The first convoy on the Ledo Road

In mid-January 1945 the first convoy of lorries set out from the small town of Ledo in Assam, India, to cross the jungles and mountains of northern Burma into China. It was the first attempt in almost three years to carry supplies to China overland. The route, which the soldiers called the Ledo Road and which would soon be renamed the Stilwell Road, was the fruit of more than two years’ work by American engineers and tens of thousands of labourers.

The convoy’s departure is sometimes placed under 11 January. The American official history (Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland, Time Runs Out in CBI) and most studies, however, state that the inaugural convoy left Ledo a day later, on 12 January 1945.

The Burma Road and the blockade of China

China had been fighting Japan since 1937, and after the loss of its coast and its great ports its army depended on supplies from outside. The most important route by which they arrived was the Burma Road, built in 1937–1938 by the hands of hundreds of thousands of Chinese labourers: cargoes were shipped to Rangoon, went by rail to Lashio, and from there by lorry over the mountains to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. The Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942 severed this artery. Rangoon fell in March and Lashio at the end of April, and the remnants of the Allied forces – among them General Joseph Stilwell, who led his staff out on foot across the mountains – withdrew to India.

From then on the only link with China was the airlift over the eastern Himalayas, across “the Hump”, as airmen called the ridges between Assam and Yunnan. The flight was dangerous and costly, and in the first months the aircraft carried only a few thousand tons a month. Stilwell, chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek and commander of American forces in the China–Burma–India theatre, believed that without an overland route it would be impossible to arm and train a Chinese army capable of defeating the Japanese. He therefore resolved to recover northern Burma with Chinese divisions trained in India and, at the same time, to build behind them a road linking the Indian railway at Ledo with the old Burma Road.

Construction

The British had already surveyed a route from Assam across the Patkai hills to the Hukawng valley and laid out the first few dozen miles of road. According to American studies, on 1 December 1942 General Archibald Wavell agreed that the Americans should take over the construction, and work began in December. It was directed by Stilwell’s Services of Supply, headed by General Raymond A. Wheeler. Progress was slow until, in October 1943, command of the construction passed to Colonel (soon General) Lewis A. Pick, an experienced officer of the Army Corps of Engineers who had previously headed the engineer division for the Missouri River basin. His energy and tenacity led the soldiers to call the road “Pick’s Pike”.

The first section, about 166 kilometres long, led from Ledo along a steep track over the Pangsau Pass on the border between India and Burma – known as “Hell Pass” – to the Burmese village of Shingbwiyang. The road climbed to a height of about 1,400 metres and wound in hairpin bends above precipices, all amid monsoon downpours, mud and dense jungle. The first bulldozer reached Shingbwiyang on 27 December 1943. Beyond it the builders followed in the wake of Chinese and American troops who were driving the Japanese 18th Division out of the Hukawng valley; over long stretches they made use of a route built earlier by the Japanese themselves.

The road’s progress depended on the progress of the front. In the summer of 1944, after a long siege, the Chinese and Americans captured Myitkyina, the most important town in northern Burma, whose airfield had already fallen into their hands in May. On 15 December the Japanese abandoned Bhamo on the Irrawaddy. In mid-January 1945 the Ledo Road joined the road from Myitkyina to Bhamo – according to the official history at a point 271 miles (about 436 kilometres) from Ledo. From there the route followed a branch of the old Burma Road via Namhkam to the Mong Yu road junction, where it joined the main road into China. To get that far the builders had to bridge ten large rivers and more than a hundred and fifty smaller streams.

Fuel pipelines were laid along the road. Petrol for lorries and aircraft flowed through four-inch pipes, so it did not have to be hauled along the road itself; according to the official history, at the beginning of 1945 the pipeline reached Bhamo, from where it was to be carried cross-country into China.

People and costs

The road was built very largely by soldiers whom the segregated American army of the time assigned to labour rather than combat. According to frequently cited estimates, some 15,000 American soldiers worked on it, roughly 60 per cent of them African Americans – among them the 45th Engineer Regiment and several aviation engineer battalions – together with about 35,000 local labourers. These included workers from India, people of the border hills such as the Nagas and the Kachins, as well as Chinese soldiers and labourers. The official history puts the cost of construction at about 148 million dollars.

