of the era. And the idea was that Rangoon, which was a major port, supplies would come in there, they would go up a rail line and then from the rail head they would be trucked into China on the Burma Road. And so this became a kind of epic feat of amateur building in that it was built by the hands of women and children, clawed out of some of the most difficult terrain in the world. And it attracted a great deal of international, I would say, reverence. In a way. It became a kind of legendary, epic feat of the plucky Chinese trying to do everything they could against the Japanese incursion. It has to be said, and it's important to the story in a way that it be said now that it was never that effective. Monsoon rains and the weather and so forth bogged everything down. But nonetheless it was better than nothing and it was a great symbol. Now, when in 1942 the Japanese swept through Burma, they also took the Burma Road and suddenly China really was blockaded. And it was at this point that U.S. president Roosevelt stepped in and made a pledge to the Chinese people directly that, quote, come what may, America would ensure that China would be supplied during this war. And given that there was no access by land and had not been long lost by sea. The only remaining access was going to be by air. And so now we come to this sort of extraordinary task, epic task of building, if you will, a kind of aerial Burma Road.

[Ellen Evans]

So, at the time that Roosevelt makes this pledge to Chiang Kai Shek to support Nationalist China, how feasible is this mission? What's the picture of how much this aerial route has been explored before?

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

Well, what does one mean by feasible? On paper, it looked highly feasible. It was 800 miles straight from northeast India, in allied hands, British hands, Assam, all the way, and straight route to Kunming, which was the capital of the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. And this was pointed out, by the way, by one of the Chinese foreign ministers, who said, look, it's just 800 miles of straight flying. The route had been explored quite extensively by an interesting aviation group that's very little known today, but was remarkable, which was a jointly owned Chinese American commercial airline called Chinese National Air Corporation, known as CNAC by its acronym. And this pioneering little plucky air force had flown some of the part of the route and another part of the route, and then they kind of stitched it all together to see was it possible to make this flight direct. Now, what was so complicated about it? What was so complicated about it was that it happened. The route, to be flown safely, had to thread a fairly fine needle through the Himalayan foothills. And so, strictly speaking, the highest ridge that had to be overflown would have been at about 14,500ft, which doesn't sound like a great deal in modern aviation terms, is not great deal in modern aviation terms. But the problem was that on either side of this route, and very visible from the pilot seat, were mountain peaks that rose higher than the plane was flying. This meant that the route had to be followed very, very strictly. And now we come to the great complications. And the major complication was the weather. And it was due to a kind of extraordinary illness, fate, if you will. This route happened to bore through the chronic convergence of three massive air systems. You had warm, moist air rising on either side from the east and west, from the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal on the one hand. And then you had these dry, icy blasts that came down from the Tibetan plateau and Siberia. And these always commingled, and they do today. And it's worth mentioning, listeners may remember that last, there was a very tragic and severe commercial aviation incident over Myanmar, where a Singapore Airline plane lost altitude in very severe, unexpected turbulence. And 70 people were injured badly. And one man was killed. And this was flying at an altitude probably, I'm speculating, about upper 30 to 40,000ft. These aircraft of our era we're talking about flew much lower at sort of 20,000ft, was the upper ceiling at this time. So you can imagine now the situation, which is, on the one hand, very, very severe weather, which makes directional control very difficult, with wind drift and so forth. And on the other hand, you're flying often on instrument conditions almost from takeoff to landing, which is a very unnerving thing to do, with very, very primitive navigation systems. Obviously no such thing as gps, but also not just over the mountains, but over the vast Burmese jungle of northern Burma, which permitted no kind of navigational way stations or radio stations or anything like that en route. So these pilots were essentially, to fly this straightforward aerial Burma Road 800 miles, had to fly in very severe conditions over very dangerous terrain.

[Ellen Evans]

Yes, you're giving us a sense here of a hugely risky undertaking. One imagines that they're getting experienced aviators to do this, because it seems like such a fraught challenge. What did you find out about the reality of this mission and how it was conceived?

