Podcasts

The Flying Tigers became legends. The shark mouths. The dogfights. The mythology of fearless American pilots diving through the skies above China and Burma. But behind the glamour lay another war almost nobody remembers.

This is the story of The Hump crews, the exhausted transport pilots, navigators, mechanics, and bomber crews who flew through Himalayan storms carrying fuel, bombs, medicine, and hope into a collapsing China. Men vanished into cloud wrapped mountains so often the pilots gave the route a grim nickname, Aluminium Alley.

And when the Second World War ended, many of those same men did not come home. They flew straight into the secret wars of the Cold War, helping build Civil Air Transport and eventually Air America, the CIA’s shadow airline across Asia.

This is not simply a story about war. It is a story about exhaustion, survival, forgotten courage, and the men history almost allowed to disappear.