It is worth starting with a fact that gets lost in most tellings of this war.
The fighting in China did not begin in nineteen thirty nine or nineteen forty one. It began in nineteen thirty seven, and by many reckonings earlier than that, and by the time Europe went to war China had already lost Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan and Guangzhou, and had moved its capital twice.
By nineteen forty one, China had been fighting alone for four years. It had almost no air force left, no capacity to build aircraft, and a supply situation that consisted of one road.
The story of this episode is really the story of that supply line, and of the two extraordinary things that were done to keep it open.
Claire Chennault was an American fighter pilot who had argued, all through the nineteen thirties, that fighters mattered and that they should be directed from the ground by a network of observers. His superiors disagreed. He was partially deaf, thoroughly insubordinate, and retired as a captain in nineteen thirty seven.
He went to China more or less immediately, as an adviser to the Chinese government, and spent four years watching Japanese aircraft operate and taking notes on exactly how they flew.
In nineteen forty one he came back to Washington with a proposal: let American pilots fly for China as volunteers, before America was in the war at all.
It was approved quietly at the highest level. Pilots and mechanics resigned from the American services with an understanding that they could rejoin later, signed contracts with a civilian company, and sailed to Burma. The pay was six hundred dollars a month, which was excellent, plus five hundred dollars for every aircraft destroyed, which was extraordinary.
They were given a hundred Curtiss fighters that had been built for Britain and that Britain had decided it did not want, because they performed poorly at high altitude.
The Japanese fighters they faced could out-turn and out-climb them comfortably. In a conventional turning fight, the American aircraft lost.
So Chennault forbade turning fights. Absolutely, as a rule, with penalties.
His tactic used the one advantage the Curtiss had, which was that it was heavy and dived beautifully. Get above the enemy. Dive through the formation at high speed. Fire once, on the way past. Do not turn back. Keep the speed, use it to climb away, and come round for another pass from above.
It is a completely unromantic way to fly and the pilots hated it at first, because every instinct in a fighter pilot says to turn and fight. It also worked, and it is more or less how every Allied fighter fought the Japanese for the rest of the war.
Chennault also built, in China, the ground observer network nobody in America had wanted. Thousands of people across the countryside with telephones and field radios, reporting aircraft as they passed overhead, feeding into a central plot. It was radar made of human beings, and it meant his handful of fighters were in the right place far more often than they should have been.
The shark mouth came from a magazine photograph of a German aircraft that somebody found in the mess. They liked the look of it and painted it on. The name Flying Tigers came later, from publicity, and nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why an aircraft with a shark on it is called a tiger.
They went into action on the twentieth of December, nineteen forty one, thirteen days after Pearl Harbor, over Kunming.
They fought for about seven months, over China and Burma, usually outnumbered and always short of spare parts, cannibalising wrecked aircraft to keep others flying.
Their claimed total was around three hundred enemy aircraft destroyed. Claims in air combat are always inflated, on every side, and the modern figure is lower. What is not disputed is that fewer than twenty of their pilots were killed in combat, and that during a period when the Allies were losing everywhere, the Flying Tigers were winning, and it was reported at home, and it mattered enormously to people who badly needed something to read about.
They were also, by every account, an extremely difficult unit to command. They were civilians on contracts, they had walked out on their own armed forces to be there, and they argued with Chennault about tactics, pay and orders more or less continuously. He seems to have regarded this as an acceptable cost.
The group was disbanded in July nineteen forty two and absorbed into the regular American air forces. Chennault got his general's stars at last.
In the spring of nineteen forty two, Japanese forces took Burma, and with it the Burma Road.
That road had been built between nineteen thirty seven and nineteen thirty eight by around two hundred thousand Chinese labourers, mostly with hand tools, cutting seven hundred miles of surfaced road through mountains. It was the only overland route into unoccupied China.
With it gone, China was sealed. Everything it received from outside would now have to arrive by air, or not at all.
The route available ran from airfields in Assam, in north-eastern India, to Kunming in Yunnan. It is about five hundred miles. In between are the eastern foothills of the Himalayas.
The aircraft available were transports designed for airline work at moderate altitudes, and they had to cross ridges that forced them to sixteen thousand feet and more, in a region with no reliable maps, violent up and down draughts, severe icing, and a monsoon season that lasted half the year.
The crews called the route the Hump.
The Hump airlift ran for three and a half years and never stopped, day and night, in all weather, because stopping meant China received nothing.
Pilots described turbulence that threw a loaded transport a thousand feet upward and then dropped it further than that. Ice built on the wings faster than the de-icing equipment could remove it. Aircraft were sometimes flown by crews who had arrived from training a week earlier and had never seen mountains.
There were Japanese fighters over the northern part of the route as well, and unarmed transports have no answer to those.
Somewhere approaching six hundred aircraft were lost, and around thirteen hundred crewmen died. So much wreckage accumulated along the route that in clear weather crews could navigate by it, following the glint of aluminium on the hillsides from one crash site to the next, and that is where the name came from. They called it the Aluminium Trail.
By the end, the airlift was delivering more than seventy thousand tons a month, and something over six hundred and fifty thousand tons in total: fuel, ammunition, weapons, medicine, and the parts to keep it all running.
It was the first sustained strategic airlift in history, and everything anybody knows about how to supply a country by air was learned on that route, in the worst possible conditions, by people making it up.
The airfields at the Chinese end were largely built by hand. There was no heavy machinery, so runways for heavy bombers were made by hundreds of thousands of local labourers breaking and laying stone and then pulling enormous concrete rollers across it, by rope, in teams. Photographs of this exist and they are worth finding.
The Flying Tigers are remembered far more than the Hump, which is unfair by any measure. The Tigers were a hundred pilots for seven months. The Hump was three and a half years and cost something like sixteen hundred American lives, which is dozens of times what the Tigers lost, and it is the reason China stayed in the war.
Chennault stayed in China after the war and founded an airline. He is still well known in Kunming, and there is a museum there.
Here is something to think about tonight. The Curtiss fighters given to the Flying Tigers were rejects. Britain had tested them and found them poor. In China, flown differently, they beat aircraft that were better than they were. How much of whether a thing is any good depends on how it is used?