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

2. Terrain, Weather, Pilots, and Planes

✪ 44 2 T E R R A I N , W E AT H E R , P I L O T S , A N D P L A N E S Before studying the chronological history of the Hump as it would begin to unfold after March 1942, it is worthwhile to pause and spend a chapter looking specifically at the environment in which the airlift took place as well as at the pilots and planes that flew there. Looking at a simple planiform map of the supply-mission’s route might leave someone unimpressed, the flight being relatively short by air transport standards. Depending on the points of departure and arrival, the flights back and forth from India and China usually averaged only five hundred miles, whereas the trip from Natal, Brazil to Accra, Ghana, covered five times that distance. When matched with all of the regularly scheduled routes flown by AAF transports, the Hump route was among the shortest; yet to this day it is remembered as the most difficult of them all. For over sixty years a veterans’ organization existed—the Hump Pilots Association (HPA)—with its members knitted together by one common experience, that of flying over the Himalayan “Hump.” This was no back-alley organization, either, as its members, over time, garnered the respect of national leaders of both U.S. and Chinese stripes. In 1978 President Gerald Ford was the distinguished visitor at an annual HPA reunion in Vail, Colorado, where he extolled the heroics of the Hump’s flyers.1 The Republic of China also publicly recognized the efforts of the Hump pilots by award- TERRAIN, WEATHER, PILOTS, AND PLANES 45 ing them the Chinese Commendation Medal, commemorating their “celebration of victory together.”2 In 2005 a group of approximately thirty former Hump fliers traveled to the People’s Republic of China, where they were met by adoring crowds and addressed personally by President Hu Jintao, who hosted them at a state dinner held in Beijing at the Great Hall of the People near Tiananmen Square, honoring the memory of what they did during China’s “Anti-Fascist” war.3 To better understand the motivation behind such an outpouring of gratitude, it is necessary to appreciate the makeup of the Hump route; current Sino-U.S. sentiment recognizes the airlift not simply because it delivered supplies to “keep China in the war,” but because of its demanding environment. One qualification is necessary before going further, that having to do with the temptation to succumb too easily to the Hump’s heroics. Joseph A. McKeown , a Northwest Airlines pilot before the war, recognized this tendency to overstate the airlift’s dangers, reporting it in a letter written to his company’s “tough and ambitious” president, Croil Hunter, on September 18, 1942.4 McKeown was among the first batch of airline pilots commissioned by the AAF earlier that spring to serve as an initial cadre of aviators sent to fly supplies to China. Responding to a news article written by a reporter who flew with him on a flight over the Hump earlier that summer, McKeown wrote that he “saw an article from a U.S. newspaper about me flying the Burma road that was full of blood and thunder and malarkey,” prompting him to “write and put you [Hunter] straight so you won’t think I’m a scatterbrained nitwit instead of a sample of airline piloting technique.” McKeown goes on to write, “On the aerial Burma road run the minimum instrument altitude is 17,000 feet with the mountains some 23,000 to the side of the course,”5 adding, “We do not fly on instruments all iced up through narrow passes at 18,000 feet with no radio bearings [for navigation] as the newspaper stated.” Perhaps in an effort to excuse the reporter’s exaggerations, McKeown offers, “The particular trip that seemed so hair raising was only so because one of my engines was cutting out while on instruments,” leading to this explanation : “We naturally have to take risks to get the job done, but we are not foolish enough to [as the article alleged] chase through passes blindly and take on ice at altitudes where the overloaded airplane is already mushing with full power and 2,459 rpm.”6 Surprisingly, McKeown did claim there were hazards in flying the Hump— CHAPTER 2 46 not because it was...