The human cost was high. Malaria, dysentery, accidents on the steep slopes and while clearing the jungle, landslides and floods killed more than 1,100 soldiers according to American figures, and the number of local labourers who died is unknown and was certainly higher. Hence the saying that the road had cost “a man a mile” – a figure of speech rather than an exact reckoning.

The undertaking was controversial from the start. Winston Churchill called it “an immense, laborious task, unlikely to be finished until the need for it has passed”. General William Slim, commander of the British Fourteenth Army, later wrote that he had not doubted the road could be built, but had not believed it would be of decisive importance to the war. The commander of the American air forces in China, Claire Chennault, argued that aircraft would carry more than lorries. Stilwell’s staff counted on 65,000 tons a month; meanwhile, as new transport aircraft arrived, the tonnage flown over the Hump grew faster than the road – according to American figures, from 18,000 tons in June 1944 to 39,000 in November, when the capture of Myitkyina made it possible to fly a shorter, more southerly route.

Stilwell himself did not live to see the opening of the road on the spot. His quarrel with Chiang Kai-shek, which had been building since the autumn of 1943, ended in October 1944 with his recall by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The China–Burma–India theatre was divided: in China command passed to General Albert C. Wedemeyer, and in India and Burma to General Daniel I. Sultan, under whose command the campaign and the construction were completed.

Pick’s convoy

At the beginning of January 1945 the fighting for the last stretch of the route was still going on. East of Bhamo, General Sun Liren’s Chinese New First Army and the American Mars Task Force were fighting their way through the Shweli valley towards the border, while from the other side, from the Salween, Chinese troops from Yunnan were advancing on Wanding as they completed the Salween offensive. The command nevertheless decided to send the convoy before the road was fully clear, reckoning that the Japanese would withdraw before the lorries reached the front.

The inaugural convoy was led by General Pick himself. According to the most frequently cited figure it consisted of 113 vehicles: lorries, jeeps and tractors, some of which towed 75 mm and 105 mm howitzers intended for the Chinese army. At the wheel were African American soldiers and – as the official history noted, “for ceremonial reasons” – Chinese drivers. The event was carefully staged for public consumption: 65 journalists and press officers rode in the column, more than there were soldiers guarding it.

The convoy reached Myitkyina on 15 January and had to wait there until 23 January, because the Japanese were still shelling the road beyond Namhkam. On the night of 22–23 January General Sultan announced that the road was open, and the column moved on, but near Namhkam it halted again for several days, because a Japanese 150 mm howitzer could still reach the stretch it was to drive along. The command did not want to risk a shell landing among lorries full of correspondents.

Meanwhile Pick’s convoy had been beaten to it by another American’s small column. Lieutenant Hugh A. Pock, with two lorries and a heavy wrecker, drove from Myitkyina to Kunming by a short cut, along a primitive route via Tengchong, and according to the official history arrived on 20 January after sixteen days on the road. On 24 January the BBC announced that the “first convoy” was already in China, to the surprise of the journalists waiting near Namhkam.

The last stretch was opened by the link-up of the forces from India and from Yunnan near Mong Yu in the last days of January. On 28 January Pick’s convoy crossed the border and joined the Burma Road, and on 4 February 1945, after more than three weeks on the road, it entered Kunming in a parade. For the last few kilometres Chinese drivers were at the wheel, while Pick stood upright in a jeep at the head of the column amid firecrackers and bands.

Place in the war

The departure of the convoy from Ledo crowned one of the greatest engineering undertakings of the war and symbolically ended the overland blockade of China, which had lasted since 1942. Its practical importance, however, proved more modest than Stilwell had assumed. By the time the road was working, the airlift was already carrying many times more: according to American figures, in July 1945 aircraft delivered about 71,000 tons to China, and the Ledo Road about 6,000 tons. Over the whole war the Hump brought China about 650,000 tons of supplies, the road about 147,000. What was valuable, on the other hand, was that the vehicles and guns themselves reached China, while the pipeline delivered fuel.

Soon after the opening Chiang Kai-shek named the route after Stilwell, his recent adversary. After the war the road quickly fell into ruin, and long stretches of it were swallowed by the jungle. What remained above all was the memory of the soldiers and labourers who built it in some of the most difficult terrain in the world.