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

Well, the short answer is that the airmen tended to be hugely inexperienced. There's some stories, and I actually spoke to a number of the pilots. I was very, very lucky to just catch some of these by now, elderly pilots, not many, but there were some remarkable kind of insights. And one remembered going over with 25 hours of instrument training, for example. Now, that is something that even in a local flight club today, you know, wouldn't get you very far. And here they were being sent, you know, to tackle this enormous task. The reason for this is, it's rather bracing because it made me have to remember how young aviation really was. The reason was there simply weren't many pilots and there simply weren't that many planes. And most of the planes and superior pilots were being used for fighter pilots, for combat, for bombing raids and so forth. And so the cream of the flight classes and the most experienced pilots were already into the system, both in America and most particularly in England, which had been fighting longer than this new air supply mission had been in invented. So they were at the bottom of the heap in terms of their youth and their inexperience. There were a number of measures taken by the US Army Air Forces. I mean, one point just a bit pedantic, but to dwell on it, there was no U.S. air Force at this time. It was so young, it was not even a separate power. But there were some attempts to bolster the training by sending over commercial airline pilots, for example, pilots from the American Airlines. The commercial OUTF was sent for sort of seven weeks of intensive instruction and so forth. But the bottom line was that these were very young, inexperienced pilots. And there was another factor that rather cruel, which is that because they were not combat pilots, they were really rather regarded as the bottom of the totem pole of hierarchy. They were part of the Air Transport Command, the acronym for which was atc. And other pilots sneered at this and said that it stood for aller to combat. And so that gives you a sort of whiff of the degree of indifference for which these pilots were treated. It also was the case that this was a very specialized mission. And when you stand back, we're focused now on this so called flying the hump. And that was the term that was used at the mountain range. It was the hump. And so these are hump pilots flying the hump. But this is a very, very specialized task in a very, very narrow field of interest. And when you stand back and look at all the other and needs that were for aviation, you realize that these really weren't that important in the big scale of things. They were not going to help storm the beaches of Normandy, for example. And the pilots themselves, the source of demoralization for them was the sense that they knew they were in this black backwater theater, sort of crouched down in the edge of the jungle in these very makeshift quarters. And they called themselves the FBI, which stood for Forgotten Bastards of India.

[Ellen Evans]

So we're getting a picture then of what these men, these young men are up against as they go into this theatre of war. They're expected to take on this risky flying mission. And I think another point that we should probably cover as well is the tech that they're doing it with. These aren't like nippy aircraft, as you say. They're not fighter planes. Can you take us into the belly of a DC3 or another plane? What sort of aircraft were they in?

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

Well, this again is sort of very interesting. I Learned that the DC3 was the original workhorse for cargo transport. It was known in Britain as the Dakota. DC3 is the American terminology. And the military designation of that is a C47, but it's known as the Dakota. And you'll find that in British memoirs and so forth. It was actually a much beloved plane. It was an astonishingly stable aircraft. It was every pilot who left a testimony about it described it as forgiving. It sort of lumbered on through all these conditions, but it was steady it took off in very short Runway, very rugged conditions, and it just felt like the pilot's friend. This sounds odd, I should mention my partner is a former combat pilot, a Navy combat pilot, and as part, is sort of life's passion, knows all about these different planes. And the DC3 has this kind of reverence. However, it also had very limited carrying capacity, and the Americans were interested in scaling everything up. And so in 1943, let's get the dates right. May of 1942 is when Burma is lost and the Japanese have claimed Burma. And so about a year later, in comes the revised version, which is the C46, which had in fact, only been test run on domestic flights across the United States. And it arrived on scale in India to start this ferry run. And very, very shortly, the hump weather and hump conditions discovered every weakness that that aircraft had. And it was noted, for example, for leaky hydraulics. It was known for gas leaks, fuel leaks from the rivets, which is almost unimaginable to me. And so according to Air Force history that was written about the war, the sort of official record of the war experienced by American pilots, it said the pilots had a deep unease because of its tendency of its engines to sort of catch fire and blow up in flight. And there are many accounts of this happening, of planes just lost over the hump, or another pilot saw an explosion in the air and so forth. Then they brought in another, yet another larger transport. And there would be iterations, ever bigger and finally ever more stable, it has to be said. But there was one which was essentially reconfiguring a bomber type, the B24, and rendering it into a kind of cargo version. But it turns out that it couldn't carry ice on its wings, and ice was one of the most perilous factors of the hump. And ice can bring down any kind of plane. So this also turned out to be yet another source of not just actual crashes, but. But great unease. I think that's possibly one of the things that comes through most often, is that there were some very, very skilled pilots who handled the condition psychologically the best. But for most pilots, this was a very. On any day that didn't have clear weather, this was a very frightening kind of experience that they never quite got used to. And that's not the way to be flying any kind of mission.

