On one of WW2’s deadliest air routes, pilots’ biggest fear was surviving a crash – here’s why

They flew transport aircraft such as the C-47 Dakota and C-46 Commando, carrying fuel, munitions and supplies that were deemed vital to keep China in the war. Many of the crew were just 23 or 24 years old, fresh from the American Midwest or provincial Britain, now hurled into a deadly mission with little preparation.

But it wasn’t just traversing the skies that filled the pilots with fear. The jungles that they soared over were perhaps even more terrifying.

“The pilots were more afraid of bailing out over the jungle than they were, I think, of crashing into the mountains,” explains journalist and author Caroline Alexander, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast about the myriad challenges faced by these pilots.

Why was the ‘Hump’ mission necessary?

The Hump operation was born out of strategic necessity. Since 1937, China had been at full-scale war with Japan. The Chinese government under leader Chiang Kai-shek was a key ally in the fight against Axis powers in Asia, tying down large numbers of Japanese troops and resources.

But in 1942, the Japanese captured Burma (modern-day Myanmar), cutting off the Burma Road – China’s last overland supply line from the Allies. “Chiang Kai-shek realised that all of his coasts and ports had been blockaded,” Alexander explains. “There was a real danger that China was going to be entirely cut off.”

So, with China at risk of total isolation, Allied planners, backed by US President Franklin D Roosevelt, devised a solution: a sustained airlift campaign from northern India, to be flown over the Himalayas.

• Read more | When and why did the US get involved in WW2?

To keep China supplied, Allied aircraft would fly out of airbases in Assam and Bengal, bound for Kunming and other Chinese airfields. Though perilous, this was deemed to be the only way to maintain the alliance and prevent Japan from fully consolidating its hold on East Asia.

Flying blind through a death trap

But flying the Hump was brutally unforgiving. Pilots had to ascend to altitudes of 16,000–20,000 feet, without radar, GPS or accurate weather forecasting. They routinely encountered lightning storms, gale-force winds and extreme turbulence.

“This was a very frightening experience that they never quite got used to,” says Alexander, “and that’s not the way a pilot wants to be flying any kind of mission.”

• Read more | Flying ‘the hump’: the US pilots who navigated treacherous skies above the Himalayas in WW2

There was also an oppressive sense of cynicism among the young American pilots, says Alexander, that the supplies they were ferrying would end up in Japanese hands. The aircraft flying the Hump did not often come under Japanese attack, and there’s evidence in airmen’s diary entries that show the futility with which many of the young pilots regarded their task.

Aircraft were frequently overloaded. Navigation depended on imprecise maps and dead reckoning. Many flights ended in crashes. “The official estimate is close to 600 crashed cargo planes, but no one believes that that’s the full measure,” Alexander notes. “It’s estimated that about 1,200 airmen had to bail out over the Hump, which means putting a parachute on and just jumping while the plane crashes.”

But even those who survived that landing didn’t escape danger.

Crashing into the deadly unknown

The jungle that blanketed the lower slopes of the Himalayan mountains posed its own terrifying horrors. “It was dark and foreboding and alien and vast and overwhelming,” Alexander says.

Pilots and crew who bailed out of their aircraft often landed in remote, near-impenetrable rainforest. Even if they survived the landing, isolation was nearly guaranteed. “If five men bailed out altogether from one crew, they might land a hundred yards apart. But they couldn’t hear each other calling. It was as if the jungle just absorbed all the sound.”

To make matters worse, the survival kits they carried, intended to sustain them until rescue, were often looted or incomplete. “These had been plundered in China, [where] everything was looted. And so the pilots would open the kits and various things were just not in there,” says Alexander.

Then there were the diseases. Malaria, in particular, made recovery efforts risky even for trained search teams. “There were certain times of the year they never went in because the malaria strain is so severe,” says Alexander.

Perhaps worst of all were the threats posed by the various animal inhabitants of the jungle, hungry for new prey. “There was great fear of snakes, which were absolutely in the jungle.” And even bigger fear was the tigers that called the jungle home.

Alexander says there were “several accounts of tigers following their pilots, like curious cats. Just watching … it’s altogether a very terrifying experience.”

Unprepared and undertrained pilots

Despite the danger, most of these men were given minimal preparation. While bomber crews and infantry units received rigorous briefings and training, the young men flying the Hump were often rushed through their courses.

“They were given sort of perfunctory ‘How to survive in a jungle’ training,” Alexander notes. “Which for young airmen who’d come from, say, Iowa or Kansas was utterly bewildering.”

Many had never seen mountains before, let alone flown blind across them in unarmed planes with no backup.

And for all their efforts, the mission faded from popular memory.

So why isn’t this extraordinary story better known?

Why the Hump is rarely remembered

Despite the scale of the effort, with thousands of flights and as many casualties, the Hump operation remains a relatively obscure footnote in many histories of the Second World War, and the China-Burma-India theatre (CBI), where the mission was based, was seen by many in the West as secondary to the more high-profile European and Pacific campaigns.

Partly, Alexander proposes, that could be down to the long-term failure of the Hump’s mission. While supplies were successfully funnelled into China (albeit at great cost), Roosevelt’s broader geo-political strategic aims were never met.

• Read more | What was the Truman Doctrine?

“The real reason that America was supplying China was that Roosevelt wanted China as an ally in the post-war world. In his naivety, he imagined that this would be a Western-looking, possibly Christian, definitely democratic shoulder-to-shoulder partner for America,” says Alexander.

Instead, the Chinese civil war after the Second World War ended with the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in 1949. The new People’s Republic of China sealed itself from Western influence, becoming an insular and inward-looking nation, more closely aligned with the Soviet Union than the Western democracies.

Roosevelt’s grand vision collapsed, and so did the historical spotlight on efforts like the Hump.

Now, it stands as one of the US’s primary adversaries on the international stage.

“I think the lesson I would carry away is that ideology and wishful thinking must never override intelligence,” Alexander concludes.

But despite the danger, and the ultimate fruitlessness of the mission, the pilots who made the journey across the Hump continued to do what they were asked. Daunted, certainly, but diligent.

This article is based on an interview with Caroline Alexander, speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

D-Day: Land, Air and Sea

Member exclusive | Discover the story of 6 June 1944 from the perspectives of the soldiers, sailors and airborne troops who served. Featuring interviews with WW2 experts Saul David, Nick Hewitt and Giles Milton, as well as gripping eyewitness testimonies.

Listen to all episodes now