Lost in Tibet: The Untold Story of Five American Airmen, a Doomed Plane, and the Will to Survive

My dad never confided in anyone about the true story. All we knew as kids was the story about how he split his chin open when parachuting out of a plane. I read the entire book in one evening and have shared it with many friends.... The fact that I am alive to even read this is amazing given the obstacles they had to overcome to get back home. The politics behind his story I found so amazing and often wondered if he really was privy to the entire truth. Afterall he was only 19 at the time. I highly recommend this to all as a great read to anyone who loves a real life drama about war.

Lost In Tibet is not your typical WWII book. It is the story of five men who were forced to jump from their plane somewhere over Tibet. How they got there and how they get back to their base in India is an amazing tale of bravey and survival. The reader is left to wonder how these men were able to do it. Even though the book includes no battles, and no fighting it is still a WWII story that must be read. You will not be disappointed. A sad footnote is how the Tibetans were treated by the Chinese after they invaded in 1950 and how the rest of the world, and the United Nations stood by and did nothing to help.

Rebeccasreads highly recommends LOST IN TIBET as a fascinating recollection of a WWII drama when five American airmen were flying their C87 over The Hump, got blown off course & had to bail out onto The Roof of the World. In 1943, Robert Crozier, Harold McCallum, Kenneth Spencer, John Huffman & William Perram were out of fuel & lost in the clouds & the Himalayas. With no time for their parachutes to open the five airmen landed in the snow on the same mountain, all but one within hailing distance. After sleeping the night in their niches, they made their way down to a settlement in the valley where they were received by the village leader & met their first Tibetans, who were fascinated by these men who fell from the sky. Summoned to Lhasa by the Tibetan government, the five airmen, following their guides & riding little ponies, trekked up & down mountains to The Forbidden City where they met with unrelenting hostility from the citizens, a feast by the Chinese mission commander, & eventually, the sanctuary of the British delegation. How they got back to India, how they were received in America, what happened in Tibet after they left, an Afterword about the five American airmen, & the key players who helped them, plus a Notes section round out a tale very well told. Could not put LOST IN TIBET down! Unique & engrossing, ably told by two passionate mountain travelers with a host of cultural & historic details.

In 1943 during WWII, five U.S. airmen flying the "Hump" between Burma and the U.S. ally Nationalist China were blown off course into Tibet in a storm and bailed out of their plane before it crashed. After an arduous trek across the forbidding Tibetan mountainous terrain, they arrived in the capital of Lhasa--only to find themselves at the center of precarious international affairs. The Chinese were trying to take over Tibet. Since the U. S. was an ally of China in the war against Japan, the Tibetans could not believe that the American airmen were not somehow involved with China's hostile aims toward their country. The Chinese were concerned that the airmen would be witnesses to their actions taken to occupy Tibet even while the U. S. government was trying to keep the Chinese movements from becoming widely known. The authors tell this complex, engaging tale clearly, skillfully keeping its different elements in balance while keeping a focus on the plight of the airmen resented by both Tibet and China and dealt with at arm's length by the U. S. until they made their timely overland escape to India with the aid of British citizens in the region who were acting as surrogates for the American government. The authors, both journalists, recount the full story of this little-known episode of WWII that has heretofore received only passing attention. From their travels to mountainous areas of Asia, they bring a special sense of the five airmen's struggles to survive in the Tibetan terrain at the beginning and again at the end of their incredible story.

This book grabs your attention at several levels. First off, it's a top-notch survival story about five WWII airmen whose aircraft, blown off-course, crashes in the mountains of forbidden Tibet. The story describes how the men manage to survive - only to find themselves placed under house arrest by suspicious Tibetan authorities, leaving them to an uncertain fate. Once you think they're about to gain their freedom, the politics change and they're forced to race against time to escape back to civilization making an equally arduous winter trek across the Tibetan plateau. It reminds one of Shackleton's adventures, but with Kafka overtones and no water. Intertwined with the adventure is the war-time political intrigue surrounding the battle for Tibet between sometimes friends sometimes adversaries, China, Britain and the United States; perhaps the last vestiges of the Great Game so well described by Peter Hopkirk in his famous book on the subject. Throughout the book you're continually amazed at the fortitude and adaptability of these five very ordinary, young Americans and their struggle to adapt to an alien culture completely unknown to the outside world. Of equal interest is the post script which follows the men into later life showing how this harrowing adventure stamped a lasting imprint on their character.