Telling the story of the Allies’ fight in the chaotic China Burma-India theatre of war, Skies of Thunder introduces readers to the most dangerous air-route in the world, and the heroics of the pilots tasked with flying over the foothills of the Himalayas on this most perilous of journeys.
We spoke to author and historian Caroline Alexander about the writing of her aviation epic.
What got you interested in this story?
I was in Northern Myanmar on assignment for a National Geographic magazine piece on tigers. Northern Myanmar has the world’s largest tiger reserve, a magnificent place called the Hukawng Valley. But the Hukawng Valley, to readers of history, descendants of Chindits, descendants of fighters in the Burma campaign, would have very different connotations. It was a place of great terror and peril, and very dense jungle.
I walked into this extraordinarily beautiful, seemingly untouched, landscape completely clueless about the Burma campaign. But in the remote villages of the Naga people, I noticed that the vegetable gardens were ringed with jagged metal fences. I asked where this metal came from, and was told that they were cut from the fuselages of the crashed US cargo planes in the jungle. This very much caught my attention.
When I went back to the States, I looked into it and found that there were estimated to be about 600 crashed undiscovered US cargo planes scattered along the old air route in what’s now the jungles of Myanmar. And so that got me into the story.
The Burmese campaign doesn’t always get as much attention here in the UK as the events that took place in Europe. How well known is the Burmese campaign and the history of this theatre of war in the US?
Well, it’s interesting. I’d say that both countries have edited this history to tailor to their own national interest.
In America, I think it’s fair to say that the average, well-read person interested in general history has no real knowledge of the Burma campaign. If I say the word Chindits to them, they look completely blank. The only hooks that would evoke some sort of recognition would be the Flying Tigers, who were very much a manufactured product of the American media machinery. And they would know about General Stilwell. But if you’d pressed further, people wouldn’t really know what had happened. One reason for that is the whole point of the American campaign was to cultivate favour with nationalist China. And that was so clearly a miserable failure. There was no glory to be had in it at all, whereas in Britain, it’s about winning back Burma, beating the Japanese, driving them back from the gateway of India. For the British, it was a success and a triumph and a remarkable hard-fought campaign. In America, it was simply a mission that failed.
Your book is filled with some incredible contemporary quotes and pieces of citizen journalism. There’s a line I love from a pilot that describes landing a plane as like “setting her down like a featherbed”. Can you tell me about the research process and the thrill of coming across quotes such as those?
The research is overwhelming. If you look at the bibliography and footnotes, you can see that! To my great good fortune, a lot of the US Air Forces material had been scanned and they had a good database. This book was written during the pandemic lockdown, and I would get these massive microfilm reels, thousands of pages long…
It would be possible to write a part of this story entirely from the American archives and from the memoirs of the American pilots. But I was very interested in the setting of these bases in Assam, and that brings in all the tea planters and their memoirs. And then you follow the route all the way through to China and a desire to know about the people involved and living all the way along, not just Americans and Brits.
It was an era in which people wrote very well. They’re so quotable! There’s wonderful, evocative language that is gold dust for a writer. The more I could quote people, the happier I am. And this happens to be an era where people were very quotable.
Some of the accounts have an almost spiritual quality. These are people breaking totally new ground in a time of great experimentation. You’ve written in the past about the explorer Shackleton, and I wondered if you saw any similarities between Shackleton and the men who flew these planes?
Shackleton’s great gift was a faith that ordinary people could do heroic things. That he expected to bring everybody back home. He had no business to assume that they could make it through this terrible ordeal, but he believed they could. And in a strange way, that too is the backbone of this remarkable aviation epic.
These were not hotshot pilots flying The Hump. They’re non-combatants. In fact, the Air Transport Command acronym ‘ATC’, was sneered at by other pilots as standing for “allergic to combat”. These were guys just out of flight school, sent over to fly untested, experimental cargo planes over the foothills of the Himalayas through what just happened to be the worst weather system for aviation in the world – flying from take-off to landing with very primitive navigational aids. These guys took off and there was complete radio silence, except for when they could sometimes hear other planes saying, “We’re lost, we’re lost.”
These were very ordinary men, who had not yet gone on to evolve to be first-rate pilots, but who were given one of the most dangerous aviation jobs imaginable, and mostly – more or less – delivered the goods.
You have an extraordinary, eclectic range of past work – from books about Shackleton to The Iliad to this aviation epic. What is it that interests you most as a writer? What is the connector between your body of work?
It will sound odd, but the organizing principle of my reading and writing life has always been The Iliad. I read it in translation when I was 14 and then studied Greek. In The Iliad, the great dramatic moment is not the triumph of Achilles over Hector, it’s that terrible aftermath with Priam coming to beg for the body of his son and Achilles weeping. It’s about ending on the mortal note.
I tutored the Florida State football team in English, back when it was number one in the nation. I had a class of about a dozen African-American students, mostly from the rural South, who were reading at third-grade level, which would be about the level of a nine-year-old. This is because they had been passed through the system because they were brilliant athletes, and everybody just said, “Ah, you don’t need to learn to read and write, you’re not going to do anything with that, you’re going to go into pro sports.” But it was a very good class, that stuck with me.
When they turned 30, I went to track down what each of them had done with their life. Some of them were in prison, some I couldn’t find, there was a couple of very warming success stories, one had been a star in the pros. But ultimately, it was a story about heroism, but of a very different kind – just the sort of daily, believe in yourself, do it for your family, kind of noble errand. So, I would say ultimately, I’m interested in heroism, but I think it can be found in very unexpected places.
