Caroline Alexander, Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over The Roof Of The World

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Okay, now let's get on with the show.

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You're listening to Episode 249 .

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Caroline Alexander was born in Florida to British parents and

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has lived in Europe, africa and the Caribbean.

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She studied philosophy and theology at Oxford as a Rhodes

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Scholar and has a doctorate in classics from Columbia

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University.

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She is the author of the New York Times bestseller the

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Endurance Shackleton's legendary Antarctic expedition, which has

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been translated into 13 languages.

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Her other books include Mrs Chippy's Last Expedition, the

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Journal of the Endurance's Cat, the Bounty, the True Story of

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the Mutiny on the Bounty, the War that Killed Achilles and her

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latest Skies of Thunder.

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Ms Alexander writes frequently for the New Yorker and National

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Geographic.

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Here's the synopsis for Skies of Thunder.

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Miss Alexander writes frequently for the New Yorker

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and National Geographic.

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Here's the synopsis for Skies of Thunder.

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In April 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army steamrolled

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through Burma, capturing the only ground route from India to

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China.

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Supplies to this critical zone would now have to come from

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India by air, meaning across the Himalayas on the most hazardous

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air route in the world.

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Skies of Thunder is the story of an epic human endeavor, one

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in which allied troops faced the monumental challenges of

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operating from airfields hacked from the jungle and taking on

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the hump the fearsome mountain barrier that defined the air

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route.

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They flew fickle, untested aircraft through monsoons and

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enemy fire, with inaccurate maps and only primitive navigation

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technology.

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The result was a litany of both deadly crashes and astonishing

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feats of survival.

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The most chaotic of all the war's arenas, the

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China-Burma-India Theatre, was further confused by the

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conflicting political interests of Roosevelt, churchill and

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their demanding nominal ally, chiang Kai-shek.

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Hi, caroline, and welcome to the show.

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It's wonderful to have you here .

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Speaker 2: Thank you very much.

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I'm excited to be here.

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Speaker 1: Congratulations on your new book, skies of Thunder

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the Deadly World War II Mission Over the the roof of the world.

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It is magnificent, thank you.

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I knew nothing about this particular part of World War II

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pertaining to Burma and I found it absolutely fascinating.

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And we'll get more into your writing of the book a little

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further on into our conversation .

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But congratulations, it's absolutely wonderful.

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The book is coming out on May 14th and I highly recommend

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pre-ordering this book.

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Okay, let's begin with learning about you and your diverse

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creative endeavors from professor, author and filmmaker.

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Speaker 2: Well, I think of myself first and foremost as a

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writer, and that was what I had always, always wanted to be from

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.

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I can remember wanting to be a writer at age six.

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At that age who knows what that really meant, but I loved books

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and I was a voracious reader.

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I was very fortunate to grow up without television, so my

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sister and I read and read, and read, and somewhere along the

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line I read a.

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I went to a high school that had no structured I almost want

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to say instruction of any kind, but that's not quite fair.

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But let's say it was wide ranging, we were given a lot of

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latitude and somewhere in the course of that I stumbled on a

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translation of the Iliad by the great Richmond Latimore, when I

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was about 14, and it was life-changing.

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I responded to the story, the characters, the speeches, the

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whole sense of this being maybe quasi-historic in a very

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visceral way and decided that I needed to learn Greek to read

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the Iliad.

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Oh my goodness.

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I grew up in the United States and classical instruction is not

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normative unless one goes to sort of prep school type things.

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So I had to wait until I went early to university.

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So I had to wait until I went early to university, graduated

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from high school early a great part to get on with my program.

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But I was also becoming increasingly aware of how many

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authors that I read and enjoyed had been classicists.

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So I was very respectful of what a traditional Greek and

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Latin curriculum can do for a young writer, or a writer a

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yearning writer, let's say and I believe that the use of what

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I'd almost call these shadow languages, these languages that

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one is never going to really speak, is a very good training

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for word precision.

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It means you're translating for yourself in a private way, as

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opposed to learning, say, french or Spanish or German, which is

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going to be for public discourse .

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So I'm a great advocate for that for a writer.

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And then, when I came out of that, a friend and I put

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together, when I was at university in England, an

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expedition to collect insects in Borneo.

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We had undertaken it to travel the world and to see the world

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and we were very ill-qualified for it.

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It was really a game of bluff, and we raised money based on the

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name of Oxford as opposed to any skill, but anyway we went

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off to do it of Oxford as opposed to any skill, but anyway

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we went off to do it.

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And then when I came back and I was at graduate school at

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Columbia University for my doctoral studies in Classics, I

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had the urge to write about this experience and sort of poured

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it out over on these new phenomena called word processors

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that we had in the graduate room and showed what I'd written

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about the North Borneo expedition, as I had called it,

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to a friend.

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And long story short, the friend who was one of my

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professors had a very close friend who was a literary agent

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and he took the manuscript and about, I'd say, two, three weeks

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later I got a call that the new editor at the New Yorker, bob

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Gottlieb, had chosen this piece to be the first piece he would

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publish as editor of that historic magazine.

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And so suddenly I was a writer.

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While I always remember there was a sign in a student bar in

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Tallahassee, florida, where I grew up, that said 10 minutes

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ago I couldn't spell bartender, and now I are one.

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I couldn't spell bartender and now I are one, you know, and I

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sort of thought about that as my writing career that suddenly I

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were one and so I sort of balanced this creative so-called

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creative writing, if you will with my doctoral duties.

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And when I emerged at the end with my doctorate, to the

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satisfaction of my mother, I felt now I could embark on a

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freelance career, that I sort of knew the perils but I had a

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little bit of traction.

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So that was how I became a writer.

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But I carry classics with me a lot of the way, and very

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specifically the Endurance which was, if you will, my

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breakthrough book about Shackleton's extraordinary epic

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of survival, was very much written with the Iliad in mind.

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There was a kind of terseness of language where you rely on

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the flow of a narrative without having to ever get over.

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Homer is never overblown.

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There's actually, despite appearances, a very simplicity

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of language, very fast flowing, very straightforward in its way,

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but mostly the whole structure of that typically that story's

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always told ends with the heroic ending of the rescue of the men

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.

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But that would be like ending the Iliad when Achilles kills

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Hector.

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That's not where the Iliad ends .

