Blood-Red Camel Hump

The sunlight is blinding, almost cruel. It pours down over the eastern Himalayas. The snow-covered peaks reflect its glare, like countless cold diamonds set in an endless blue sky. Above this remote region, beyond the reach of humankind, an invisible corridor once carried the hope of a nation's survival and swallowed countless young lives. Look down into the vast folds of the Hengduan Mountains, where emerald green meets gray-brown. If you fly low enough, or have sharp enough eyes, you may spot strange glimmers. They lie scattered along the edges of bottomless gorges, dot the cloud-wreathed ridgelines, and even show through the gravel left behind by melting glaciers. They are not ore, water, or sunlight reflected off ice and snow. They are aluminum. The last stubborn glints of aircraft skin, still shining after years of erosion. The route from Assam, India, to Kunming, Yunnan, China, was known with fear and respect as “the Hump.” It was no straight line. Treacherous terrain and fierce Japanese fighter planes forced it to twist and rise like a camel's back among deadly peaks. This six-hundred-mile air corridor was China's only lifeline to the outside world during World War II. Every drop of fuel, every shell, every tablet of penicillin that arrived was steeped in courage and despair. In three years, 800,000 tons of supplies and thousands of pilots. The price was the wreckage of more than five hundred aircraft scattered along the route. On clear days, later pilots did not even need sophisticated navigation equipment. They could find the corridor simply by following the faint but unbroken “trail of aluminum” glimmering in the sun.