'The Hump': India honours US airmen downed in WWII China airlift

India opened a museum remembering the spectacular Himalayan airlift known as “The Hump” close to its strategic border with China on Wednesday in remembrance of the hundreds of US personnel lost in World War II.

It includes 80-year-old rusty debris and machine guns of some of the 590 planes that fell into the steep mountains and forest hills of Arunachal Pradesh, telling the narrative of how Allied pilots flew the treacherous path to feed Chinese forces.

Together with US ambassador Eric Garcetti, Arunachal Pradesh’s chief minister Pema Khandu opened “The Hump WWII Museum” in the town of Pasighat, stating that it displayed “the remnants of aircraft that went missing”.

The hazardous aviation path over the ice-covered eastern Himalayan highlands was dubbed “The Hump” by pilots. Japanese forces had cut off the overland route through Burma, or modern-day Myanmar, and Chinese troops were fighting them.

The quantity of collisions also led to it being dubbed the “Aluminium Trail.”

US aircraft of World War II vintage are still found in the rough mountains and dense jungles of Arunachal Pradesh, which is sandwiched between Myanmar and China.

Present-day Washington and Beijing are competing superpowers, and China claims “South Tibet” to include nearly the entirety of Arunachal Pradesh in its borders.

Fearing Beijing’s increasing military aggression along their shared 3,500-kilometer (2,175-mile) border, New Delhi has always insisted that Arunachal is a “integral and inalienable part of India”.

The China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association has reported that from April 1942 until almost the end of the war in 1945, 590 aircraft went down, killing almost 1,650 people.

It was dubbed the “greatest sustained aerial transport achievement of the war” by the US Air Force National Museum.

They transported about 650,000 tonnes of ammunition, fuel, and equipment across the Alps in some of the most difficult flying circumstances.

The US Air Force museum in Ohio noted that the “world’s first strategic airlift” was made possible by “obstacles posed by terrain and the extremes in climate, difficulties never before experienced in mass operation of aircraft”.

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Teams from the US Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which handles cases involving soldiers who are missing in action, have been to Arunachal Pradesh on multiple occasions in an attempt to find the remains of missing military members.

(With agency inputs)