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[Ellen Evans]

We get a sense from you here of the terror of the peril involved. You talked to some of the pilots who had flown. You looked at many testimonies and diaries and writings from this time. Can you take us into the reality of what flying the hump meant? Generally? What sort of conditions were these men facing?

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

I would start with on the ground, which was just the conditions that they lived in, which were very, very basic. Those who know of the land campaigns in Burma, the Burma campaigns will know of the kinds of conditions both in terms of the kind of bamboo thatched huts that were the housing. These were not the kind of comfy air force bases that were enjoy in say Europe or even in other parts of India. So very basic conditions with monsoon rain trickling through the thatched roofs and insects crawling into your bed and the fear of snakes and all of that and also terrible diseases. And this is again seemed to be endemic to the jungle experience. And they're on the edge of the jungle, these pilots, but lots of afflictions of, you know, from dysentery to malaria and so forth and just morale demoralizing conditions in the first place. So then they get into these planes that they do not trust and a kind of professional system of air traffic control has been devised. The first air traffic control tower, by the way, was built in a tree overlooking one of the Airfields to give you an idea of how rough and ready it was. And then they take off and they fly on instruments, often, as I said, almost from takeoff. They're little smudge pots that are lighting the round ways for landings which are sort of very uncertain, but no proper landing or takeoff lighting. And then they basically fly blind for most of the journey until they come into Kunming. As they approach Kunming and the mountains decrease and there are also signs of habitation which were very comforting to the men just to see rice fields that were being worked and then they land in Kunming. But in terms of the other aspect of those are sort of the conditions. The other aspect that the pilots carried with them was the knowledge that what they were doing was really ineffectual, if not, I almost want to say, pointless. And many of them, it was known at a very early stage that these precious supplies that were being brought into China at such cost were being sold on the black market. Many of them could be seen in the shops of Kunming, on the one hand, where everything was for sale, including all these American made goods that could only have come over the hump and more concerningly ending up in Japanese hands where they were traded across the so called fighting front and made their way into the shops in Shanghai. So you had Red Cross, American Red Cross goods that were securely known to have originated to be loaded onto these cargo planes and then would somehow end up in Japanese occupied territory. And so in terms of what was discovered from the memoirs and diaries, I'd say there were two keen points of view. One was a kind of deadly cynicism. And one of the pilots actually wrote in his diary, he says they were remarkably not under Japanese attack that often. And there are a number of reasons for this. But the one that the pilots believed was that it was not worth the Japanese attacking them because so much of what they were ferrying would end up in Japanese hands. That's an extremely cynical view, but it's a real view and recorded in the diaries of the time, I'd say that the pilots themselves of the time they got up, they did their job, they did the best they could, they were very professional about it. But there was a kind of cold uncertainty as to the reason for what they were doing, what they did. Now, post war, it's interesting when one looks at the sort of memoirs that were written after the war or just short testimonials, and particularly those by descendants, for example, in obituaries, it's always there's that taint of cynicism, is Gone. And one always reads that ferrying these supplies kept China in the war and allowed China to keep on fighting the Japanese. And it sort of glorified into this mission. But that is not, it seems, how many of the pilots felt at the.

[Ellen Evans]

Time, okay, so despite this post war picture, during the conflict, there's this cynicism that must have been so weighty. They're flying in instrument conditions where they can't tell up from down outside the window, inevitably there are going to be accidents. What did you find out during the course of your book about how much can be known about how many aircraft went down and once they went down, what were their chances?

