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Late the other evening I got to talking with a man in a bar over on Third Avenue. His eyes were a bit glassy and his voice was thick and pretty soon he began to talk about the war. "I was in Italy," he said, "mostly Cassino. Toughest theater in the war. All we did week after week was wallow around in the muck and dodge them damn 88's. We were in the forgotten theater. Nobody ever heard of us."
"Well," I said, "Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin did pretty well by you, not to mention a book called 'A Walk in the Sun,' which -"
"Say, listen," he glared at me, "just where in the hell were you? In some fur-lined foxhole with the rest of the USO Commandos?"
Third Avenue gets nice and quiet along about midnight, except when the El goes rumbling overhead. I left the bar, threw away my cigarette, yanked up my coat collar against the wind and headed uptown. What I needed, I decided, was a good walk. And that struck me funny - wanting to take a walk, I mean. Because there was a time, a couple of years ago, when I swore I'd never walk another step in my life. That is, if I lived to be a civilian again and I had the dough to grab a taxi.
That was in Burma. That was when I was with Merrill's Marauders. Mostly it was during the last 100 miles or so of that 700-mile hike from Ledo to Myitkyina, when our shoulders were raw from pack sores and we were gaunt and wobbly and had been on K-rations for one month too long. Of the 2,800 who had started as volunteers on this mission behind Jap lines a couple of months before there were only a few hundred of us left. Some had been clipped by the Japs; others had been evacuated with malaria or dysentery or just plain fatigue. And the scrub typhus had just caught up with us.
Scrub typhus was tough. One day a man would be okay, slogging along through the jungles, cussing Stilwell and offering to trade his fruit bar and powdered coffee for a cheese and a powdered chocolate. And the next he would suddenly collapse with a 104-degree fever and go blind and start turning black. When a man got it, we gave him pills, tried to keep him warm and start digging another hole. Usually he died quickly and we would leave him under a little rustic cross. "The lousy thing about it," someone said, "is that they gotta die after walking 600 miles. If they was gonna die, why the hell couldn't it been way back at Walawbum or Inkangahtawng?"
By this time our mules were so beat up from all those miles, and especially from that 6,000-foot climb up the Naura Hyket Pass, that they began dropping right and left. When they dropped, we wanted to shoot them and end their misery. But we couldn't, because we were a good 70 miles behind Jap lines and someone might have heard us. So we just loosened their pack saddles to make them more comfortable and said goodbye. And we took the mortar shells and radios off their saddles and carried them ourselves.
It was rough in Burma, all right. We used to ask our officers what we were doing in the CBI. They said it was all to build a road. There were airplanes running the Hump, one every five minutes carrying cargo to China, but they weren't enough. China had to have a road through the blockade - so we had to drive the Japanese out of the jungle, and the engineers would follow us down with a new road from Ledo until the old Burma Road was open again. We were a year and a half doing it. Every once in a while when our air-drop parachutes floated down with more K-rations and Grade B cigarettes, there were some copies of the CBI Roundup. The Roundup was our theater newspaper. We used to read in it of thousand-plane raids over Berlin, of huge carrier task forces approaching the Philippines, or massive invasion convoys spilling out divisions of men upon the beaches of Normandy or Saipan. That, we thought, was really war. But this?
Death of an Air Strip
A few months ago, while I was sitting in New Delhi pondering the complexities of Indian politics, the opportunity
presented itself for me to make a special return trip to Assam and Burma to see the Hump airfields and the Ledo Road
and the old battlefields once more. I had too many memories not to go...
For more than two years, Chabua airport in northern Assam Province, India, had been the main western terminus on the Hump run to China. Month after month it was the busiest airport in the world. No sooner did a plane take off or land, day or night, then another was rolling down the runway. In the sky overhead, planes wheeled slowly at different
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Between twenty and thirty thousand men had been stationed in upper Assam, air-feeding cargo to China. The heart of the Hump was the operations shack on the air strip at Chabua. It was a close, smelly room, full of sweat and men, men dressed in their fleece-lined flying clothes, elbowing and shoving each other in turmoil. In the crowded Operations Office, pilots and navigators poured over weather reports with the intensity of doom. On the backs of their leather jackets were sewn American flags and Chinese characters, just in case they should be by some double miracle not only be alive after going down over the Hump but also discover any human beings existing up there in the mountains and wind and the snow.
