Hump: America's Strategy for Keeping China in World War II

NOTES

249 NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Originally the term “Hump” referred only to the southerly Himalayan mountain range crossed during flights between India and China. As the war progressed , the Hump became synonymous with that airlift itself, serving as shorthand for both the airlift’s location and operation. I retain that shorthand throughout this work. 2. The best estimate on the precise amount of tonnage delivered to China from India by U.S. military air transport is 738,987 short tons (all tonnage in this work is expressed in short tons of 2,000 pounds unless otherwise noted). This figure is derived from the totals found in USAAF, ATC, Historical Officer, Air Transportation to China under the 10th Air Force; and U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey , Military Analysis Division, Air Transport Command. Note also that the Burma and Ledo Roads would eventually connect and be renamed the Stilwell Road in January 1945. 3. The best single-volume survey of the Hump is Koenig’s Over the Hump, part of Ballantine’s Illustrated History of the Violent Century series. Koenig packs a wealth of information (and photos) into the book’s 150 pages, covering the Hump’s history from the beginning to end. He rightly emphasizes the early part of the lift, as it is the operation’s growth up to the summer of 1944 that is the most significant part of the story. His sources are all secondary (books printed in English ), so they leave out the Chinese and Japanese perspectives. The most prominent memoir is Tunner’s Over the Hump, covering the final year of the operation from his vantage point as the India-China Wing commander. Tunner was pivotal in bringing the era of “big business” to the lift, as he built on Thomas Hardin’s work to boost the lift to phenomenal heights. Over the Hump is helpful, too, in that it covers the Berlin Airlift (which Tunner eventually commanded), the conceptual 250 NOTES TO PAGES 2–4 offspring of the Hump. The chief weakness of the work is that it covers only the tail end of the operation and is furthermore written as a work of advocacy, thus lacking a critical dimension. A good complement to Tunner is Spencer’s Flying the Hump. Spencer was a Hump pilot who served toward the midpoint of the campaign , and his memoirs are useful primarily in showing just how challenging it was to fly the Hump, especially as inexperienced flyers were tossed into missions in the world’s deadliest terrain and weather. In discussing the Hump as part of the broader air war in World War II, Craven and Cate’s Army Air Forces still remains a standard reference. Volume 1 contains a chapter titled “Commitments to China,” which briefly covers the U.S. airpower history of the China-Burma-India theater up to the creation of the Tenth Air Force. Volume 7 is more specific, with a major section titled “Air Transport” as well as the 38-page chapter “Airline to China.” 4. I use the pinyin system of romanization throughout this work with the exception of direct quotes from period sources and in the case of prominent figures like Chiang Kaishek (in lieu of Jiang Jieshi) and T. V. Soong (in lieu of Song Ziwen). In the case of Chiang I have also chosen to adopt the pinyin convention that drops the hyphen from his surname. 5. One of the earliest examples of this interplay came on June 26, 1942, when Chiang was notified that U.S. B-17 bombers and A-24 attack aircraft assigned for service in China had been redirected by the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George Marshall, to fly to Egypt to help British forces that were being threatened by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. When Chiang was informed of Marshall’s decision, he went on to question the United States’ sincerity toward China, sardonically stating, “I am unhappy about this development. The China Theater of War is lightly regarded. Naturally I wish to know whether America and Britain consider it as one of the Allied Theaters.” Three days later Chiang issued three demands as a way of testing the sincerity of FDR’s rhetoric, requesting, among other things, 5,000 tons per month of tonnage over the Hump. Romanus and Sunderland, Stilwell’s Mission, pp. 169–72. 6. The clearest example of this is seen in a report titled Summary of Spring Diversions, issued by ATC in...