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

Well, I should almost start this by saying how I came to the story and how I came to the story was I was on assignment for National Geographic magazine about Tigers and was in northern Myanmar and one of the most spectacularly beautiful places, I have to say, that I've ever been. And in this part of the north part of the country, it's very little inhabited. And the very trim villages are mostly built or entirely built really, of bamboo thatch. And yet I saw these very striking fences made of jagged metal all around the vegetable plots, in many of the. Around many of the houses, the villages. And when I asked about these, I was told that they had been cut from the fuselages of the crashed cargo planes in the jungle. And I made inquiries and came back with this sort of astonishing discovery that there were close to 600 crashed US cargo planes, known cargo planes in the northern Myanmar jungle. And so that opened up the story to had I never heard about this, how could I never have heard about this? The first thing that has to be said is in terms of really precise statistics, that's very hard to come by. Again, I think one could say that this is indicative of the lack of regard for this particular theater because proper records were really not kept until about June of 1943. That that's a year over a year after the whole operations got going. And so during that time, nobody is really keeping track of how many aircraft go missing, how many are crashed, known to have crashed, and how many personnel have died, have been killed. The best estimates are that, well, the official estimate is, as I say, close to 600 crashed cargo planes. But no one believes that's the full measure. And the range of personnel lost is something, a very extreme range from something like 1,300 men to 3,800, which is an indication. It's just a kind of wild guess. But officially also, it's estimated that about 1,200 airmen had to bail out over the hump. And bailing out, which means putting a parachute on and just jumping while the plane crashes, became very, very common. And it's interesting, the pilots were more afraid of bailing out over the jungle than they were, I think, of almost crashing into the mountains. The jungle had this reputation, fearful reputation of perhaps. I mean, it is a fearful place. And when I was. Just for some context, when I was there for the story that I mentioned, the wildlife officers who were the sort of tiger patrol rangers, described conditions which were extraordinary. There were certain times of the year they never went in because the malaria strain is so severe that really is deadly. And so there were things there. It was dark and foreboding and alien and vast and overwhelming, and it had these strange spooky effects. It absorbed sound. This was noted by a number of people where they would say, five men bailed out altogether from one crew, and they might be 100 yards apart, but they couldn't hear each other calling. It was as if the jungle just absorbed all the sound. And there was great fear of snakes, which were absolutely. In the jungle. Interestingly, I know of no case where anybody was actually bitten by a snake in the jungle. But the noises when night fell and the tigers that were around. Again, no known tiger attacks within the era that we're talking about, although several accounts of tigers following their pilots, like curious cats just watching. And I've heard this also from modern rangers, that the tigers just want to know who's in their territory. But altogether a very terrifying experience. And pilots were equipped with these little jungle survival kits, which looked very good on paper, and they were given sort of perfunctory how to survive in jungle training, which for young airmen who'd come from, say, Iowa or Kansas, was utterly bewildering. But often, as it turned out, these kits had been plundered in China, which was. Everything was looted. And so they would open the kits and the various things were just not in there. But also, ultimately, the experience was too overwhelming or they were injured when they landed. And this brings in, I think, another set of heroes, if you will, of the story, which were the hill people, the Naga, the Kachin, the Karan. These were people for whom the jungle was home. And they were enormously supportive of the Allied fight against the Japanese to their great cost. There was an attempt to intimidate the Kachin by going in and raising their villages and so forth. And it had the exact opposite effect. It strengthened the resolve of these people to do everything they could and by and large, at the end of the day, when one reads these great survival stories, what happens is that the airmen are lucky enough to fall in with, with one of the hill peoples who have been either actively looking for them because they know there's a missing aircraft, or stumble on them and then lead them out and in some cases care for them over many months in one remarkable story. But the experience haunted this jungle experience preyed very much on the imagination of the pilots.

[Ellen Evans]

Yes, the humanity shown in stories like that is staggering. And I mean, the incredible risks. You've got thunder in the air, you've got hills to avoid, and then you've got tigers on foot. I mean, the mind boggles, really. A story in your book that brings together all of this and shows the humanity involved is the Severide incident. Caroline, could you introduce this story for our listeners, please?

