WILL BURMA ROAD BE REALITY OR MEMORY?

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23587, 14 March 1942, Page 6

WILL BURMA ROAD BE REALITY OR MEMORY?

SUPPLIES FOR CHINA

(By the Chungking Correspondent CHUNGKING, March 3. Is the Burma Road to become a memory, or continue as a reality. Th is the stark decision confronting China as Rangoon ends its period as the gateway to China for war supplies sent by '"BetaTni"/fe, I find this inexorable decision is Chungking’s major preoccu--ojourney was made along the twisting, stupendous mountain highway from Burma, generally regarded as a section of Chinese opinion is not convinced that the new India Road will be a workabie substitute. That conviction is something which only Chiang Kai-shek hiraselt can ensure. His visit to India has undoubtedly been for the purpose of investigating the potentialities of the new British road link to Chinas section, which runs for more than 1500 miles to Chungking. Mushroom Town The real road journey begins with the fantastic mushroom town of Lashio, a former sleepy village, where natives still eat snakes. The snakes can be seeft hanging outside the butchers Sh The iew Lashio is the nearest thing to a gold-rush town one is likely to see outside Hollywood, with drivers and adventurers striding the streets, flamboyantly dressed, and carrying revolvers. , , ... Buildings are being rushed up daily half-finished frame edifices. In the streets there is an incredible confusion of trucks, cars, carts, and buses, the shouting drivers of which jostle one another. Here and in places towards the border, arches of welcome have been erected in—honour of the incoming Chinese troops, who were cheered when in camouflaged trucks, they reached the bamboo Customs barrier. My interpreter on the journey was a dashing young Army captain, who pointed out that this was the last stage of the movement of the mechanised army to Burma along the highway from Kunming. I talked with officers of this army, who were eager that there should be a High Command, in order that there could be a drive against Japanese concentrations in Indo-China and Thailand. Signal by Revolver The sun was glinting on the mountain tops as I drove in a high-powered car over the macadam of the first section of the road. The road soon degenerated into a bumpy, precipitous track, with roaring lorries —sometimes 10-wheelers— struggling along at eight miles an hour and blocking, the passage of our car.

of the "Sydney Morning Herald.") Lorry drivers negotiating these stretches of road are unable to hear a horn, so the officer fired a revolver as a signal that the car wished to over. - take the trucks. Every few hundred yards we saw a wrecked vehicle beside the road. Oc'casionally we saw a charred wreck hundreds of feet under our part of the road. , , . On the second and third days the distance between these lorries which had come to grief greatly increased. The road is the world’s best test of driving skill. It has produced the very exclusive coterie, “Burma Ros^ters.’' I was solemnly initiated into their company after arrival in Kun. 1 ming. The badge was a 10-dollar bill signed by others who survived the ' trip. Gangs were working throughout the length of the road. Sometimes, surprisingly, they were formed of women. Often children were seen breaking stones. Thousands of lives were given to the construction of the highway. Thousands are dedicated to the interminable task of resurfacing, repairing, and widening. This last is a very necessary procedure, for it is no exaggeration to say that travellers often measure the distance between themselves and eternity by inches as vehicles pass with one wheel slipping over the crumpled brink of a thousand feet drop. If a breakdown occurs on a lonely section it involves danger from ban* dits as well as the impossibility of carrying out complicated repairs. Death and Toil I shall not quickly forget the night . during which I spent two hours on a deserted mountain stretch near the . colossal Mekong gorge in a howling wind. As we made adjustments to the back spring of the car the Army captain stood guard with drawn revolver., Neither shall I forget the night in a strange place near where a traveller was murdered, for, in spite of policing, many wild sections still remain. Many analyses and factual calculations are possible concerning the Burma Road, but it seemed to me as I helped to pull out limp and bloody figures from a truck which fell oyer a cliff a few minutes before V/e arrived near one town that all were reducible to a simple human equation. The construction of the road meant death and toil; the unceasing task of bringing supplies to the heart of Free China means sacrifice, agony, and danger; but, as I saw great trucks rumbling, into Kunming, the headquarters of many gallant Chinese armies, I knew ■ that they, too, were part of humanity’s pattern. They, too, were symbols of free peoples striving against things abhorrent.