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The Iliad ends on the mortal note, with Achilles alone in the

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tent and Priam coming to him, and the two men reflecting and

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acknowledging that they've had all this loss of life and they

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too are going to die.

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And I thought we need to know these were mortal men of

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Shackleton's, not just legendary heroes.

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And so I traced all the men, found out what happened to them

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after the expedition, which was sort of innovative at that time

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but I can say was directly inspired by the Iliad.

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So I lurched forward and I seemed to gravitate to epic

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stories, and Skies of Thunder is another epic story in my view.

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And you write them so well.

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Speaker 1: Well, thank you.

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Where did the filmmaking come in?

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Speaker 2: The filmmaking came in.

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I had a very dear friend of mine who was a very gifted

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documentary filmmaker, a pioneer named George Butler, whose

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best-known work was Pumping Iron , where he discovered Arnold

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Schwarzenegger oh my goodness.

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But he wrote.

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He had a very interesting background.

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He was a British American, grew up in Somalia, lived in Jamaica

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and just very curious and unorthodox and did beautiful

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documentaries with the kind of production value that people

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invest in feature films.

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And so I wrote for him specifically on a number of

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projects, including a documentary on the Endurance.

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Very tragically, to say, he died young 78, at the end of 2021,

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in the midst of making this wonderful IMAX movie about the

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tigers of the Sundarbans, the mangrove swamp area in

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Bangladesh and India, but a great, quirky conservation story

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, and I had been the writer of that and had been a sort of

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assisting as a producer.

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He was afflicted with Parkinson's and when he passed

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away, his producer and I finished the movie, which we've

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in fact just recently done.

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So I'm very cautious about claiming to be a filmmaker.

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I feel I was the partner and participant of a very specific,

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narrow range of projects.

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That said, I'm hoping now, with the producer, to do an IMAX for

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the Science Center venues one of these shorts, if you will, on

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the oracles of ancient Greece, which I think is a lot of new

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information and technologies.

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That could be very exciting to do that.

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So if that happens and it takes a miracle to make a movie if

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that happens I would more forthrightly claim to be a

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filmmaker.

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Speaker 1: Well, that project sounds intriguing and the

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documentary you made earlier with your friend is that Tiger,

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tiger, yes, yes, it's out, isn't it?

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Speaker 2: It was sort of unveiled at the Giant Screen

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Convention in just last fall and it's now getting leases, so we

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are anticipating it's being opened in two big theatres in

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Canada and then with these Science Centre movies.

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What I like about them is that they actually unroll over a very

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long period of time.

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They don't all come out at once all over the world in all the

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same theatres, so it would be some five years or so they would

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be unfolding.

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We got Michelle Yeoh to narrate , which was a real coup, just

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before she got her Oscar.

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So we had some good luck there.

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Speaker 1: Good luck and exceptional talent To set the

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scene for your recent book Skies of Thunder.

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You begin by explaining the geographical place names of the

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era, which was 1940 through 1945 .

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Myanmar is Burma, yangon is Rangoon and Thailand is Siam.

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In the second chapter you describe the intricacies and

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dangers of constructing the Burma Road.

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Can you expand on the urgency and the importance of building

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this road?

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Speaker 2: The Burma Road is one of those great names.

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That is possibly the only part of the story that I had heard of

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before actually doing the research and writing the book.

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But if you had asked me what it really was, I don't think I

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could have told you.

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The Burma Road was begun, despite its name, in China.

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It was a Chinese nationalist initiative undertaken by Chiang

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Kai-shek and begun in 1934 following the defeat of his most

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dangerous foe, if you will, the communist.

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Chiang Kai-shek had many foe, but the group that he rightly

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feared the most in terms of being a direct threat to his

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personal power, were the communists, and he had had an

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important victory in the south of China, which had forced Mao

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and his followers out on their epic 6-mile trek to the

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north and will go directly to my capital, which at that point

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his new capital was Chongqing, in Sichuan province, on the

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Yangtze River.

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So work was begun on the road from the adjacent province,

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yunnan province, the most southwesterly province in China,

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towards to the eastward, to Chongqing, his capital, and that

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was done fairly straightforwardly.

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Then he began on the second leg , which only advanced about 100

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miles, and this was westward, towards Burma, and in fact it's

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the westward part, it's the part from Kunming which eventually

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did lead to Burma.

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That became the classic Burma Road, a route of about 700 miles

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or so when all the quirks and turns of the terrain were taken

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into account.

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But the road languished after this initial start and then,

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with new urgency, was begun again in 1937 as the Japanese

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threat, which Japanese had been in Manchuria since 1931.

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But now there was renewed Japanese activity and one by one

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the coasts of China's great long coastline were being.

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The ports along the way were being captured and held, and

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China began to see that it could in fact be blockaded.

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So this vast country, but with a shoreline that's tied up,

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didn't leave very many routes of access from the outside world,

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and the other routes one coming in from the north, from what

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would have been the outlying part of the Soviet Union, was

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essentially impractical, beings very, very long and very, very

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difficult.

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So now the Burma Road, a route into Burma, becomes a kind of

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point of not just internal military strategy but really a

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kind of route of survival.

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And so this becomes a vast enterprise where all along this

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route from Kunming and Yunnan province, which was considered

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within China to be a very undeveloped backwater province,

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with many peoples along the way, who were not Chinese speaking,

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were not even ethnically Chinese , and one of the fascinations to

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me of learning about this was just to discover how many

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different peoples lived along this route as recently as the

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late 1930s, when the road is being built.

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Late 1930s, when the road is being built, and so it was built

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by civilians.

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They had some professional engineering oversight, but the

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actual manual labor and it was manual, with very few tools was

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built by the peasantry Chinese, all the people who'd really not

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been conscripted, so children, women, old men, many of them in

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undernourished because of the terrible poverty in China, and

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particularly that province at the time.

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And so it's this extraordinary spectacle of hundreds and

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thousands of these civilians being, you know, dutifully

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walking out to their levee points where they had been told

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you know you need to be at this place on this time and you're

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going to be responsible for building this amount of road.

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And then they build it.

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And the terrain encompasses some of the great river gorges

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on Earth, the Salween and Mekong River, for example, these

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extraordinary mountains, jungles , forests, and it's a kind of

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surreal conjuring.

