Deadly skies: the WW2 mission to fly over the Himalayas

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Stories of the Second World War are dominated by Dunkirk and D-Day, but did you know that one of the war's most treacherous missions took place in the skies over the Himalayas? In this episode, author and historian Caroline Alexander joins us to discuss her new book Skies of Thunder, which uncovers the extraordinary ordeal of the young, often undertrained pilots who flew the so-called hump, navigating cargo planes from India into China across one of the most perilous air routes on Earth. Caroline was speaking to Ellen Evans. We're talking today about a remarkable aviation mission during World War II in an arena of the war that's not so often covered.

Caroline, before we go into the aerial mission proper, I hoped we could give some vital context for our listeners in understanding where we are in this story. Could we start with the Burma Road? Where are we in the world and what's happening geopolitically and why is this transport route so important? Well, the legendary Burma Road was a remarkable feat. It's called the Burma Road, but it was instigated from China.

And in the background to this is that in 1935, Chang Kai-shek, who was head of Nationalist China, had wished to build a supply road in southern southwest China to help his battle against the communists. So it began as a kind of self serving military mission and it went pushed out a few hundred miles towards the Burma border and then stopped. Then However, in 1937, the Japanese, who had been encroaching on China from the early 1930s, turned into sort of all-out occupation, and Chiang Kai-shek realized that all of his coasts and ports had been blockaded.

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