William J. Koenig

concise overview of the Hump airlift campaign, the political reasons for it, the conflict among national and theater commanders revolving around it, the operational commanders and their challenges, the pilots and crews, the aircraft, the weather, and the cargo.
The "Hump" airlift was one of the major efforts of the US Army Air Force in the Second World War, and it has never received the publicity it deserved, because it was critical to keeping Chiang Kai-Shek in power and China in the war against Japan. The technologies and techniques devised in the airlift enabled the US and Britain to feed Berlin during the 1948 blockade and the massive airlift efforts of Korea, Vietnam, and other wars, and the air freight operations of the modern age.

To the crews who worked and flew in the difficult and primitive conditions, it was a ghastly ordeal. Hump aviators didn't have to deal too often with Japanese fighters, but the Himalayan mountains were tough enough. The route was called the "aluminum trail" for the line of crashed airplanes along it, whose remains lie there to this day.

Mr. Koenig's prose is fairly typical of the series, and the photographs, all black-and-white, along with a few illustrations, convey both the difficulties of the operation and the struggles between the colorful American, British, and Chinese personalities who commanded in the theater: familiar names like Stilwell, Chennault, Chiang, and Mountbatten.… (meer)