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Burma Road and Ledo Road in 1944

Burma Road and Ledo Road

Allied lines of communication in Southeast Asia (1942–43). The Burma Road is shown at far right

The Burma Road (滇缅公路) is a road linking Burma (also called Myanmar) with China. Its terminals are Kunming, Yunnan and Lashio, Burma. When it was built, Burma was a British colony.

The road is 717 miles (1,154 km) long and runs through rough mountain country.^[1] The sections from Kunming to the Burmese border were built by 200,000 Chinese laborers during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and completed by 1938. It had a role in World War II, when the British used the Burma Road to transport war materiel to China before Japan was at war with the British. Supplies would be landed at Rangoon (now Yangon) and moved by rail to Lashio, where the road started in Burma. After the Japanese overran Burma in 1942, the Allies were forced to supply Chiang Kai-shek (also called Jiang Jieshi) and the nationalist Chinese by air. They flew these supplies from airfields in Assam, India over the eastern end of the Himalaya uplift. At the insistence of the United States, and much to the chagrin of Winston Churchill, the wartime leader of Britain, British forces were given, as their primary goal in the war against Japan, the task of recapturing Burma and reopening land communication with China. Under British command Indian, British, Chinese, and American forces, the latter led by Vinegar Joe Stilwell, defeated a Japanese attempt to capture Assam and recaptured northern Burma. In this area they built a new road, the Ledo Road which ran from Ledo Assam, through Myitkina and connected to the old Burma Road at Wandingzhen, Yunnan, China. The first trucks reached the Chinese frontier by this route on January 28, 1945. (Winston Churchill, The Second World War, v. VI, chap. 11.)

Women and children using hand tools to build Burma Road

See also

• Ledo Road
• Yunnan-Burma Railway
• Salween River Bridge

References

1. ^ Burma Road - Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Further reading

• Jon Latimer, Burma: The Forgotten War, John Murray, (2004). ISBN 0-7195-6576-6.

External links

• Burma Road photos
• WW2 - Campaigns in Burma WW2 Burma Road video
• WWII - Why We Fight - The Battle of China 1943 video 1
• WWII - Why We Fight - The Battle of China 1943 video 2
• Life-line to China Re-Opened, 1945/02/12 (1945) Universal Newsreel
• The Ghost Road Mark Jenkins, Outside Magazine, October 2003
• Blood, Sweat and Toil along the Burma Road Donovan Webster, National Geographic Magazine, November 2003
• Burma Road on bicycle Erin O'Brien, The Cultured Traveler, Vol 6 April 2004
• China to Europe via a new Burma road David Fullbrook, Asia Times, September 23, 2004
• On the way to MandalayThe Sydney Morning Herald, August 16, 2008
• Los Angeles Times, "Burma's Stilwell Road: A backbreaking WWII project is revived", December 30, 2008.

From Wikitravel

This article is an itinerary.

The Burma Road was built during World War II to bring supplies to beleaguered China, to help them resist the Japanese invasion.

Parts of the road were originally built by the British and Indians, starting in the 1920s, from Ledo in Assam over the mountains to Lashio in Burma (now called Myanmar). This Ledo Road was heavily upgraded by US forces during the war. Traveling this road today is nearly impossible. The four hundred kilometers between the border with India (near Pangsau Pass) and Myitkyina is off-limits to foreigners. The road itself had mostly returned to the jungle but has been rebuilt, allegedly with forced Naga and Kachin labor, in recent years. The Myanmar junta is in the process of converting this section into an all weather section for trade with India. (Note: The Indian section of the road, from Ledo to Nampong on the Ledo road is also a restricted area.) The Ledo road is also known as the Stilwell Road because it was championed and built by General Joe Stilwell.

The actual Burma Road was largely built by the Chinese themselves — 160,000 workers with almost no equipment hacking a road out of the mountains of Western Yunnan, from Kunming to Lashio, starting in 1937. After 1941, US Army Engineers also worked on this part of the road. Travelers on today's Yunnan tourist trail cover some of this route, albeit on far newer and better roads. Traces of the old road, including some milestones, are still visible.

The Burmese part of the Burma road is short, from the border town Ruili to Lashio, and can be traversed only one way which is (Ruili to Lashio) and only under escort.

There was a good deal of fighting in the area by British, Indian, and African troops under General Slim and Colonel Wingate, and Americans and Chinese under Generals Stillwell and Wedemeyer, battling Japanese forces that held much of Burma and at one point even threatened India. Keeping the road open was an important Allied objective.

The alternative to the road was "flying the hump", which was taking supply planes from airports around Calcutta to Kunming over parts of the Himalayas. This was done by American pilots at great risk. Another Allied objective in Burma was to knock out bases used by Japanese fighters harassing the hump flyers. Today "The Hump" is a popular tourist bar in Kunming and there are commercial flights Kolkata-Kunming.

See

In the event that sections of the road open up to travelers, the following are some of the highlights along the Ledo Road and the Burma Road.

• Nampong is a border town in the Indian state of Assam
• Pangsau Pass, just inside the Indo-Burma border, 3727 feet in height.
• Pangsau is the first town on the Burmese side.
• The Lake of No Return near Pangsau
• Myitkyina, in the Kachin State, is open to travelers and is connected by road, rail, air, and ferry from Mandalay.
• Bhamo, also in the Kachin State, is open to travelers.
• Namkham, a village in the Northern Shan State in Burma. Travel to Namkham is currently restricted and a permit (almost impossible to get) is required from Yangon.
• Kunming
• Lake of No Return (Nawng Yang in Burmese), Kacin Province.  edit