Burma Road

File:The Hump and Burma Road.png

Transportation of Allied Forces in Burma and southwestern China including the Burma Road

File:Ledo Burma Roads Assam-Burma-China.gif

The "Twenty-Four Bends" (25.821725°N, 105.202600°E), often mistaken for a segment of the Burma Road, is actually in Qinglong County, Guizhou Province. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Western supplies carried over the Burma Road first arrived at Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, then traveled over mountain roads, such as the "24 Bends," passing through cities such as Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province, before continuing to Chongqing.

File:Workers with hand tools building Burma Road2.jpg

Burmese and Chinese laborers using hand tools to reopen the Burma Road in 1944

The Burma Road (Template:Zh) was a road linking Burma (now known as Myanmar) with southwest China. Its terminals were Lashio, Burma, in the south and Kunming, China, the capital of Yunnan province in the north. It was built in 1937–1938 while Burma was a British colony to convey supplies to China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Preventing the flow of supplies on the road helped motivate the occupation of Burma by the Empire of Japan in 1942 during World War II. Use of the road was restored to the Allies in 1945 after the completion of the Ledo Road. Some parts of the old road are still visible today.<ref>Voy: Burma Road</ref>

History

The road is Template:Convert long and runs through rough mountain country.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The sections from Kunming to the Burmese border were built by 200,000 Burmese and Chinese laborers during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and completed by 1938 in order to circumvent the Japanese blockade of China.<ref name=Bernstein2014>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Seagrave, Gordon S., Burma Surgeon, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1943 Template:ISBN?</ref> The construction project was coordinated by Chih-Ping Chen.

During World War II, the Allies used the Burma Road to transport materiel to aid China's war effort, especially after China lost sea-access following the loss of Nanning in the Battle of South Guangxi. Supplies from San Francisco for example would land at Rangoon (now Yangon), moved by rail to Lashio where the road started in Burma, up steep gradients before crossing into China over the Wanding bridge. The Chinese stretch of the road continued for some five hundred miles through rural Yunnan terrain before ending up in Kunming.<ref name=Bernstein2014/>

In July 1940, Britain yielded to Japanese diplomatic pressure and closed the Burma Road for three months.<ref>Lorraine Glennon. Our Times: An Illustrated History of the 20th Century. October 1995. Template:ISBN</ref>Template:Rp The Japanese overran Burma in 1942, closing the Burma Road. The Allies thereafter supplied China by air, flying "over The Hump" from India, which initially proved fatally dangerous and woefully inadequate, leading U.S. army general Joseph Stilwell to obsessively pursue the goal of reopening the Burma Road.<ref name=Bernstein2014/>

The Allies recaptured northern Burma in late 1944, which allowed the Ledo Road from Ledo, Assam to connect to the old Burma Road at Wanding, Yunnan province. The first trucks reached the Chinese frontier by this route on January 28, 1945.<ref>Winston Churchill. The Second World War, v. VI, chap. 11.</ref> The first convoy reached Kunming on February 4, 1945.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Films set on the Burma Road

• Burma Convoy (1941)
• A Yank on the Burma Road (1942)
• Bombs over Burma (1942)
• Objective, Burma! (1945)

The construction of the road also features in The Battle of China (1944), the sixth film of Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda film series.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Further reading

• C. T. Chang: Burma Road, Malaysia Publications, Singapore 1964.Template:ISBN?
• Forbes, Andrew ; Henley, David (2011). China's Ancient Tea Horse Road. Chiang Mai: Cognoscenti Books. Template:ASIN
• Jon Latimer: Burma:The Forgotten War. John Murray, London 2004, Template:ISBN.
• Smith, Nicol (1940). Burma Road: The Story of the World's Most Romantic Highway. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.Template:ISBN?
• Tan, Pei-Ying. The Building of the Burma Road. Whittlesey house, 1945. Template:ASIN
• Webster, Donovan : The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II. Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, 2003, Template:ISBN.

See also

• Ledo Road
• Tea Horse Road, ancient Silk Road segment over the same area
• Hangrui Expressway, the modern road along this route
• Yunnan-Burma Railway
• Burma Road (Israel), wartime makeshift named for the original Burma Road

External links

• Merrill's Marauders: Protecting The Burma Road
• Burma Road photos
• WW2 - Campaigns in Burma World War II 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
• 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.
• Transcribed copies of Joseph Warren Stilwell's World War II diaries Template:Webarchive are available on the Hoover Institution Archives website, with the original diaries among the Joseph Warren Stilwell papers at the Hoover Institution Archives.
• Transcribed copies of the World War II diaries of Ernest F. Easterbrook, Stilwell's executive assistant in Burma (as of 1944) and son-in-law, are available on the Hoover Institution Archives website, with the original diaries among the Ernest Fred Easterbrook papers at the Hoover Institution Archives.
• For tours along the Burma Road.