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There's a very good account of it, given by the managing

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director, who gives the sort of eyewitness as it unfolds and you

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have men hanging from thread-like, not even

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scaffolding, just ropes off cliff faces.

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They had no dynamite, so they used firecrackers.

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Speaker 1: That part of the story fascinated me At every

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roadblock, so to speak.

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Their ability to devise plans to continue is extraordinary.

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Speaker 2: It's this continual improvisation faced with rock

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cliff faces.

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And how do you make a road?

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They're trying to sort of gouge along the side of the cliff and

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so they have to create this kind of literal inroad to wind

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around the cliff face, and all they have are chisels and hand

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tools.

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So thousands of they figure out that firecrackers have enough

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little gunpowder to make little pitiful explosions that help in

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the loosening of this rock.

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And so these thousands of squibs are placed, you know, one

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by one, into the rock face and lit, and then there's a little

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bit of tumbling and then they hammer that out, but all the

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time, you know, great peril of their own lives, sort of

00:19:48
dangling on these makeshift lines.

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Then they come to the great rivers.

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How do you get a bridge across a river?

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Well, the first thing you do is you have men strip down, tie

00:20:01
cables around their waist and swim a mile across the raging

00:20:05
river and when they drown, then the next wave comes up and you

00:20:09
just keep coming until somebody makes it across and then they

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pull that string and the cable attached to it and you have the

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first sort of beginning of a structure across across the

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river.

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One of the more horrifying things that happened is, as the

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road began to be completed, these vast hand-chiseled stone

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rollers, weighing you know sometimes many tons, were then

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hauled over the broken pebbles and gravels to kind of beat it

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all down.

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But these were also, if you will, new technologies and there

00:20:49
are counts of people, particularly children, just not

00:20:52
understanding that when you come on a downslope, these behemoth

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rollers are going to take on a life of their own.

00:21:00
And there are these horrifying stories of people, particularly

00:21:04
the children, running gleefully ahead of these rollers, like it

00:21:08
was a game, just get crushed in the past.

00:21:10
I mean just an extraordinary account of this remarkable road

00:21:15
built by people who, as several sources pointed out, had never,

00:21:20
in the course of their own history, ever seen a wheeled

00:21:23
vehicle.

00:21:23
So it's going to be a road for lorries carrying supplies, by

00:21:30
definition, but the people's building it have never seen even

00:21:34
a wagon.

00:21:35
All transportation was done by foot or pack ponies.

00:21:39
Speaker 1: This seems like a perfect place to talk about the

00:21:42
Lolo women and the Pendulum women.

00:21:45
I found your descriptions of these two groups of women both

00:21:49
charming and sad.

00:21:51
Speaker 2: So again, mr Tan, who was the managing director of

00:21:55
this enterprise, wrote a wonderful book, a very small

00:21:58
book which you can find on used bookstore sites like Abecom,

00:22:04
called Building the Burma Road, and he gives a wonderful account

00:22:09
of having to negotiate as they travel, moving towards the Burma

00:22:15
border, westward towards the Burma border, passing through

00:22:19
all of these different peoples, and each one has different

00:22:22
customs and different habits and different taboos and different

00:22:27
preferences, and the Chinese engineers sort of have to

00:22:31
negotiate with them one by one and often accommodate their own

00:22:34
preferences.

00:22:35
So the Lolo people were known as the tiger people, very much

00:22:40
feared by everybody, not just people within China.

00:22:45
But when the Americans move in with their air mission, there's

00:22:48
actually a story of some downed airmen being kidnapped by them,

00:22:53
which is a whole kind of other side story.

00:22:56
But they had a very fierce reputation.

00:22:58
But nonetheless, the Lolo women appear and their costume is

00:23:02
this kind of gleaming white tunic, which becomes important

00:23:06
because their strong preference is to work in the dark and they

00:23:11
liked this because it meant they could care for their families

00:23:14
during the day.

00:23:15
Their children have accompanied them and then they can work at

00:23:18
night.

00:23:18
And so the director describes seeing the women you know by

00:23:23
their gleaming clothes in the moonlight, working at night

00:23:28
where all the men were afraid of working at night because this

00:23:32
is when the predators, uh, tigers, so forth, come out.

00:23:35
But, as uh the managing director says, you know, the

00:23:39
lolo women were said to be dead shots with the bow and arrow.

00:23:42
So I always loved that kind of sort of glimpse into these.

00:23:47
You know, women who were so motherly that they wished to

00:23:51
care for their children but would go out at night, you know,

00:23:54
prepared, as it were, to do battle.

00:23:57
But the pendulum women were the Shan women.

00:24:02
Even further west, as you move into Shan country, which is

00:24:06
straddles China, and now into Burma, the country and people

00:24:12
were known as by all travelers as being exceptionally beautiful

00:24:15
and the country had a sort of wonderful climate and a lot grew

00:24:21
there very easily and there was a kind of more indolent way of

00:24:27
life.

00:24:29
And it was also, it has to be said, a place with fierce

00:24:32
malaria.

00:24:33
But when it came to trying to negotiate with the Shan women,

00:24:38
who were, of all the peoples along the way, the least

00:24:42
conditioned to this kind of hard labor, but they knew their

00:24:46
rights, as it will, as few will, and they knew their preferences

00:24:50
and their strong preference was that they wished to carry the

00:24:54
rock debris in baskets balanced picturesquely on one shoulder, I

00:25:00
think, like if we've seen illustrations of ancient Greeks

00:25:04
with amphora carried on their shoulder, sort of very graceful

00:25:06
for a, you know, carried on their shoulder, sort of very

00:25:08
graceful whereas the more practical way and conventional

00:25:18
way to haul off rocks was by balancing a pole across your

00:25:19
shoulder with baskets balanced at each end.

00:25:21
But they remonstrated with the director and they said if we do

00:25:24
that, we can't sway when we walk and we're known as the pendulum

00:25:28
people.

00:25:29
Uh, we must sway when we walk and we're known as the pendulum

00:25:30
people.

00:25:30
We must sway when we walk.

00:25:32
Speaker 1: And so the exasperated managing director,

00:25:34
you know, acquiesced to their demand and the shunned women

00:25:38
carried their baskets gracefully on their shoulders, and this

00:25:42
speaks of the diversity of the people who worked on the road

00:25:46
and, as you said earlier, the poverty in which they lived.

