Non-fiction corner: Scrappy WW-II pilots who took flight for a perilous mission

Elizabeth D. Samet

“You and your outfit have been assigned one of the most important military missions ever given to American soldiers — the task of driving the Japanese back to Tokyo.” So begins “A Pocket Guide to India,” prepared for World War II service members in the western base section of the China-Burma-India Theater, commonly known as the C.B.I. “India is a strange, colorful land,” the guide continues. “If you exercise a normal amount of curiosity you’ll learn much that is fascinating; much that will enable you to begin stories to your children or grandchildren in later years, ‘Now, when I was in India. …’”

If the guide seems to protest too much, perhaps that’s because the C.B.I. was, as Caroline Alexander explains in her riveting new book, “Skies of Thunder,” under-resourced, improvisational and rife with smugglers, its actual purpose murkier than its symbolic value. It was the war’s “most chaotic theater,” she writes, marked by “competing interests, and contradictions that exposed the fault lines between the Allies.” To some stationed there, C.B.I. stood for “Confusion Beyond Imagination.”

My father, who served as an air traffic controller in the C.B.I., didn’t recall reading the “Pocket Guide,” but he did tell me stories of working in Delhi and Agra, a vital supply depot and service point, and traveling to various locations to lay radio-range beacons. The main point of these activities, he explained, was to enable pilots to fly supplies over the Himalayas to China. While it was always easy for me to picture my father in his control tower, those flights over the mountains remained mysterious until I read Alexander’s vivid account.

Alexander, the author of books on Shackleton’s Endurance expedition and the fateful voyage of the Bounty, begins with the Allied loss of Burma to the Japanese in April 1942, which sealed off the ground supply corridor from India to China and led to the opening of an “aerial Burma Road.” This treacherous route, known as “the Hump,” supplied Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and Allied troops, including the 14th Air Force, commanded by the flamboyant Claire Chennault.

Alexander casts her story as an “epic,” yet it is one in which the actors suffer like Job more often than they fight like Achilles. There are stirring episodes of British sang-froid, “American-style glamour” and remarkable courage among the region’s remote tribal peoples, but it is perseverance that assumes heroic proportions: refugees escaping through the Burmese jungle; soldiers and local laborers hacking through that same jungle to build a new road; Assam airfield personnel living in squalor, seared by the sun, swamped by monsoons, but most of all shrouded in a “miasma of cynical indifference.” What unites this book with the author’s previous work is a fascination with human behavior in extremis.

While Alexander devotes considerable space to strategic and political issues, her interest lies primarily in the vicissitudes of individual human personality. In places she represents the theater’s dysfunction as a tragicomedy of failed relationships at the highest levels of command: between the mercurial Chiang Kai-shek and the American Joseph Stilwell, the theater’s irascible, insecure commanding general; between Stilwell and the unscrupulous, self-aggrandizing Chennault; between Stilwell and the British allies he loathed.

Alexander’s gift for dramatizing these personal animosities occasionally produces seductive yet oversimplified biographical explanations of historical problems, a mode E.H. Carr described as “the Bad King John theory of history.” Ultimately, and rightly, the pilots — intrepid as “sailors of old” crossing “unknown oceans” — are the core of the book. Demeaned as “Hump drivers,” ostensible noncombatants at the bottom of the aviation hierarchy, they flew an inadequately charted route over baffling terrain, its surreality intensified by their frequent refusal to wear oxygen masks.

Alexander adroitly explicates technical concepts — flight mechanics, de-icing, night vision — but is at her best rendering pilots’ fear. Besides terrain, its sources included weather, enemy aircraft, insufficient training, night missions and “short rations of fuel” on the return leg. At least a pilot could depend on his plane, the beloved Douglas C-47 Skytrain, until the introduction of unreliable or unsound higher-capacity models turned the machines themselves into another source of terror.

Readers thrilled by sagas of flight will marvel at the logistics required to transport a stunning 650,000 tons of cargo by air, the audacity required to fly the Hump, the search-and-rescue operations necessitated by its hazards and the experimental use of aviation involved in the Allied recapture of Burma in 1944.

They will also have to reckon with Alexander’s hard-nosed conclusions about the C.B.I. Others who have chronicled its history concentrated on the strategic merits of this deeply imperfect theater, or celebrated its pioneering use of air power.

The image that dominates the end of Alexander’s epic is “the aluminum trail” of wreckage — “the hundreds of crashed aircraft that still lie undiscovered in the jungles, valleys and fractured ranges beneath the Hump’s old route.”