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Wall Street Journal
12 hours ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Trump's Tariffs Weaken America's Military
Eighty years ago, the U.S. Army Air Forces staged an exhibition beneath the Eiffel Tower. Thousands of Parisians gathered to admire the B-17 Flying Fortress—an American-built aircraft that helped liberate Europe from Nazi occupation. Primitive by today's standards, those bombers were the product of a national industrial base operating at full capacity. They were deployed by a trans-Atlantic alliance that shared logistics, intelligence and purpose. That model of coordination is what we need now—but it's being tested by a trade agenda that favors confrontation over cooperation. As I co-lead the congressional delegation to this week's Paris Air Show, the world's largest defense aerospace expo, I find myself asking: Is the greatest obstacle to America's security not China or Russia but our own trade policy?
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Chaos, confusion and ice-covered wings: The WW2 mission that every pilot dreaded
Among the many individual battles that will be commemorated this year on the anniversary of Allied victories in WW2, are those of the brutal campaign against the Japanese in Burma (as Myanmar was then called). Fought in jungle and parching heat, the long battle for Burma turned in February-March of 1945, eighty years ago, with Allied victories at the key towns of Meiktila and Mandalay. The Burma campaign, as one historian wrote, had 'the elements of a great Homeric saga…. it took place in a fantastic terrain, isolated by great mountains and jungles from any other theatre.' Adjacent to this epic strife, and entangled with it, were the events of the little-known China-Burma-India arena, known as CBI, which are less likely to be the object of significant commemoration. As its name indicates, CBI operations extended beyond India and Burma into China, and reflected specifically-US interests, yet even in the US few today know its history. In part this is because the CBI's objective of fostering a close relationship between the US and China in the post-war world was so obviously a failure; in part, too, because it was so chaotic that even those who participated in the CBI were often unclear what they were doing there. A retired US Army Air Forces colonel who had been based in China, made a common assessment: 'I cannot dwell on the military causes and effects of my mission,' he wrote. 'I must drop that flat before I become utterly confused again.' CBI, it was said, stood for Confusion Beyond Imagination. Competing interests of the British and American allies afflicted the CBI with a chaotic, 'necessarily abnormal' (according to US Army chief of staff George C. Marshall) structure of command. Friction between the Allies was a fact of the war, but in the CBI this was massaged into vicious enmity and it spawned many shocking and now little-known events. These included an extraordinary motion made in Parliament to declare a US general 'persona non grata in any war theatre where British officers and men are serving,' and a US plot to assassinate the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek by dropping him from an aircraft as it flew over the 'Hump' of the Himalayan foothills. The Hump, as it was dubbed, was an operation of unprecedented ambition: to supply Free China entirely by air following the loss to Japanese forces, in April 1942, of the Burma Road, the only practical land route into China. President Roosevelt, intent on keeping China in the war and fearful that its leader might make a separate peace with the Japanese, had boldly declared that 'no matter what advances the Japanese make, ways will be found to deliver airplanes and munitions of war to the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.' The 800-mile route from air bases in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, to Kunming, the capital of China's southwestern province Yunnan, exposed pilots and aircraft to conditions of terrain and weather never before experienced. Turning east after takeoff, if weather allowed, pilots were awarded one of the great spectacles on earth – a panoramic view of the Himalayan mountains to the north, rising in nonchalant grandeur higher. 'I gasped,' recalled one pilot of breaking through clouds to a view of the ranks of dazzling peaks in the distance. 'Sheer, absolute beauty.' The route, which kept over the lowest peaks, passed over north Burma and its vast ocean of dense, mountainous jungle; over the silver-flash of the Irrawaddy River; over the Kumon range that marked the boundary between Burma and China, and, eastward still, over the great gorges of the Salween and Mekong rivers, so deeply cut that they seemed to lie in perpetual, menacing shadow. Most airmen rarely saw this magnificent landscape, for by ill fate the route also passed through the worst weather system for aviation in the world – a convergence of warm, moist high-pressure masses arising from the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea to the west and east, and the frigid winds that poured down from Siberia and Tibet to the north. Slamming against the wall of the Himalayas, these chronic systems, laden with ice, also created deadly mountain wave effects, with wind shears and turbulence that even the most experienced pilots had not only never experienced but had not imagined possible. Early surveillance of a possible aerial route – made in clear weather – had issued warnings: 'If the weather should be much worse,' one key report read, 'with bad cross winds or a bad icing condition, or if the tops of the clouds should be two or three thousand feet higher than we saw, then it would be extremely dangerous and costly and very nearly impractical.' Despite such stark cautions, Roosevelt pressed ahead and the aerial route was launched. Every element had to be assembled from scratch. Aircraft were desperately needed elsewhere, yet a new fleet had to be scraped together. Airmen, also in short supply, were hustled through flight programmes, with the result that some arrived in Assam with as few as 25 hours of instrument training for conditions that would necessitate instrument flying – over mountains – within minutes of take-off. Much of the route was over uncharted landscape and no map reliably indicated the heights of the ranges over which the pilots, often in dense cloud, had to fly, an unclarity that spawned rumours of 'lost' mountains—mysterious peaks that rose over 30,000 feet around the Amne Machin range. New aircraft designed for greater carrying capacity were rushed to India before they had been fully tested, where ice, altitude, monsoon, and humidity quickly found their weaknesses. Air-traffic control towers were built in tall trees overlooking the base field; elephants were used to load the great drums of high-octane fuel that constituted the bulk of the cargo. As the air operation lurched forward, its success was measured by the monthly tonnage that the growing fleet was able to haul over the Hump. Chiang initially demanded 5,000 tons a month, a figure that broke down to 1,666 flights carrying an average – and excessive – load of three tons per overloaded Dakota plane; by early 1943, Chiang was demanding 10,000 tons a month. The frenetic pace of improvisation took an all too visible toll, and soon the air route shadowed a trail of crashed planes from Assam to Kunming, which cynical airmen dubbed the Aluminium Trail. As non-combatants, mere cargo carriers, the Air Transport Command, or ATC airmen occupied the lowest rung of aviation hierarchy (ATC, it was said, stood for Allergic to Combat). Arriving at the bedraggled airbases that had been carved out of British tea estates or raw jungle, new airmen were further demoralised by the dismal living conditions in bamboo huts, and by veteran pilots' litany of worst-flight stories over the Hump – stories of engines choked by ice, of crews that crashed and crews that bailed over mountains and jungle, of fierce winds that batted aircraft so far off course that, with only rudimentary navigational aids, they became lost over the vast, featureless jungle of north Burma; one pilot reported a drift angle of 45˚, meaning the winds were his plane was flying sideways. Experienced pilots, including from the American commercial airlines and a few from the RAF, while awed by the weather, were psychologically able to handle the task. For inexperienced and incompletely trained pilots, however, acquiring the requisite 650 Hump flight hours that would release them from service was a crushing ordeal. Pilot Jack Pope recalled the 'cold chilling fear' incited by the words of the duty officer who came before dawn to rouse him: 'Time for your flight, sir.' Leadenly, he would rise, dress, and head for the waiting jeep that would take him through monsoon rain and mud to the air field. Like most new airmen, Jack Pope soon had his own worst-flight story: 'The date – that was a mile-stone in my life,' he wrote. 'January seventh nineteen hundred forty four. The time is 0900 hours… My wings are ice-covered…There is a cold steel knot in my stomach…Ahead of me is a thunderhead.' Too high to fly over, to massive to fly around, the great storm could not be skirted, and Pope ploughed his plane directly into it. 'The Curtiss Commando – C-46 – is seized as if with a giant hand – it vibrates like a hand air hammer running wild. My altimeter goes crazy.' The bottom seemed to drop out of the very air, the plane plunged, and as he and his co-pilot wrestled with the controls they briefly flew inverted. Sick with fear, literally, Pope regurgitated into his oxygen mask. But the engines keep turning; the air became calmer and the peaks lower, and he had completed another trip over the Hump. 'The kids are flying over their head,' warned the deputy commander of the Air Transport Command, but renewed efforts to augment pilot training could not keep pace with the need. A medical study of 'problems peculiar to Hump pilots,' a condition dubbed 'Humpitis,' noted that many were 'fair weather' pilots, but also acknowledged the 'real hazards', such as weather, lack of confidence in the aircraft, 'the possibility of death in the jungle' if forced to bail out, susceptibility to 'the legend of the Hump', and, most inconvenient to Roosevelt's objective, knowledge of '[t]he ultimate disposition of urgent supplies which they had to fly over the 'Hump';' specifically pilots feared, 'with reason, that most of it would be wasted by the Chinese.' The ultimate disposition of many of the goods was the lively black-market trade that supplied shops in Kunming; individual entrepreneurs of many nationalities, including some US airmen; and, most distressingly, shops and individuals in Japanese-occupied cities. Writing in his diary, one pilot reflected on the strikingly few Japanese attacks on transport planes, noting 'there is no doubt that they could almost stop this route if they wanted