00:25:49
Speaker 2: They were living in poverty and they were levied.

00:25:51
I mean, it has to say that this was a came down as a mandate

00:25:56
from the national government.

00:25:58
You know that they had to comply.

00:26:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, they didn't have much of a choice.

00:26:02
Now you've written about the dangers the workers faced severe

00:26:06
weather, mud, treacherous heights, mosquitoes, other

00:26:10
disease-spreading insects and, of course, predators like tigers

00:26:14
.

00:26:14
Now, apart from Mr Tan's book, how difficult was it to find

00:26:18
primary source information for your research?

00:26:22
Speaker 2: On this particular aspect of the larger story.

00:26:26
This was one of the least difficult parts.

00:26:28
The Burma Road attracted a great deal of international

00:26:32
attention at the time.

00:26:33
It was a huge, vast human enterprise.

00:26:37
It was a moving story, it was a lifeline being boiled by

00:26:42
China's own people in the most kind of heart-rending and

00:26:46
hardscrabble way with their bare hands.

00:26:48
And so there was both a kind of sentimental interest in this

00:26:54
story as well as a more focused interest, which is how well is

00:26:59
this going to work?

00:27:00
Is this, you know, wars looming ahead?

00:27:03
These kinds of supply lines are going to be of interest.

00:27:07
And so there was a great deal of , I'd say, more academic study

00:27:11
from the British side, which looked at things like tariffs

00:27:17
and cargo numbers and the statistics and how much was

00:27:20
actually getting through.

00:27:22
And from the American side there was perhaps more sentiment

00:27:26
.

00:27:26
For example, national Geographic magazine sent a team

00:27:31
to ride the Burma Road and in fact they were never able to

00:27:35
finish it because they got caught by the monsoon.

00:27:38
And therein lay the most cautionary part of this, which

00:27:42
is that how effective really was the Burma Road as opposed to a

00:27:47
grand symbolic gesture?

00:27:48
But anyway, the long and the short is that, from various

00:27:53
points of view.

00:27:54
With few travelers who even rode the road, intrepid people

00:27:58
who went in early, it was possible to get a lot of detail

00:28:03
into that particular part of the story.

00:28:05
Speaker 1: And when did the research become more difficult

00:28:08
In?

00:28:09
Speaker 2: terms of moving chronologically through the

00:28:11
story.

00:28:11
The Burma Road was one of the first parts I really dug into,

00:28:16
and so that material seemed to come very readily.

00:28:19
The rest of the book, I'd say that there was both too much

00:28:24
information from some quarters and not enough information from

00:28:29
others, which I suppose is the way that all big research

00:28:32
projects goes.

00:28:33
But, for example, the uh us air force archives have a plethora

00:28:41
of, I mean thousand, tens of hundreds of thousands of pages

00:28:46
of material, all of which was digitized and sent to me during

00:28:50
the pandemic and this gives the kind of raw logistical data of

00:28:56
the campaigns and of the building this air route and so

00:29:01
forth.

00:29:01
Then there were lots of memoirs privately published recently,

00:29:07
privately published by sons and daughters of participants who'd

00:29:12
found their dad's diary and realized that they could, you

00:29:15
know, wanted to get it out.

00:29:16
There were lots of memoirs from particularly British who'd

00:29:22
lived in Burma or in Northeast India during the time.

00:29:27
I love books that are out of print, so it was fun to just

00:29:31
track them down.

00:29:32
In fact there's a wonderful source you have in Australia

00:29:35
called Asia House, which specializes, as its name sounds,

00:29:40
in obscure books relating to Asia, and I found a number of

00:29:45
wonderful fights there.

00:29:47
But I'd say the part that most frustrated me was, as the story

00:29:53
progresses, there is a big role paid by the Chinese.

00:29:59
Really, peasants who've been recruited is too kind a word who

00:30:03
have been yanked into service to serve in the army that's

00:30:09
eventually going to American-led army, that's eventually going

00:30:12
to go into North Burma, and the experience of these people is

00:30:18
largely told through the eyes of the optimistic eyes and

00:30:23
language of the American trainers, and it was very tough

00:30:27
to find any kind of voice from those people as to how they

00:30:33
actually viewed the experience.

00:30:34
So that was a big, to me, dark hole that I was never able to

00:30:40
fully penetrate.

00:30:41
Speaker 1: And that segues beautifully into my next

00:30:43
question.

00:30:44
On page 106, you write about the inadequacies of navigational

00:30:49
aids on the planes being used to fly over the hump.

00:30:52
Can you explain where the name the hump derived and the terrain

00:30:57
that made this area extremely dangerous to navigate?

00:31:00
But before you do, there's something I wanted to talk about

00:31:03
at the beginning of the book.

00:31:04
In the prelude, which to me had the book reading almost like a

00:31:09
thriller, Prelude, which to me had the book reading almost like

00:31:13
a thriller you give excerpts from pieces written by pilots

00:31:15
talking about their experiences flying over the hump and they

00:31:19
are remarkable and it makes narrative nonfiction wonderful

00:31:23
to read, exciting to read.

00:31:27
Speaker 2: There are a number of factors that made this

00:31:29
terrifying, and that's perhaps unusual is how layered the

00:31:34
difficulties were.

00:31:35
So the hump specifically refers to this is the air supply of

00:31:42
China from India, largely run by the US Air Forces, although

00:31:48
there are other participants.

00:31:50
There's a commercial American-Chinese commercial

00:31:54
operation that did a valiant service called the Chinese

00:31:58
National Aviation Corporation, and there were some RAF and

00:32:03
Australian pilots also, by the way who participate in it.

00:32:06
But largely this is an American operation and they start from

00:32:11
northeast India in the province of Assam and fly to the nearest

00:32:18
point in China, which is, or the nearest feasible point in China

00:32:22
, which is Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, which is the

00:32:26
province closest to Burma.

00:32:28
So in the middle of this there is Japanese-occupied Burma and

00:32:33
in the middle of this is the Japanese.

00:32:35
Not just Japanese-occupied Burma, but one of the great,

00:32:39
vast jungle areas of the world.

00:32:41
The hump refers to a ridge along this route that specifically

00:32:48
rises between, if you're coming from the West, from India,

00:32:52
between the Salween and the Mekong River and in the Hengduan

00:32:58
Mountain, larger Hengduan Mountain range.

