Remembering the Hump, eight decades on

This year marks the 85th anniversary of the Flying Tigers' arrival in China to support the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Their combat record is well known. Less widely remembered, yet equally consequential, is the sustained airlift operation that became known as "the Hump." It was the first large-scale combat airlift in modern history and the last major supply route into China after Japanese forces cut the Burma Road in 1942. The Flying Tigers themselves were a combat force, not the main operators of the later cargo airlift. Yet their defense of Chinese airspace and bases in 1941-42 helped create the conditions in which the Hump route could be opened and sustained after the land route was severed. Without that early protective effort, the unarmed transports that followed would have faced even greater peril. In this sense, the Tigers' arrival and the Hump airlift form linked chapters of the same story of wartime cooperation.

The pilots who flew the Hump came from many walks of American life. Some were volunteers who had already joined the China task force before the United States formally entered the war. Others were active-duty personnel of the U.S. Army Air Forces assigned to the China-Burma-India Theater. They flew alongside Chinese aircrews and ground personnel. Local communities, including ethnic Yi villagers in Sichuan and others across the mountains, repeatedly risked their lives to rescue downed airmen and recover wreckage. That mutual aid is part of the historical record and part of the bond the operation forged.

The scale remains striking. The airlift began in April 1942 with fewer than 30 aircraft. The early workhorses were Douglas C-47s, never designed for such altitudes, loads and weather they faced. Later, the larger but more troublesome Curtiss C-46 Commandos joined the fleet. By the final months of the war, the operation fielded hundreds of aircraft and delivered roughly 650,000 to 685,000 tons of fuel, munitions, medicine and other supplies to Chinese forces and Allied units in China. Peak monthly deliveries in 1945 exceeded 70,000 tons.

Every crossing carried mortal risk. Crews flew overloaded aircraft through some of the world's most severe weather, over peaks that rose above the safe operating ceiling of many of their planes, with the constant possibility of Japanese interception. Maintenance was often rudimentary, and crews were exhausted. When the books were closed, U.S. records showed approximately 509 to 594 aircraft lost and more than 1,300 aircrew confirmed dead, with several hundred more listed as missing. The route earned the grim nickname the "Aluminum Trail" for the wreckage that marked the mountainsides. A contemporary correspondent observed that pilots could plot their course by the line of smoking wrecks below.

The Hump sustained China in the war at a time when the country had already borne years of invasion alone. It demonstrated, in concrete terms, that the two nations could act together against fascism. The India-China Wing of the Air Transport Command, which flew many of the Hump missions, received a Presidential Unit Citation — the first awarded to a non-combat unit. Many of the aircraft lost on the route still lie on remote slopes. The memory of those who flew, and of those who helped them on the ground, remains part of the shared history of the two countries.