19th September 2025

I’ve just finished reading Skies of Thunder by American writer Caroline Alexander. It’s about the massive allied airlift of supplies into China in World War II, to aid the beleaguered Chinese army resist the Japanese. It involved flying over ‘the Hump’ of the Himalayan foothills, one of the most dangerous air routes in the world, due to its combination of mountains and frequently terrible weather.

Coming out of China in December 1944, my family (and I) flew that route in a DC3 Dakota. I was too young to remember it, but my parents’ accounts still make me a bit queasy. “If you can see the end of the runway, take off”, the pilot was told. We were fortunate, and got to Calcutta safely. But my parents not long after arrival there attended a service for another party of missionaries whose plane had got lost and crashed in a blizzard. Later, they even heard from friends back in China a report that we’d been shot down.

Not until reading the book however did I realise just how hazardous those flights were, including ours, and how costly was the scale of the whole operation. At least 700 aircraft were lost, some 21,200 airmen died. What a price – or waste? Did it in the end materially help the war effort? So many unanswerable questions, some very personal, not least for anyone who survived it all. Why did we survive, when so many didn’t? A matter of sheer chance? It’s up to us, each one, in faith, to prove the worthwhileness of our survival, by the way we live now in a dangerous world.

Keith Clements