00:33:01
But that very narrow ridge came to stand, was named the hump,

00:33:07
just with kind of airman slang, and was named the hump just with

00:33:11
kind of airman slang.

00:33:12
We're flying the hump, we're flying the rock pile was another

00:33:14
phrase that they would give, but it also came to stand for

00:33:17
the entire route.

00:33:18
So flying the hump essentially meant the whole route.

00:33:21
What made this so difficult?

00:33:24
It's hard to even know quite where to start, but let's start

00:33:28
just with the route.

00:33:29
The route, if flown absolutely correctly, never really had to

00:33:37
surmount anything higher than about 15 feet.

00:33:41
There was a way point along route, lycian Mountain, which

00:33:46
rose to about 18 feet, which one flew.

00:33:49
It was a landmark to sort of turn the corner to the southeast

00:33:52
, but that was about the height that the aircraft alone had to

00:33:58
accommodate.

00:33:58
However, on a clear day, visibly on all sides of this

00:34:03
route, well within a hundred miles, were mountain peaks of

00:34:07
the Himalayas which rose vastly higher.

00:34:11
So the first thing that was imperative was that this route

00:34:15
had to be stuck to pretty closely.

00:34:17
If you deviated you would be in great danger.

00:34:21
The first challenge was that the maps and charts themselves

00:34:25
available when this operation began, which was in 1942, were

00:34:29
very, very faulty, and there were errors in every direction.

00:34:33
Sometimes mountains ranges were listed higher than they

00:34:36
actually were, sometimes they were lower, and so that in

00:34:39
itself was very, very destabilizing.

00:34:41
The second point is that there were initially, particularly

00:34:47
when it began, no navigational aids en route whatsoever.

00:34:53
So you had a compass and a heading and a kind of airspeed

00:34:58
indicator, but there were no air traffic control.

00:35:03
There was initially just one beacon that was put in I think

00:35:06
it was January of 1943, which was just a kind of allowing you

00:35:11
to have a landmark as you headed over the Burma jungle, but very

00:35:17
much pilots were flying essentially like ships sailing

00:35:22
by dead reckoning.

00:35:23
Later on, in the course of the, as this was sort of developed

00:35:27
out, there were radio stations, but these were mostly at the

00:35:31
destination.

00:35:32
They weren't along the route, because along the route was

00:35:36
Japanese occupied Burma.

00:35:38
So you would get some aid as you came in, maybe within 200

00:35:43
miles if you had perfect conditions, more likely within

00:35:48
25 miles if conditions were less than perfect as you came in

00:35:52
towards your destination.

00:35:54
But in the midst of all of this was the what was arguably the

00:35:58
worst aviation weather system in the world, and this was a

00:36:05
diabolical convergence of both very moist low systems coming

00:36:12
from the Bay of Bengal on the west and the South China Sea on

00:36:18
the east, then combining with these very diabolical dry, cold

00:36:23
winds that come rushing down from Tibet and from Siberia, and

00:36:28
the convergent meant this kind of chronic maelstrom of

00:36:33
turbulent weather, in addition to which you have the mountains,

00:36:38
and mountains, as any pilot would tell you, can cause what's

00:36:43
called mountain wave effects, which is when high winds slam

00:36:47
against the mountainside and then create a kind of wind shear

00:36:50
that can even today, you know, one has to be very wary of, can

00:36:55
flip planes, invert planes, aircraft.

00:36:58
So you had these weather conditions, on top of which you

00:37:03
had a monsoon kind of climate, so there were these periods of

00:37:07
just intensely solid rainfall, and on top of all of that, the

00:37:14
thing airmen perhaps feared most of all was ice, and the ice

00:37:19
conditions were extreme.

00:37:21
They not just encountered a long route, but at vertically,

00:37:28
so from 9 feet all the way up to 26 feet.

00:37:33
Which brings us to the final factor, which is the

00:37:37
capabilities of the aircraft.

00:37:38
At that time these were not aircraft like today where we can

00:37:43
fly from, you know, sydney to Cairn at 26, 28, 30 feet,

00:37:50
40, 42 if you're flying other routes.

00:37:54
These had a kind of cruising ceiling of about 20 feet,

00:38:00
and some of the later aircraft could go up comfortably to 26,

00:38:05
28 when empty.

00:38:07
But you start to put all of that together 28 000 when empty.

00:38:11
But you start to put all of that together and imagine being

00:38:14
a pilot who takes off and expects to fly, solid

00:38:22
instruments all the way, with very few navigational aids, with

00:38:23
winds that press him off course , navigating by dead reckoning

00:38:26
or the seat of his pants and knowing that any margin of error

00:38:31
means that he may be landing on a mountain peak, somewhere that

00:38:34
he can't see.

00:38:35
Speaker 1: It must have been terrifying.

00:38:37
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:38:38
Speaker 1: And I enjoyed the pilot's backstories that you put

00:38:41
into the book.

00:38:41
Did you happen to read Robert T Booty's book Food Bomber Pilot?

00:38:46
Speaker 2: Yes, that's actually one of my, I'd say, most

00:38:49
valuable sources.

00:38:51
Bob Booty was a pilot who came over to India, initially to be a

00:38:57
fighter pilot and through he had fallen in love and become

00:39:04
engaged with a nurse on the long sea voyage over and once he was

00:39:10
sort of established in his barracks, his very makeshift

00:39:18
basher barracks in India, he decided he would just fly on

00:39:23
over to visit her.

00:39:24
And I have to say I think fighter pilots tend to be, I

00:39:29
think it's necessary that they're cockier than other

00:39:32
pilots.

00:39:33
I'm proud to say my partner was a former Navy pilot who flew in

00:39:39
Vietnam, and I think he would acquiesce to that actually.

00:39:43
But anyway, bob Booty felt that he had clearance to go over and

00:39:49
see his fiancee and it turned out that the authorities saw it

00:39:53
very differently and so he was charged with going AWOL and as a

00:39:57
result of which, when the dust settled, he had been demoted

00:40:02
from being a fighter pilot to an air transport command pilot.

00:40:05
Now, this is of interest for many reasons.

