“Hell is So Green: Search and Rescue over the Hump in World War II,” by Lt. Williams Diebold, edited by Richard Matthews, Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press, hardcover, $22.95

Lt. William Diebold served in the Army’s Air Transport Command in the China-Burma-India theater of World War II. He never fired a weapon in battle. Like many men who flew the Hump, he never saw on-the-ground combat, but he fought bravely by saving lives.

Flyers crossed the eastern Himalayas to keep allied armies in China supplied with food, fuel and weapons against Japan — preventing it from concentrating its power in the Pacific. They often flew in zero visibility, sometimes crashing into mountains or falling from the sky from Japanese Zero attacks.

Those who survived, Bill Diebold rescued.

In “Hell Is So Green,” Diebold vividly describes the heat and stench of the jungle; the vermin, lice and leeches; the towering mountains and roaring rivers. Rich with war slang, wisecracks and old-fashioned phrases, his book shares the stories of many men that were never told.

After the author’s early death, the manuscript was put away in an attic — until now.

Diebold wrote “Hell Is So Green” shortly after returning to America. An excerpt from the manuscript appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1946 and Coast Artillery Journal in 1947. Diebold died in 1965.

Richard Ma