to, but either it isn't worth the effort or instead, as most fellows believe, a good third of what we bring to China ends up in Jap hands through Chinese warlords.' It was also an open secret that the 'vital supplies' transported with so much effort to keep Chiang's Nationalist government in the war were not being used to fight the Japanese. As early as the autumn of 1941, an American investigative military mission had reported that 'no contact between Chinese and Japanese troops at the front was observed', and that 'the interest of the Chinese towards any aggressive action appears to be quite negligible, regardless of their statements that all they need is airplanes, tanks and artillery in order to drive the aggression from their shores.' The desire for modern materials, it continued, was 'to make the Central Government safe against insurrection after diplomatic pressure by other nations had forced Japan out of China.' In the face of such widely known facts, the US fixation on Chiang, and of catering to so many of his demands, baffled and frustrated the British. 'Why the Americans attached such importance to Chiang I have never discovered,' Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote in his memoir. 'He had nothing to contribute to the defeat of the Germans, and for the matter of that uncommonly little towards the defeat of Japanese.' The US had floated several rationales for its China policy: keeping China in the war would 'tie down' Japanese forces that would otherwise be released to fight in the Pacific. Air bases in China would bring Allied bombers within striking distance of the Japanese mainland. More fantastically, a military presence in China would enable US General 'Vinegar' Joe Stilwell to lead a US-trained Chinese army overland through Siam (Thailand) into Indochina, and onward to Hong Kong or Canton. As the war evolved, reality checked these plans. The majority of seasoned Japanese divisions in China were stationed in Manchuria, along the Russian border, with only forces 'inferior in quality,' in the words of the Japanese command, dispersed throughout the rest of China – and, as one Hump pilot mused, even if Chiang's government did collapse, 'there were many regional warlords with private armies, who were experienced in fighting guerrilla wars. They could keep the Japanese military very busy.' With the US advance across the Pacific, the big B-29 bombers were swiftly removed from the CBI to the Mariana Islands, the better to strike Japan. Stilwell's fantasy of an overland march across Asia with a not yet existent army also evaporated with the Pacific advance and more clear-eyed scrutiny. But Roosevelt's determined support of Chiang was based less on military objectives than on his grand vision of the postwar world order. China – stable, pro-American, democratic – would help America maintain order in the Pacific, especially 'in certain colonial areas' after the inevitable collapse of British and European regional power. 'After this war we shall have to think of China, America, Britain and Russia as the four 'big policemen' of the world,' Roosevelt told Chiang. Their conversation took place at the Cairo Conference of November 1943, the only occasion on which the two leaders met. By many accounts the meetings shook the President, who now personally witnessed Chiang's vacillation, evasion, and apparent obliviousness to wider issues of the war. Decades later, Stillwell's aide Frank Dorn claimed in a published memoir that, following the conference, Roosevelt gave Stilwell the order to 'prepare a plan for the assassination of Chiang Kai-shek'. After much whispered consultations, it was decided that a US pilot flying Chiang to China would be given secret orders to crash the plane over the Hump. Pilot and crew would bail to safety but Chiang's parachute would be 'fixed' so that, Dorn's words, 'when his chute opens, old C.K.S. drops like a plumb bob.' The assassination plan was never activated, although Washington toyed with other means of getting rid of Chiang, for example by shifting financial support to one of his competitors. Ultimately, however, it was decided to stay the course. Much had been invested in him, and the task of cultivating another candidate would be enormous. Washington could best control Chiang, it was believed, by continuing its show of favouritism towards him, and the supply line over the Hump was the most straightforward means of doing this. According to Air Transport Command records, its aircraft carried 776,532 tons over the Hump between December 1, 1942, and the end of operations in November 1945. Officially, an estimated 594 transport planes were lost, along with 1,659 to 3,861 pilots and crew – a suspiciously wide range that draws attention to incomplete record keeping; for one thing, few reports were filed for missing aircraft before June 1943. Some 1,200 airmen are estimated to have bailed out of stricken planes somewhere over the Hump, mostly into the Burmese jungle, where relics of the Aluminum Trail can still be found. In villages in north Myanmar, for example, garden plots are ringed with jagged metal fences, cut from the fuselage of aircraft still lying in the jungle. Unprecedented in its time, the Hump operation paved the way for the Berlin airlift and showed new ways to supply military forces in time of war. What it did not achieve was its primary objective of a close relationship between the US and China. Nonetheless, China has warmly received Americans with any association with the Hump. 'When the guest house owner learned who I was and why I was there, he refused any payment from me,' reported an American who had come to a remote village looking for the crash site of a lost Hump plane. 'He instructed his staff that everything for me is 'on the house.'' The villagers, it seems, saw only the nub of this story: that American airmen had died for China. Caroline Alexander is the author of Skies of Thunder, published now by Ithaka Press, £25 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