And now the war was over and I was back on Chabua air strip. This time I didn't have to fight my way through a crowd when I walked into the Operations Office. When my eyes became accustomed to the gloom of the big room, I discovered there was only one other person in the place. He was sitting in a corner, typing.
Among the Missing
Howdy," he said, getting up and coming toward me. His voice echoed through the room. "You the one who wants to fly
to Myitkyina?" I said yes and asked where the pilot was. "Oh, I'm the pilot," he said, "and also the CO, Adjutant,
Operations Officer, Special Service Officer and everything else. We're closing things up, you know."
Outside, I looked across the broad concrete runways and taxiways and dispersal areas. There was a single plane - a battered old C-47 - on the whole field.
The sky above was empty and silent. The captain hailed a sergeant, "Dick," he said, "will you go out in the jeep and shoo those cows off the strip?" And there in the middle of what was once the world's busiest airport was a herd of water buffalo.
A couple of others climbed into the plane with us and soon we were bouncing down the runway past the empty Control Tower and rising to head for Burma. The man next to me, it turned out, was in a Graves Registration Unit. "That's what we use this pane for nowadays, mostly," he said, "to pick up the bodies. We've had guys down below there for months hunting for graves and crashes. When they find them, they get them to the nearest air strip and we fly them to Calcutta so's they can be sent back to the States. There's still more than a thousand bodies somewhere between Assam and China which we still ain't found. But they're coming in slowly."
Down below us now as we droned across the wet, green Naga Hills, we could make out a slender thread of yellow which coiled back and forth through the mountains like an endless snake. That was the Ledo Road. That was the main object of the whole North Burma campaign begun by Stilwell in 1943. That was what we had built at a cost of pretty near a billion dollars and God knows how many lives. It wasn't completed until February, 1945 - only six months before the Tokyo Bay surrender.
"Know what the British around here are calling it now? asked the Graves Registration man. His face had darkened. "They're calling it the White Elephant Road..."
Heartbreak Road
"The Road," we used to call it. The public relations officers were variously drumming up support for such names as
Stilwell Road and Pick's Pike (Pick being the general in charge of construction), but to those of us who had lived with
it through the fighting and the malaria and the monsoons, it was always just "The Road." When we GI's did call it anything
else, it was usually after a bridge had washed out or a landslide had blocked it or we had completed another trip over it
and were coated with thick red dust. At such times, it was "The ____ Road," and the missing word wasn't "heartbreak."
But it was full of heartbreak, this broad gravel highway hacked out of the tangled jungle and the sides of mountain cliffs. Especially during the monsoons, when engineers had to forget about further construction and spend all their time just repairing and saving what they had already built. Avalanches, sinkholes and washouts kept them busy all summer - when they weren't back in the 20th General Hospital at Ledo with malaria - and their trucks and bulldozers kept getting mired over the hubs. After the 1944 monsoons, the engineers had but one boast: They had not been able to build any more of the road that summer, but they had succeeded in not losing any more than a few feet of it. Success was measured by feet in the Burma jungles, not in hundreds or thousands of miles of reconquest as it was in Europe and the Pacific.
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The engineers used to work in shifts so that construction went on 24 hours a day. At night it would continue under giant lights. And the engineers, several battalions of them Negro, would leap-frog each other as they finished one stretch and went on to another, building a new camp every few months. They were nice guys, too. When the Marauders came walking up The Road before going behind Jap lines, the engineers in camp after camp got out their long hoarded little supplies of beer and candy and handed them out to the infantrymen. Once or twice a year the engineers would get furloughs to Calcutta and they would come down to the city with their atabrine-yellow faces and rumpled, ill-fitting uniforms and awkward and ill at ease, walking the pavements alongside the plump, starched rear-echelon GI's.
Then there were the Ledo Road drivers. Most of them were Negroes. All day and night they kept their convoys of big, heavily laden trucks barreling out from Ledo to Shingbwiyang or Shadazup or Mogaung or Bhamo - or finally to Kunming. To them, each convoy was a mission, just as though they were flying the Hump. They painted gaudy names and pictures on their trucks, just as though they were planes. And their trucks thundered along at high speed, headlights on to penetrate the dust of the truck ahead or chains clanking in the gummy mud. Ocassionally a truck would skid off a cliff or into a river. But not so often as to slow anyone else down.