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

Erich Severide was a very renowned, indeed celebrated American correspondent, both in newsprints when he had worked in Paris and then later as a sort of radio journalist. And I'd like to take this chance, in fact, to recommend his memoir, which is called not so Wild a Dream and from which I take the incident that I'm going to recount of his experience over the hump. But that is a remarkable memoir, even in Paris, as France falls and so on and so forth, well beyond just the theater that we're talking about. And he writes a very beautiful. But on this particular occasion In August of 1943, Erik Severai got on a C46 along with 20 other personnel who were from the State Department, some civilians, a few Chinese generals, and clear sky conditions, beautiful flying weather. And the plane sort of takes off and is going to deliver them in Kunming, where Severide is going to be meeting with officials and covering that part and just really just doing a kind of general passenger transport. And somewhere over the hump, one of the engines loses power. And what's wonderful about Sevrite's account is that for those of us, the majority of us who are not pilots and have never had to put a parachute on, by being a civilian and completely inexperienced in any of this, he really is very good at conveying what it would have been like if, say, you or I had been in his place. And there's a sort of moment of utter incredulity. He doesn't believe that the plane is going to crash. It doesn't make sense to leave it, it's still flying. But he's told one of the crew comes back and sort of says, time to get on your chutes. And he realizes finally after stalling, that he really is the last in the doorway. And he just still can't believe he's going to do this and just jumps and is briefly struck on the head by, he thinks it's the tail and sort of wakes up in the bush, not in deep dark jungle, but in kind of a space that must have been a clearing. And Remarkably, of the 21 people who jump, 20 survive. The CO pilot did not. One is injured with minor injuries, but by and large everybody. And again amateur parachutists do pretty well. But then now here they are and they've somehow got to get out. And this sort of almost comic flurry of activity now takes place because this is big news. And back in the United States there's not going to be any way to hide the fact that a celebrated national figure, if you will, has had to parachute out over the Burmese jungle. Jungle. Whereas the public had not been informed of the conditions of the hump and how often it was necessary to bail out, now this suddenly becomes a big story. And so there's a huge amount of hustle. Because it was daylight, it was possible to see where the plane had gone down and the plane exploded, which also was a sort of landmark. And so all sorts of supplies are showered down, which Severide enumerates in his diary with this kind of, of incredulity. Hundreds of pairs of underwear and socks and T shirts and sort of ammunition and food and tins and things just like raining down to the point where they fear for the safety of themselves and some of the ultimately the villagers when they're finally sort of trekked in by these Naga. There's also this sort of wonderful story of the British officer who's sent to lead Severai to safety over a two week march. And so everybody's demoralized from this bailout and they're sort of nursing their twisted ankles and so on and frightened and they're with the Naga and they don't know if they're hostile or friendly. And suddenly this character walks in who's a young fair haired man dressed in a pale blue polo shirt and shorts and blue socks, who Sevarize said, looks uncannily like Leslie Howard, the actor. And he, equipped with peppermint sweets and his chessboard which he carried with him. And he turns out to be remarkably familiar with all of the Naga, speaks the language and guides the Americans out over a two week period. But this became a landmark event in the history of the hunger hump. Because it now was impressed upon the authorities that there was a need for a rescue strategy. And so this becomes the origin of a dedicated search and rescue group. There had been ad hoc attempts to it before, but now it becomes a kind of formal operation. And this was both effective, but also gave the airmen great sense of moral support, that the knowledge that their brethren, if you will, one of their band of brothers, would be, be absolutely out there looking for them and doing everything they could to walk them back to safety.

[Ellen Evans]

Yes, one can imagine how much of a lift that would be. And something we haven't picked up on just yet is the idea of something called Humpitis. What was Humpitis, as you understand it? And did this outcome after the Zevaride incident, did it help in combating that in any way?