02-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Chaos, confusion and ice-covered wings: The WW2 mission that every pilot dreaded
Among the many individual battles that will be commemorated this year on the anniversary of Allied victories in WW2, are those of the brutal campaign against the Japanese in Burma (as Myanmar was then called). Fought in jungle and parching heat, the long battle for Burma turned in February-March of 1945, eighty years ago, with Allied victories at the key towns of Meiktila and Mandalay. The Burma campaign, as one historian wrote, had 'the elements of a great Homeric saga…. it took place in a fantastic terrain, isolated by great mountains and jungles from any other theatre.' Adjacent to this epic strife, and entangled with it, were the events of the little-known China-Burma-India arena, known as CBI, which are less likely to be the object of significant commemoration. As its name indicates, CBI operations extended beyond India and Burma into China, and reflected specifically-US interests, yet even in the US few today know its history. In part this is because the CBI's objective of fostering a close relationship between the US and China in the post-war world was so obviously a failure; in part, too, because it was so chaotic that even those who participated in the CBI were often unclear what they were doing there. A retired US Army Air Forces colonel who had been based in China, made a common assessment: 'I cannot dwell on the military causes and effects of my mission,' he wrote. 'I must drop that flat before I become utterly confused again.' CBI, it was said, stood for Confusion Beyond Imagination. Competing interests of the British and American allies afflicted the CBI with a chaotic, 'necessarily abnormal' (according to US Army chief of staff George C. Marshall) structure of command. Friction between the Allies was a fact of the war, but in the CBI this was massaged into vicious enmity and it spawned many shocking and now little-known events. These included an extraordinary motion made in Parliament to declare a US general 'persona non grata in any war theatre where British officers and men are serving,' and a US plot to assassinate the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek by dropping him from an aircraft as it flew over the 'Hump' of the Himalayan foothills. The Hump, as it was dubbed, was an operation of unprecedented ambition: to supply Free China entirely by air following the loss to Japanese forces, in April 1942, of the Burma Road, the only practical land route into China. President Roosevelt, intent on keeping China in the war and fearful that its leader might make a separate peace with the Japanese, had boldly declared that 'no matter what advances the Japanese make, ways will be found to deliver airplanes and munitions of war to the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.' The 800-mile route from air bases in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, to Kunming, the capital of China's southwestern province Yunnan, exposed pilots and aircraft to conditions of terrain and weather never before experienced. Turning east after takeoff, if weather allowed, pilots were awarded one of the great spectacles on earth – a panoramic view of the Himalayan mountains to the north, rising in nonchalant grandeur higher. 'I gasped,' recalled one pilot of breaking through clouds to a view of the ranks of dazzling peaks in the distance. 'Sheer, absolute beauty.' The route, which kept over the lowest peaks, passed over north Burma and its vast ocean of dense, mountainous jungle; over the silver-flash of the Irrawaddy River; over the Kumon range that marked the boundary between Burma and China, and, eastward still, over the great gorges of the Salween and Mekong rivers, so deeply cut that they seemed to lie in perpetual, menacing shadow. Most airmen rarely saw this magnificent landscape, for by ill fate the route also passed through the worst weather system for aviation in the world – a convergence of warm, moist high-pressure masses arising from the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea to the west and east, and the frigid winds that poured down from Siberia and Tibet to the north. Slamming against the wall of the Himalayas, these chronic systems, laden with ice, also created deadly mountain wave effects, with wind shears and turbulence that even the most experienced pilots had not only never experienced but had not imagined possible. Early surveillance of a possible aerial route – made in clear weather – had issued warnings: 'If the weather should be much worse,' one key report read, 'with bad cross winds or a bad icing condition, or if the tops of the clouds should be two or three thousand feet higher than we saw, then it would be extremely dangerous and costly and very nearly impractical.' Despite such stark cautions, Roosevelt pressed ahead and the aerial route was launched. Every element had to be assembled from scratch. Aircraft were