00:40:09
One then Bob Booty's wonderful diary starts tracking the story

00:40:15
I'm tracking, which is of course air supply and the hump and so

00:40:20
forth, but it's very, very indicative in what low esteem

00:40:26
the air transport command pilots were held, because to be

00:40:31
demoted to one of them is a very eloquent way of saying you've

00:40:36
been put down with the people we regard as the lowest of the low

00:40:40
, and so I think one of the things that was very

00:40:44
demoralizing from the outset was that, you know, the fighter

00:40:48
pilots were top of the totem pole, if you will, and then

00:40:51
below them are the bombers, and then below them maybe the

00:40:55
evacuation planes, but at the very, very bottom are just cargo

00:40:59
pilots who are truck drivers in the view of the kind of

00:41:03
established hierarchy.

00:41:04
And indeed the acronym of the Air Transport Command, atc, was

00:41:11
cynically used by people outside the services, saying it meant

00:41:15
allergic to combat.

00:41:16
So they were sort of looked down upon as being non-combat

00:41:22
pilots, and yet here they were flying this inherently very,

00:41:25
very dangerous mission, very, very dangerous mission.

00:41:33
So Budi is a wonderful voice in that you see him having to

00:41:35
adapt to this task for which he's not trained.

00:41:36
He was obviously a very skilled pilot and survives the war,

00:41:41
although has an accident really not of his making at the very

00:41:45
end that takes him out of service.

00:41:47
But it does underscore another point, which is that the pilots

00:41:53
who were funneled into the Air Transport Command were the least

00:41:57
trained.

00:41:57
The most trained pilots are going on what are recognized as

00:42:02
the big, important missions in Europe, in North Africa, as

00:42:06
fighters and bombers.

00:42:08
There are stories.

00:42:09
I actually interviewed one pilot, a lass who's passed on

00:42:13
since I spoke to him, but he described arriving and being

00:42:19
told to collect with a friend, a C-46, which was the new, bigger

00:42:25
cargo plane that had just come into the theater, and had a lot

00:42:29
of problems with it, by the way.

00:42:30
And they arrived.

00:42:32
They had known it was a c46 and they arrived to find it and

00:42:36
they had never seen one before, they had never been instructed

00:42:39
in one before, and he said we literally had to figure out how

00:42:42
to open the door.

00:42:43
And then they got in and read the manual as they taxied sort

00:42:48
of desolatory back and forth and then he flew it first to

00:42:52
Calcutta where, just because it was a new plane and it had to go

00:42:55
there and that was the protocol , and then took it over the hump

00:42:59
.

00:42:59
But there are stories of pilots arriving with 25 hours of

00:43:03
instrument training, which wouldn't get you a pilot's

00:43:08
license I don't think today and yet they were then thrown into

00:43:12
these severe conditions.

00:43:14
So I think the level of fear was not just because the

00:43:18
situation was inherently difficult, but because, as one

00:43:34
executive said, look, the kids are flying over their head, was

00:43:35
how he put it.

00:43:36
And so the protocol was the more seasoned pilots would fly

00:43:38
and the junior just arrived pilot would sit as co-pilot in

00:43:39
the right seat a certain number of hours, but that was their

00:43:44
training and sadly, many of them didn't make it home.

00:43:47
Speaker 1: In your book you quoted something like 600 planes

00:43:51
are littered across this flight path.

00:43:53
That is an extraordinary amount of planes.

00:43:57
Speaker 2: The way I came on this story was I was on

00:44:00
assignment for National Geographic magazine on a story

00:44:04
about tigers, and I was in the north of what's today Myanmar,

00:44:10
in this amazing place called the Hukong Valley, which is today

00:44:16
holds the world's largest tiger reserve and is a spectacular

00:44:22
wild jungled area, but was in fact that area over which the

00:44:29
pilots were flying?

00:44:31
And very few people go into this area today, really only

00:44:35
wildlife officers or poachers.

00:44:37
And so I was talking to the wildlife team about their

00:44:41
stories and so on, and there were some Naga villages

00:44:48
scattered throughout this and they had these very strange

00:44:50
metal fences around their vegetable plots, and when I

00:44:52
commented on them, the wildlife officers said, oh, they cut

00:44:55
those from the fuselages of the cargo planes in the jungle.

00:44:59
And that was how I learned of the story.

00:45:01
And they one of the officers said that he'd been on a patrol

00:45:05
some years before and come on a downed aircraft, he and his team

00:45:09
, which had the skeleton of the pilot still strapped into the

00:45:13
left seat, and I couldn't believe this that cargo planes

00:45:19
just would vanish, be buried in the jungle still.

00:45:22
And then, when I came back to the States, I looked into it and

00:45:26
I was told that the estimate is about 600 are still

00:45:30
undiscovered and that I would say, and I think most people

00:45:34
would say, is a very conservative figure.

00:45:37
The record keeping was very spotty, particularly during the

00:45:41
first year or so of this operation, and other records

00:45:46
speculate that there are as many as you know, more like 1.

00:45:50
But we'll never know that they just people, the planes either.

00:45:55
Sometimes they were found after a crash, because you would see

00:45:59
an explosion and smoke and a pilot flying over could spot it,

00:46:03
but often they just vanished just into silence.

00:46:07
And this is something one of the pilots wrote about in his

00:46:10
memoir.

00:46:10
He said you know, we'd all wait and wait for this plane we knew

00:46:14
was meant to come in and we'd hope it had been diverted to

00:46:17
another airfield.

00:46:18
We'd hoped it might have stayed overnight somewhere, but then

00:46:22
it never appeared.

00:46:23
Never appeared, just silence.

00:46:25
So that was the fate of some aircraft and another others.

00:46:30
Were the crews bailed out?

00:46:32
If they got lost, if they had engine trouble, if they would

00:46:36
run out of fuel because they were lost, they would parachute

00:46:40
out and the aircraft, you know, would drift on to crash

00:46:43
somewhere.

00:46:44
Speaker 1: Maybe found, maybe not found and if we just think

00:46:47
about that figure for a moment, 600 to 1200 planes, that's a lot

00:46:52
of money the US had invested in this region of the war.

00:46:56
And that kind of leads me to this question, because I'm

00:46:59
interested in your thoughts on how did British colonialism

00:47:04
affect what the Americans were wanting to do in this

00:47:07
geographical area of World War II, and how did Churchill and

00:47:11
Roosevelt differ and thought similarly about China at this

00:47:16
time?

