The Burma Road

Charan Singh, our Sikh driver, turned his green-turbaned head just long enough to flash a smile above his majestic black beard. 

“Now come Wanting.”

With that our Lend-Lease caravan of twenty-eight handsome new station wagons lurched down into the cramped little valley. Wanting—where the tough part of the Burma Road begins.

For the next twenty minutes we seemed bogged down in the middle of an unbreakable traffic jam. The leader of our caravan was rushing about like mad. But in no time at all our cars were bouncing over the ruts, twisting and climbing out of the town.

Then it dawned on me. Not a single official had talked to us or examined our baggage. Here we were inside wartime China and we hadn’t so much as shown our passports at the border.

But it merely seemed to fit with the general scheme of things.

Nothing, apparently, was orthodox on the Burma Road.

I had chosen to come in through China’s back door because most of the problems of continued Chinese resistance hinged upon the amount of weapons and war materials transported over the Burma Road.

The United States government had appropriated half a billion dollars or more as its first installment of Lend-Lease aid to China. Now the first trickle of vital supplies was coming up over the fabulous mountain-bucking, gorge-diving highway that stretches 1,445 miles from Rangoon’s docks to Kunming, in the heart of distant Yunnan.

At places our station wagon, if it should be pushed over, would drop and somersault at least four hundred feet before it could meet anything as solid as a single dwarfed pine tree.

We are thinking in terms of being pushed over because dozens of trucks are grinding fiercely and indiscriminately around these curves.

“Those drivers are lunatics,” growls my Quaker companion, Peter Rowland of the Red Cross.

At that moment it seemed only too true, but in reality they were merely typical Chinese drivers of the Burma Road.

For the supreme slogan of the Burma Road has always been:

“To hell with everybody except yourself.”

Here everything is as ruthless as an early American gold rush—a gold rush on wheels. And for most of the road’s drivers, as we gradually discover, that is exactly what it is.

On our fifth day we reached Kunming—for us, the end of the Burma Road odyssey. It had been a lucky trip in every way. But just how lucky, I did not fully appreciate at that time.

Soon afterwards a terrible example of typical Burma Road lawlessness was witnessed by two American officers who were bringing through a United States Navy supply truck.

Just in front of them a truck was crashed head-on by a Chinese army conveyance which was speeding on the wrong side of the highway.

Out leapt a dozen Chinese soldiers. They hauled the driver out of the truck, knocked him down, and began kicking him fiercely.

Then the two Americans, so outnumbered they dared not intervene, saw one soldier grab a rock-crusher hammer from beside the road and bludgeon the brains out of their victim’s head.

For more than three years this kind of gangsterism had flourished, virtually without control, along the middle sector of the Burma Road.

That explained why Englishmen and Americans in Burma had said:

“Take a gun with you if you go over the road.”

But I had never fired a revolver in my life. I was pretty much of a fatalist.

You needed to be a fatalist if you were going to travel the Burma Road at all.

Now we were in Kunming at last, at the clean and civilized Hotel de l’Europe.

The next afternoon I boarded a CNAC (Chinese National Aviation Corporation) plane for Chungking.

The Burma Road was the greatest racket in the Far East.

Yet unless all the tonnage that could be transported over the Burma Road was transported over it—unless its abuses were eradicated—the Chinese armies could never stage a large-scale offensive against the Japanese.

For these reasons the Burma Road was of simply inestimable importance to the Allied cause.

Some time in the spring of 1941 the U.S. Congress made its first Lend-Lease appropriation of nearly five hundred million dollars for aid to China.

Our Lend-Lease had been improvised under the spur of necessity. We were not yet in the war and China was hard-pressed, so the materials which Chinese representatives in Washington declared to be needed most urgently were shipped as quickly as possible.

Chungking’s first requests under Lend-Lease fell into two categories.

The first included trucks, gasoline, airplanes, anti-aircraft guns, artillery and other arms.

The second concerned machine tools, mining apparatus, blast furnaces and a great variety of industrial equipment which could not contribute to the prosecution of the war until one to three years after this equipment was delivered over the Burma Road.

Despite great handicaps, the Chinese were doing a remarkable job turning out small arms and munitions.

Government arsenals, however, often ran short of the necessary raw materials.

In Rangoon large stocks of these raw materials had been lying and rusting for more than a year.

If a considerable portion were moved over the Burma Road, China’s output could have been doubled or tripled.

But for the past ten months, inquiry revealed, an average of only two hundred tons per month of raw materials for the arms and munitions plants had been transported over the road.

The amount of private contraband being smuggled was easily eight or ten times that tonnage per month.

Everything came down to Burma Road racketeering.

There was the item of spare radios for the P-40 Tomahawks which two of the three American Volunteer Group squadrons would soon be flying from their Kunming headquarters.

The spare radios were shipped over the Burma Road.

Recently, I learned, an Allied officer had got the feeling that a certain caravan smelled rather fishy.

So he opened the crates, which supposedly contained spare radios for the AVG planes, and found them stuffed—with perfume and women’s toilet articles.

Such things bring a fancy price in Kunming or Chungking.

The radio sets were gone.

Undoubtedly they had been sold at a pleasant profit either in Rangoon or Mandalay.

This was the Burma Road functioning in its accustomed fashion.

Two days before Christmas the Japanese hit Rangoon—on schedule.

There was scarcely a minute’s warning.

Suddenly dozens of bombs tore into the heart of the city, a city without cellars and without air-raid shelters worthy of the name.

Lend-Lease munitions, piled on the quays, made a fearful din as they went up in smoke.

Between six hundred and eight hundred persons were killed—most of them standing in the open or cringing helplessly against walls as the raiders released their bombs.

The next day was Christmas.

That night the Strand Hotel was a shabby mess of dirt and broken glass, without a servant left in the place.

About eight o’clock two Englishmen, dressed immaculately in white shirts and black ties, walked in with a woman wearing a sweeping evening gown.

They were bound for a chota-peg in the bar, according to a ritual which was undoubtedly of many years’ standing.

They did not seem remotely aware that Rangoon’s fires were still smoldering, that parts of the city were a shambles, or that its hospitals were overcrowded with some two thousand wounded.

It seemed that these three had not seen a thing all day—perhaps not for years and years.

This was my introduction to sleepwalkers among the bombs.

The first week of the Burma war clearly foreshadowed everything that happened afterward; so much so that those of us on the spot could foresee from the beginning the inevitable end.

The air battles over Rangoon were the only aspect of the Burma war that gave us anything to cheer about.

Wherever else we turned it seemed the tropical rot of colonial Burma hopelessly bogged down the efforts of brave men who were anxious to fight.

In fact, all Burma was a hotbed of actual or potential Japanese agents.

It was hardly fair to call the scores of thousands of Burmese “fifth columnists” simply because they were fiercely anti-British.

After the first bombing of Rangoon the charred remains of oil trucks were found in streets where not a single bomb had fallen.

In the confusion of the raid they had been fired by saboteurs.

The natives kept bonfires burning night after night across the countryside to guide Japanese bombers coming in.

And while the governor and other British authorities in Rangoon were maintaining that the members of the Burma government were reliable and pro-Allied, the premier of Burma’s local government, U Saw, was arrested abroad for conniving with the Japanese.

Thus the British policy toward the Burmese was utterly unrealistic.

It did not offer the Burmese the slightest hope for greater independence in the future, nor did it dare to take a strong hand toward those who were enemies of the British and active in sabotage for the Japanese.

Restored from an OCR source. Original wording and structure preserved as closely as possible, with corrections for readability.