desperately needed elsewhere, yet a new fleet had to be scraped together. Airmen, also in short supply, were hustled through flight programmes, with the result that some arrived in Assam with as few as 25 hours of instrument training for conditions that would necessitate instrument flying – over mountains – within minutes of take-off. Much of the route was over uncharted landscape and no map reliably indicated the heights of the ranges over which the pilots, often in dense cloud, had to fly, an unclarity that spawned rumours of 'lost' mountains—mysterious peaks that rose over 30,000 feet around the Amne Machin range. New aircraft designed for greater carrying capacity were rushed to India before they had been fully tested, where ice, altitude, monsoon, and humidity quickly found their weaknesses. Air-traffic control towers were built in tall trees overlooking the base field; elephants were used to load the great drums of high-octane fuel that constituted the bulk of the cargo. As the air operation lurched forward, its success was measured by the monthly tonnage that the growing fleet was able to haul over the Hump. Chiang initially demanded 5,000 tons a month, a figure that broke down to 1,666 flights carrying an average – and excessive – load of three tons per overloaded Dakota plane; by early 1943, Chiang was demanding 10,000 tons a month. The frenetic pace of improvisation took an all too visible toll, and soon the air route shadowed a trail of crashed planes from Assam to Kunming, which cynical airmen dubbed the Aluminium Trail. As non-combatants, mere cargo carriers, the Air Transport Command, or ATC airmen occupied the lowest rung of aviation hierarchy (ATC, it was said, stood for Allergic to Combat). Arriving at the bedraggled airbases that had been carved out of British tea estates or raw jungle, new airmen were further demoralised by the dismal living conditions in bamboo huts, and by veteran pilots' litany of worst-flight stories over the Hump – stories of engines choked by ice, of crews that crashed and crews that bailed over mountains and jungle, of fierce winds that batted aircraft so far off course that, with only rudimentary navigational aids, they became lost over the vast, featureless jungle of north Burma; one pilot reported a drift angle of 45˚, meaning the winds were his plane was flying sideways. Experienced pilots, including from the American commercial airlines and a few from the RAF, while awed by the weather, were psychologically able to handle the task. For inexperienced and incompletely trained pilots, however, acquiring the requisite 650 Hump flight hours that would release them from service was a crushing ordeal. Pilot Jack Pope recalled the 'cold chilling fear' incited by the words of the duty officer who came before dawn to rouse him: 'Time for your flight, sir.' Leadenly, he would rise, dress, and head for the waiting jeep that would take him through monsoon rain and mud to the air field. Like most new airmen, Jack Pope soon had his own worst-flight story: 'The date – that was a mile-stone in my life,' he wrote. ' January seventh nineteen hundred forty four. The time is 0900 hours… My wings are ice-covered…There is a cold steel knot in my stomach…Ahead of me is a thunderhead.' Too high to fly over, to massive to fly around, the great storm could not be skirted, and Pope ploughed his plane directly into it. 'The Curtiss Commando – C-46 – is seized as if with a giant hand – it vibrates like a hand air hammer running wild. My altimeter goes crazy.' The bottom seemed to drop out of the very air, the plane plunged, and as he and his co-pilot wrestled with the controls they briefly flew inverted. Sick with fear, literally, Pope regurgitated into his oxygen mask. But the engines keep turning; the air became calmer and the peaks lower, and he had completed another trip over the Hump. 'The kids are flying over their head,' warned the deputy commander of the Air Transport Command, but renewed efforts to augment pilot training could not keep pace with the need. A medical study of 'problems peculiar to Hump pilots,' a condition dubbed 'Humpitis,' noted that many were 'fair weather' pilots, but also acknowledged the 'real hazards', such as weather, lack of confidence in the aircraft, 'the possibility of death in the jungle' if forced to bail out, susceptibility to 'the legend of the Hump', and, most inconvenient to Roosevelt's objective, knowledge of '[t]he ultimate disposition of urgent supplies which they had to fly over the 'Hump';' specifically pilots feared, 'with reason, that most of it would be wasted by the Chinese.' The ultimate disposition of many of the goods was the lively black-market trade that supplied shops in Kunming; individual entrepreneurs of many nationalities, including some US airmen; and, most distressingly, shops and individuals in Japanese-occupied cities. Writing in his diary, one pilot reflected on the strikingly few Japanese attacks on transport planes, noting 'there is no doubt that they could almost stop this route if they wanted to, but either it isn't worth the effort or instead, as most fellows believe, a good third of what we bring to China ends up in Jap hands through Chinese warlords.' It was also an open secret that the 'vital supplies' transported with so much effort to keep Chiang's Nationalist government in the war were not being used to fight the Japanese. As early as the autumn of 1941, an American investigative military mission had reported that 'no contact between Chinese and Japanese troops at the front was observed', and that 'the interest of the Chinese towards any aggressive action appears to be quite negligible, regardless of their statements that all they need is airplanes, tanks and artillery in order to drive the aggression from their shores.' The desire for modern materials, it continued, was 'to make the Central Government safe against insurrection after diplomatic pressure by other nations had forced Japan out of China.' In the face of such widely known facts, the US fixation on Chiang, and of catering to so many of his demands, baffled and frustrated the British. 