00:47:17
Speaker 2: I would flip it around, I would say the driving

00:47:19
dynamic of this hump operation was what the British regarded as

00:47:25
an American obsession with China, and it could not be

00:47:30
shaken.

00:47:30
It was very unclear quite what the objectives of this great

00:47:37
heroic airlift was.

00:47:39
So at the very beginning, from correspondence that came back

00:47:45
from advisors, american advisors , who were sent over to sort of

00:47:49
examine the situation of China, as you know Japanese have the

00:47:54
war has already begun, if you will, in China, earlier than it

00:47:57
will, if one considers the Japanese invasion of China to be

00:48:02
, you know, part of the larger war as it eventually becomes.

00:48:07
So American advisors were going over and they come back with

00:48:12
actually brutal assessments of Chiang Kai-shek, both as a

00:48:16
person, as a leader and as capabilities.

00:48:19
But they believe that having the japanese continue to occupy

00:48:26
china is good for the wider war effort because it will tie down

00:48:32
those forces as in in a kind of occupying situation which could

00:48:37
otherwise be unleashed to cause harm, particularly as the

00:48:41
pacific war, you know, looms into focus.

00:48:44
So the first kind of objective is that this will keep China

00:48:51
from collapsing, and by collapsing essentially they mean

00:48:55
selling out to the Japanese.

00:48:57
At the same time, every advisor from every nation understood

00:49:04
clearly that Chiang Kai-shek would never sell out or fall to

00:49:08
the Japanese, that his own grasp of power, his own thirst for

00:49:15
power was so strong he would never put himself in that

00:49:17
position and also his hatred of the enemy was very real.

00:49:21
So this collapse that's always threatened and which Chiang

00:49:26
Kai-shek threatens the allies with too, that if he doesn't get

00:49:29
this loan, if he doesn't get this a billion dollars worth of

00:49:33
gold one of his demands is, if he doesn't get 10 tons a

00:49:37
month over the hump in supplies, china could collapse, her

00:49:41
morale would collapse, and it's always a threat that he

00:49:44
continually wields.

00:49:45
But it's unclear really what that would have entailed.

00:49:49
And certainly a lot of the airmen actually who had come to

00:49:55
know China said, you know well, even if they did, there were so

00:50:00
many other warlords, there were so many factions, there were

00:50:04
also the communists that it was never as if the Japanese could

00:50:07
have just, you know, bailed out and got somewhere else.

00:50:10
They were going to have to be in it one way or the other.

00:50:13
So the first sort of sketched objective is that this holds

00:50:19
down the Japanese in the war.

00:50:21
But the second objective, which is stated with much more

00:50:24
clarity by the Americans, and by Roosevelt in particular is that

00:50:29
the end of war objective is that China will be this great

00:50:35
democratic ally and particularly close to the United States,

00:50:41
that the United States having shown all this goodwill and

00:50:47
fought as an ally, as, if you will, with Chiang Kai-shek, that

00:50:51
the inevitable result afterwards would be these four

00:50:55
powers Britain, the United States, soviet Union and China

00:50:59
but that China would be very firmly attached and beholden to

00:51:04
American leadership and, in other words, a very close and I

00:51:08
would almost want to say cynically manipulated ally.

00:51:11
That was the view, and Roosevelt prided himself on his

00:51:16
knowledge of China.

00:51:17
His maternal grandfather had made a fortune in tea and opium

00:51:25
in China and he liked to refer to this and he would tell people

00:51:29
you know, I have 100 years of history of China myself and my

00:51:32
family, so there was a kind of sense that he knew what he was

00:51:37
doing and genuinely looked forward to this kind of great

00:51:42
new balance of power which, amongst other things, would

00:51:46
diminish the European and specifically British power in

00:51:50
the East and would increase American power in the East by

00:51:54
being so closely allied to China .

00:51:56
So a lot of geopolitical maneuvering and objectives here,

00:52:00
and so out of this comes all of these campaigns, the Hump

00:52:07
campaign, the land campaign through Burma, and the British

00:52:11
had an entirely different view of the value of China.

00:52:14
They did not believe in Chiang Kai-shek, they did not believe

00:52:18
in the fighting power of the Chinese troops and army, which

00:52:23
they knew to be starved of both food and supplies and leadership

00:52:28
often, and they did not believe in this vision of the post-war

00:52:34
kind of reality.

00:52:35
And indeed there's some memos that are written by sort of

00:52:40
British-Chinese experts that said look, there's nothing we

00:52:43
can do.

00:52:44
There's going to be a civil war and it's quite possible that

00:52:48
the communists, who have, you know, this number of force

00:52:52
behind them and better policies and so on, are going to win and

00:52:55
there's nothing we can do about it.

00:53:01
The British well, what can you do?

00:53:06
Based on very deep analysis and the American optimist we can't

00:53:12
do nothing, you know.

00:53:14
Of course we must try, of course we can make it work, and

00:53:18
bold big ventures are done by that latter view.

00:53:21
You know, building the hump, airline, I guess, sending people

00:53:29
to the moon, you know all of these impossible things.

00:53:31
So one can admire that can-do, must-do kind of spirit that I

00:53:32
think is very American and very entrepreneurial American.

00:53:36
But sometimes reality thwarts that best optimism, as it

00:53:43
clearly did in this case.

00:53:46
It's safe to say that the British and Americans, who were

00:53:51
allies, were also deeply suspicious of each other's

00:53:54
motives, particularly in this particular theater China, burma,

00:53:59
india the Americans were intent on fighting a land war, and the

00:54:04
reluctance of the British to be dragged into a land war in

00:54:07
Burma made the American think that the British wanted the

00:54:11
Americans to fight their war, whereas in fact I think

00:54:15
Churchill would have been happy to have had no Burma campaign

00:54:19
and to have said simply look, the Japanese are in there, we

00:54:23
cut off their supply lines, they're going to starve and have

00:54:26
to retreat or just die in the jungle outposts.

00:54:31
If we blockade Rangoon, for example, on the one hand, and

00:54:35
we're on the other side in Siam, we can hold them down.

00:54:40
So it's a fascinating conflicted sort of situation

00:54:47
amongst these close allies in what is already an entirely

00:54:51
chaotic and very difficult theater.

00:54:53
But it's safe to say that I think the one thing Churchill

00:54:58
and Roosevelt did agree on was ultimately on the value of one

00:55:06
the air supply and two air bases being built in China for a

00:55:13
projective offensive.

