Skies of Thunder

After Japanese forces captured most of Burma in 1942 and severed the Burma Road, the Allies faced the problem of supplying Nationalist China from India. Caroline Alexander reconstructs the airlift over the eastern Himalayas known as the Hump, where transport crews flew unreliable aircraft through monsoon storms, icing, mountain turbulence and enemy activity with limited navigation equipment. Crash sites, rescue attempts and individual airmen provide the human scale of a logistical operation conducted in some of the most dangerous flying conditions of the Second World War.

The book places the air route within the wider China–Burma–India theater. It follows the 1942 collapse in Burma, the campaigns of the Chindits and Merrill’s Marauders, Joseph Stilwell’s efforts to rebuild a land route to China and the competing priorities of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek. Drawing on official records, memoirs and diaries, Alexander shows how terrain, weather, coalition politics and the strategic importance attached to keeping China in the war shaped both the airlift and the Allied campaign in mainland Asia.