'Why the Americans attached such importance to Chiang I have never discovered,' Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote in his memoir. 'He had nothing to contribute to the defeat of the Germans, and for the matter of that uncommonly little towards the defeat of Japanese.' The US had floated several rationales for its China policy: keeping China in the war would 'tie down' Japanese forces that would otherwise be released to fight in the Pacific. Air bases in China would bring Allied bombers within striking distance of the Japanese mainland. More fantastically, a military presence in China would enable US General 'Vinegar' Joe Stilwell to lead a US-trained Chinese army overland through Siam (Thailand) into Indochina, and onward to Hong Kong or Canton. As the war evolved, reality checked these plans. The majority of seasoned Japanese divisions in China were stationed in Manchuria, along the Russian border, with only forces 'inferior in quality,' in the words of the Japanese command, dispersed throughout the rest of China – and, as one Hump pilot mused, even if Chiang's government did collapse, 'there were many regional warlords with private armies, who were experienced in fighting guerrilla wars. They could keep the Japanese military very busy.' With the US advance across the Pacific, the big B-29 bombers were swiftly removed from the CBI to the Mariana Islands, the better to strike Japan. Stilwell's fantasy of an overland march across Asia with a not yet existent army also evaporated with the Pacific advance and more clear-eyed scrutiny. But Roosevelt's determined support of Chiang was based less on military objectives than on his grand vision of the postwar world order. China – stable, pro-American, democratic – would help America maintain order in the Pacific, especially 'in certain colonial areas' after the inevitable collapse of British and European regional power. 'After this war we shall have to think of China, America, Britain and Russia as the four 'big policemen' of the world,' Roosevelt told Chiang. Their conversation took place at the Cairo Conference of November 1943, the only occasion on which the two leaders met. By many accounts the meetings shook the President, who now personally witnessed Chiang's vacillation, evasion, and apparent obliviousness to wider issues of the war. Decades later, Stillwell's aide Frank Dorn claimed in a published memoir that, following the conference, Roosevelt gave Stilwell the order to 'prepare a plan for the assassination of Chiang Kai-shek'. After much whispered consultations, it was decided that a US pilot flying Chiang to China would be given secret orders to crash the plane over the Hump. Pilot and crew would bail to safety but Chiang's parachute would be 'fixed' so that, Dorn's words, 'when his chute opens, old C.K.S. drops like a plumb bob.' The assassination plan was never activated, although Washington toyed with other means of getting rid of Chiang, for example by shifting financial support to one of his competitors. Ultimately, however, it was decided to stay the course. Much had been invested in him, and the task of cultivating another candidate would be enormous. Washington could best control Chiang, it was believed, by continuing its show of favouritism towards him, and the supply line over the Hump was the most straightforward means of doing this. According to Air Transport Command records, its aircraft carried 776,532 tons over the Hump between December 1, 1942, and the end of operations in November 1945. Officially, an estimated 594 transport planes were lost, along with 1,659 to 3,861 pilots and crew – a suspiciously wide range that draws attention to incomplete record keeping; for one thing, few reports were filed for missing aircraft before June 1943. Some 1,200 airmen are estimated to have bailed out of stricken planes somewhere over the Hump, mostly into the Burmese jungle, where relics of the Aluminum Trail can still be found. In villages in north Myanmar, for example, garden plots are ringed with jagged metal fences, cut from the fuselage of aircraft still lying in the jungle. Unprecedented in its time, the Hump operation paved the way for the Berlin airlift and showed new ways to supply military forces in time of war. What it did not achieve was its primary objective of a close relationship between the US and China. Nonetheless, China has warmly received Americans with any association with the Hump. 'When the guest house owner learned who I was and why I was there, he refused any payment from me,' reported an American who had come to a remote village looking for the crash site of a lost Hump plane. 'He instructed his staff that everything for me is 'on the house.'' The villagers, it seems, saw only the nub of this story: that American airmen had died for China. Caroline Alexander is the author of Skies of Thunder, published now by Ithaka Press, £25