00:55:14
That, by the way, never happened.

00:55:16
Certainly the British voiced support for it, churchill voiced

00:55:20
support for it, but I believe that actually they only voiced

00:55:24
support for it because they thought it would deflect

00:55:26
attention from a land campaign.

00:55:28
I'm not convinced the British actually really supported the

00:55:33
idea of any of these very messy campaigns, whether it was the

00:55:38
air operation in China or the air supply to China.

00:55:42
Speaker 1: I'd love to talk about your research and writing

00:55:45
process.

00:55:46
You mentioned that you began writing this book or researching

00:55:48
this book during the pandemic.

00:55:49
Can mentioned that you began writing this book or researching

00:55:49
this book during the pandemic.

00:55:51
Can you talk a little about this and the amount of time you

00:55:54
spend on research before starting to write?

00:55:58
Speaker 2: Yes, I was very fortunate to have got the

00:56:02
commission ahead of the pandemic , because it's wonderful to have

00:56:06
a big juicy project while people are on lockdown.

00:56:09
And I found that the archives that I needed were very

00:56:15
accessible remotely.

00:56:16
I mentioned in particular the Air Force archives in Alabama,

00:56:22
for example, that were very timely in sending out these

00:56:26
reels and reels of material timely in sending out these

00:56:29
reels and reels of material.

00:56:30
You know, as a freelancer I have the luxury of deciding what

00:56:36
my next, or hoping to decide what my pitching my next project

00:56:37
in any case, and I had done this based on my experience in

00:56:42
the Hukong Valley of coming away with this vision of these

00:56:47
fences cut from the fuselages and so on and very little else.

00:56:53
I knew nothing.

00:56:54
I had had a great aunt who had worked in Burma, as it was still

00:56:58
called for the World Health Organization, and so I love the

00:57:02
name of that country and I had sort of been drawn to the

00:57:05
country and I love traveling in modern Myanmar at that time.

00:57:11
But the things that I thought I knew well, even about the

00:57:14
Pacific War.

00:57:15
I realized how sketchy my knowledge really was, and so

00:57:19
there was a wide amount of reading just to get the context

00:57:23
of the theater, of what was going on, of who was who, of

00:57:27
what the objectives were, before one could even get down into

00:57:30
the details of the hump.

00:57:32
But the only thing I can say is it's some of the most

00:57:36
fascinating reading I've ever done.

00:57:39
It was from memoirs of people growing up on tea estates in

00:57:44
Assam to these extraordinary accounts by the pilots who

00:57:49
survive walkouts, you know, after they bail kind of

00:57:52
extraordinary background of the big powers playing out, both

00:58:12
grappling for the future after the war and hoping to actually

00:58:16
win the war.

00:58:17
It's just amazing stuff.

00:58:19
Speaker 1: Yes, it is Okay.

00:58:21
What are you currently reading?

00:58:23
Speaker 2: Well, one thing I'm doing is mopping up on things

00:58:26
that I never quite read thoroughly.

00:58:29
My favorite is the diaries two-volume published diaries of

00:58:36
General Henry Arnold, known as Hap Arnold, who was the chief of

00:58:41
staff of what was then the US Air Forces.

00:58:45
I love these diaries from the era and of course I read closely

00:58:50
the parts that pertain to my story.

00:58:53
He was building the American Air Force really from the start,

00:58:58
not quite from scratch but almost from scratch, and there

00:59:02
are many theaters of war that he was having to be involved in,

00:59:06
every detail of it, and it's just a very uncomplicated, very

00:59:11
nuts and bolts type of writing, very refreshing, and I'm

00:59:15
enjoying that.

00:59:16
Next, what I'm just starting, is a wonderful book by a scholar

00:59:21
of the Aegean and I guess you'd say the Aegean and Greek Bronze

00:59:26
Age, called Geoffrey Emmanuel, called Black Ships and Sea

00:59:31
Raiders, which is about the well , it sounds very dry but it's

00:59:38
quite interesting the sea peoples and the migrations that

00:59:42
brought down the Bronze Age, and so it very much overlaps with

00:59:47
the Homeric narrative.

00:59:50
So I'm very interested in that.

00:59:51
And finally, there's a writer of fiction I haven't read in a

00:59:56
while, but Henry Williamson, probably best known.

01:00:00
He wrote Tarka, which was a sort of beloved children's book

01:00:05
in England but he had been in the First World War and wrote a

01:00:10
12-volume autobiography that's sort of disguised as fiction and

01:00:16
I'm about halfway through and I had to put it aside for this

01:00:20
book and I'm going to go back to that.

01:00:22
Speaker 1: It sounds like you have your reading cut out for

01:00:25
quite a few months the rest of my life.

01:00:27
I think, reading cutout for quite a few months, the rest of

01:00:29
my life, I think, caroline, you are a vessel of knowledge and,

01:00:34
as the text on the back of the book says, skies of Thunder is a

01:00:43
masterpiece of modern war history, and I'm always

01:00:44
surprised at how many people are interested in planes from World

01:00:46
War II.

01:00:46
Yes, me too, actually.

01:00:46
In planes from World War II.

01:00:47
Yes, me too, actually.

01:00:49
Thank you so much for being a guest on the show, caroline.

01:00:52
It's been a pleasure chatting with you, thank you.

01:00:56
Speaker 2: Well, thank you, and I have to say that, as you know,

01:01:00
my great friend Lynn Cox, who you interviewed earlier, had

01:01:08
told me that this would be the best interview I'd had, so I

01:01:09
just wanted to pass that along also.

01:01:11
Thank you very much.

01:01:12
Speaker 1: Well, I hope you enjoyed this conversation,

01:01:14
because I certainly did.

01:01:16
Yes very much.

01:01:17
Thanks again, caroline.

01:01:19
Thank you Bye-bye.

01:01:20
You've been listening to my conversation with Caroline

01:01:24
Alexander about her new book Skies of Thunder the deadly

01:01:28
World War II mission over the roof of the world.

01:01:31
To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to

01:01:35
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01:01:39
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01:01:41
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01:01:47
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01:01:51
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01:01:54
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01:01:58
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01:02:01
The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy

01:02:05
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01:02:09
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01:02:13
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01:02:14
Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.