Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 secured for Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist forces what no amount of pleading had been able to produce: an influx of U.S. supplies. This volume explores the strategies of the Allies in China, Burma and India in World War II and the politically charged campaign waged in that theater. After an overview of the Allied situation in early 1942, the work presents the personal accounts of six individuals who served as part of the resupply effort in the CBI theater: Captain Edward Goodman, Captain David C. Hall, Staff Sergeant Robert Boehm, Corporal Anthony R. Silva, Corporal Alexander McVean and Tech Sergeant Kenneth R. Quigley. The service of African Americans in the CBI theatre is also discussed in detail. Appendices contain information on the organization of a motor transport truck regiment in Persia during World War II and an extract from a December 1944 log of an Air Jungle Rescue Unit in Burma.

The history of the use of airlift and tanker forces in the U.S. military from the early biplane to today's advanced aircraft is brilliantly described in this book.

Caught in a violent storm and blown far off their intended course, five American airmen--flying the dangerous Himalayan supply route known as "The Hump"--were forced to bail out just seconds before their plane ran out of fuel. To their astonishment, they found they had landed in the heart of Tibet. There they had to confront what, to them, seemed a bizarre--even alien--people. At the same time, they had to extricate themselves from the political turmoil that even then was raging around Tibet's right to be independent from China. Now back in print, Lost in Tibet is an extraordinary story of high adventure that sheds light on the remarkable Tibetan people, just at the moment when they were coming to terms with a hostile outside world.

The USAAF responded to the requirement to keep China engaged against Japan by conducting two distinct air supply operations, a tactical air supply mission to Burma and a strategic air supply effort over the Himalayas to China. The tactical air supply effort to Burma supported offensive combat operations and the construction of the Ledo Road, while the Hump airlift directly contributed to the American strategic objective. Despite Stilwell's stubborn commitment to the Ledo Road as the main effort to supply the Chinese and to the necessary use of tactical air supply to support this and other ground operations in Burma, the key contribution to the success of keeping China in the war against Japan was ultimately the strategic air supply missions over the Hump. This thesis reviews how the operational airlift efforts within the CBI supported both efforts and examines the challenges, processes, and development of air supply. The fundamental question associated with this effort concerns how the USAAF responded to seemingly competing air supply requirements in the CBI Theater in order to keep China in the war against Japan.

From the acclaimed author of Enduring Patagonia comes a dazzling tale of aerial adventure set against the roiling backdrop of war in Asia. The incredible real-life saga of the flying band of brothers who opened the skies over China in the years leading up to World War II—and boldly safeguarded them during that conflict—China’s Wings is one of the most exhilarating untold chapters in the annals of flight. At the center of the maelstrom is the book’s courtly, laconic protagonist, American aviation executive William Langhorne Bond. In search of adventure, he arrives in Nationalist China in 1931, charged with turning around the turbulent nation’s flagging airline business, the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC). The mission will take him to the wild and lawless frontiers of commercial aviation: into cockpits with daredevil pilots flying—sometimes literally—on a wing and a prayer; into the dangerous maze of Chinese politics, where scheming warlords and volatile military officers jockey for advantage; and into the boardrooms, backrooms, and corridors of power inhabited by such outsized figures as Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; foreign minister T. V. Soong; Generals Arnold, Stilwell, and Marshall; and legendary Pan American Airways founder Juan Trippe. With the outbreak of full-scale war in 1941, Bond and CNAC are transformed from uneasy spectators to active participants in the struggle against Axis imperialism. Drawing on meticulous research, primary sources, and extensive personal interviews with participants, Gregory Crouch offers harrowing accounts of brutal bombing runs and heroic evacuations, as the fight to keep one airline flying becomes part of the larger struggle for China’s survival. He plunges us into a world of perilous night flights, emergency water landings, and the constant threat of predatory Japanese warplanes. When Japanese forces capture Burma and blockade China’s only overland supply route, Bond and his pilots must battle shortages of airplanes, personnel, and spare parts to airlift supplies over an untried five-hundred-mile-long aerial gauntlet high above the Himalayas—the infamous “Hump”—pioneering one of the most celebrated endeavors in aviation history. A hero’s-eye view of history in the grand tradition of Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, China’s Wings takes readers on a mesmerizing journey to a time and place that reshaped the modern world.

"When the United States entered World War II, the Army needed pilots to transport or "ferry" its combat-bound aircraft across the United States for overseas deployment and its trainer airplanes to flight training bases. Male pilots were in short supply, so into this vacuum stepped Nancy Love and her Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). Initially the Army implemented both the WAFS program and Jacqueline Cochran's more ambitious plan to train women to do many of the military's flight-related jobs stateside. By 1943, General Hap Arnold decided to combine the women's programs and formed the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), with Cochran as the Director of Women Pilots. Love was named the Executive for WASP."