Burma Road

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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 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, 1944. (Winston Churchill, The Second World War, v. VI, chap. 11.)

[edit] See also

• Ledo Road
• Yunnan-Burma Railway

[edit] References

1. ^ Burma Road - Britannica Online Encyclopedia

[edit] Further reading

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

[edit] 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.