THE HUMP, THE GREAT HIMALAYAN AIRLIFT OF WORLD WAR II.

ByBliss K. Thome '38. Philadelphia: J. B.Lippincott Company, 1965. 188 pp. $5.50.

The Himalayan over-the-Hump operation of the Air Transport Command carried nearly eight hundred thousand tons from India to South China in World War 11. The first massive airlift in history, it was one of the decisive factors in the Allied victory in the East. Its success produced the confidence to tackle the Berlin airlift five years later.

Bliss K. Thorne, a veteran pilot of the Hump, has done a notable job recording that heart-breaking operation, and in recreating its atmosphere and hazards.

In the spring of 1942, four months after Pearl Harbor the Japanese cut the Burma Road, isolating China. The substitute Ledo Road brought its first convoy into South China in January 1945, nearly three years later. During those intervening three years - starting with a handful of Douglas DC-3 airliners, the C-47 of the Air Force, and later with Curtiss Commandos, the work- horse C-46s - thousands of missions were completed by American fliers, over the most inhospitable terrain in the world, and through the worst and most unpredictable weather. Nevertheless, the tonnage figures rose and rose, month after month, until toward the end of the war over fifty thousandtons a month were being transported into China, every pound of it over the shoulder of the Himalayas. No comparable figure was ever attained with land transport over either the Burma Road or the Ledo Road.

The service ceiling of those early transports was 16,000 feet. When crossing the Hump on instruments the "safe" cruising altitude was 20,000 feet, enough to avoid the peaks only so long as the plane escaped those invisible downdrafts capable of sucking a machine thousands of feet earthward in a matter of seconds.

The Hump route, went from Assam, in the northeast corner of India (where the Air Transport Command crews lived under canvas, alternately broiled by the tropical sun or drenched by the monsoon), skirted Japanese-held north Burma, and then climbed "over the Hump" - 400 miles east to Kunming, in South China.

The ground temperature at take-off beside the Brahmaputra was regularly over 100 degrees in the shade, and the planes were parked in the sun during service and loading. An hour after take-off, over that tortured geography where the Himalayan snows spawn the Irrawaddy, the Salween, and the Mekong, as well as the great Yangtze Kiang that pours northeast out of Tibet and across China, coffee froze in the containers, and on sweat-drenched uniforms the caked ice crackled.

Not all who flew survived. The casualty rate, fighting storms and gales on the roof of the world, approximated combat duty over Fortress Germany. Mount Tali, one single 22,000 foot peak just south of the over-the-Hump route, possibly became, in the words of Bliss Thorne, "the only aluminum plated mountain peak in the world."

To those of us who perched during the war on the Chinese side of the Hump, dependent upon the crews of Air Transport Command for everything from the 100-oc-tane fuel that sustained General Chennault's Fourteenth Air Force, to mail from home and the salted peanuts wherewith we sought to temper the corrosion of Chungking gin and Chialing vodka, the over-the-Hump airlift was literally the lifeline that connected the China Theater with the outside world. To us, those pilots were giants among men: to keep the lifeline taut, they daily vanquished giants.

The Hump is a story of American fortitude, ingenuity, and durability - and the greatest of these is fortitude. Bliss Thorne knows whereof he writes. Flying C-46s in 1943 and 1944 - the hard years of the airlift before the four-motored C-54s took over - Captain Thorne completed 174 over-the-Hump crossings. His professional account is enhanced by Air Force photographs, excellently reproduced.