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

Well, Humpitis, this is really remarkable. It's a psychiatric disorder that comes from flying the Hump. And what is remarkable is that again, after the war, the Air Forces has sort of debriefs itself on every single aspect of the war and these become part of its official history. And there is a large psychiatric component to the war review, if you will, which goes over nervous conditions, general fatigue. We're talking about the entirety of the war, all branches of service, and then specifically aviation. But Humpitis alone has its own significant subsection. So there's no other theater that has a separate distinct condition named for that particular theater experience. Humpitus, I suppose it's not quite ptsd, although it is clearly based on trauma. Trauma. It's a kind of reverting to the terminology of, say, World War I. A neurasthenic disorder, not quite shell shock, again, which is in response, which probably had more to do also with blasts than we now know. But it is a collapse of morale, sometimes extreme to the point that people broke down and just refused to fly. And then they were sort of made an example of, in some cases by being made to become ground crew from then on, which they took, we preferred, to being pilots, but was also very stigmatizing and humiliating. There were attempts to stay ahead of Humpitis by these sort of rest cures, which were sort of tone deaf in a way. They were often jungle rest camps. And given that they, the pilots, hated the jungle, perhaps more than anything, this was not so well chosen. But they were sort of camps where you could go and you could go fishing. It was meant to be like a Boy Scout experience. And you could recreate by the river and you could play volleyball and all of this. And sometimes people liked this Respite. But then it always meant coming back to the hump. There was one case that I studied closely in the book of a pilot who simply refused to comply and was court martialed and sentenced to three years of hard labor as a result of refusing to fly the hump at night, which was perhaps the most terrifying of all. It's hard to put a finger on. One can just say that it's a nervous collapse. But the reasons for it, which are incisively listed in the psychiatric survey, cover all of the obvious things such as fear of the aircraft, fear of the weather, obviously. Fear of the terrain, obviously. But significantly, this knowledge, and it actually says the belief all too well founded, that the supplies that they were carrying at such cost ended up in either enemy hands or being wasted. And that is a very eloquent summation of what we mentioned earlier, this sense that the pilots had of cynicism, that all of this effort really wasn't about anything. It wasn't like being a fighter pilot, a Spitfire pilot who you could say went on a mission and knew what they had done. And even if that mission failed, you absolutely knew you were doing what needed to be done, or bombing raids with specific targets or operations that you could. You knew that you were covering your fellow soldiers on the ground. This was an entirely different disorder. And I think that that's worth carrying forward in a way, just psychologically for us as human beings, that knowing that what you're doing is about something or for a real cause is terribly important to the human spirit.

[Ellen Evans]

Your book is obviously shedding much light on this mission that many of us won't have heard of. The trauma that you just mentioned is obviously one lasting, important impact. The fuselage that you saw in the Myanmar jungle is yet another. I wonder if, as we wrap up this episode, whether you can mention any lessons you felt were learned from this campaign or perhaps weren't learned and how you'd like people to think of it today.

[Mint Mobile Advertiser]

Well, I'd like to start with the last part first. I would like people to know of this experience and know the cost of these lives lost and lives risked, and just know this fascinating piece of history that has importance is the background to American Chinese relationships today. One thing that's worth mentioning is that although this mission is known, not at all, I suspect, or very little in Britain and in Europe and not so much in the United States, it is the case that if any American pilot or descendant of a pilot goes to modern China today or say, to look for the wreck of a lost plane they are welcomed with open arms. And there are extraordinary stories of one person who went to look for a downed plane. He was not a descendant of any of the pilots, but when it was known, when he came to the village where he was looking, the landlord refused to take money from him. People brought him things. I mean, really extraordinary. And that's true even at the official level, even though it was for Nationalist China, not Communist China, that this was being made. So that's sort of one nice resonance, if you will. But in terms what the lesson is, I would say what was clear from the very beginning, America had very good intelligence about the situation in China. For the reasons I touched on earlier, that there was this extraordinary missionary movement in China where Americans had been going for some generations. It's remarkable how many Americans spoke Chinese. Some of the pilots had been missionary, children spoke Chinese. There was both grassroots level and then State Department level and military mission level of intelligence. And all the intelligence showed that Chiang Kai Shek would not survive, was not a competent leader of a nation. He was a warlord. He had bettered all the other warlords. But particularly as the war went on, the level of his incompetence became clear as the country's economy crashed through utter mismanagement. It was not just that he was a dictator, a ruthless dictator, which was perhaps a moot point in the big picture. What was clear was that he was not going to be up to the job. This should have been known at the very beginning, and it was known at the very beginning that there was no nationalist fighting front of the Japanese. And therefore the whole ostensible reason of supplying China was really unfounded. The real reason that America was supplying China was that Roosevelt wanted China as an ally in the post war world. And in his naivety he imagined that this would be a Western looking, possibly Christian, definitely Democratic, shoulder to shoulder partner for America, both in a sort of military political sense and most certainly in a commercial sense. I think that the lesson that I would carry away is that ideology and wishful thinking must never override intelligence. That when you have real intelligence and it's converging from all different points of view on the same conclusion, it is one's duty to pay attention to that intelligence and act accordingly, as opposed to think that you can bend reality by optimism.

[Caroline Alexander]

That was the author, Caroline Alexander. Skies of Thunder. The deadly World War II mission over the roof of the World is out now. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.