The Jungle Takes Over
As soon as our plane landed in Burma, I set out to see The Road. "You can't see much of it, old chap," a British
officer told me. "The last monsoons did it in. Almost all the big bridges are out and the landslides have finished it
in the mountains. We don't have any engineers to speak of in this part of Burma, you know, so I guess your road is
through forever."
When had the last trucks rolled the road, I wanted to know. Oh, some Indian Army trucks had made the 400-mile run from Mytikyina to Ledo before the monsoons in 1946. They were the last - the bridges had washed out after them and the surface had potholed. The jungle was reclaiming its own. A few American seven ton trucks were being used by some Chinese as commercial buses for a short stretch south of Myitkyina. Otherwise The Road was dead, all dead.
The British officer offered to drive me as far as he could on The Road in both directions.
Just 18 miles south of Myitkyina, the engineers had spent nine months alone building the longest pontoon bridge in the world. Each of its pontoons was bigger than the LCT's that used to carry tanks in Pacific invasions. The monsoon torrents had ripped it apart and what was left of it was clinging to both shores of the river - as much of it as hadn't floated on down the churning Irrawaddy.
A Sign Goes Down
Back in the hills on the other side of Myitkyina, the jungle, like a selfish woman, was stretching its green
fingers out to take back The Road that had once been part of it. Creepers and weeds were already ankle-high cross
sections of the highway. In other places, the vegetation came drooping down from overhead. Where The Road had been
graded, the rains had washed so much of the earth away that there were large bites in The Road, looking as if they
had been made by some giant dinosaur. Erosion had set in, deeply rutting miles of the highway, splitting it open
like an earthquake. High up, I could see where landslides had almost completely erased the thin, man-made scar on the
mountainsides.
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Here and there along The Road was the rusting skeleton of a seven ton truck or a bulldozer. Or the disordered remains of a GI camp, with the basketball hoops and backboards still up, or the benches of the outdoor movie theater row on row, or a weathered sign that once was bright red and white, saying "331st Engineers (Heavy)." As our jeep started back towards Myitkyina, we passed a line of six bullock carts, heaped with vegetables and grain, heading at their snail's pace, toward the city bazaar. Driving the unwieldy carts were some sleepy Shans in white turbans and checked-skirted longyis. Farther on, padding along beside The Road, were several dozen Kachin women, all carrying bright umbrellas to shield them from the hot afternoon sun, all in the same tight white bodices and blue skirts. They looked at our jeep curiously and, I thought, with a little resentment, as it kicked up a cloud of dust. Once a jeep on The Road was a common sight; now we felt like interlopers.
It was nearly dusk when we got back to Myitkyina, and I remembered other dusks when chow call would be clanging and the GI's would be rushing to get into line with tinkling mess kits. For a moment I thought the GI's were still there - GI uniforms were all over the place. But I had only to look at the faces, some bronze, some slant-eted and some dark, to realize that they belonged to the Kachins and Karens and Indians and Shans and Chinese and Burmans - the peacetime citizens of what was once the greatest of all American bases in Burma. They had bought not only GI uniforms, but also practically everything else the U.S. Army had decided to sell here. Our old QM dump had been sold, lock, stock and barrel, to an Indian merchant firm. Now it was selling the goods retail at several times their cost. The Army ice and power plants had been taken over by the city and were being run as municipal projects. No one had troubled to pull down the GI signs all over town, and so there were still gaudy mementos of the 96th Ordnance "Pentagon Building," "81st Fighter Control Squadron," and "Monsoon Manor."
But one sign had come down. The only reason I noticed it was that it used to stand like a sentinel on the little mound of earth at the Myitkyina junction to The Road. To us GI's it had somehow epitomized all we had done in this God-forsaken wilderness 15,000 miles from home. For it marked the junction of the bloodiest battle of the Burma war and the chief objective for which it was fought - the first land route in history from India to China. And it bore the names of such places as Calcutta, New York, Ledo, London, Tokyo, Kunming and San Francisco, each with its mileage after it in bold figures. As bold as though this junction were the new crossroads of the world.
Well, that big sign didn't stand there any more. No one pulled it down, either. It had been toppled over by the monsoons. Now it lay face down in the mud.
I stood there and looked at it for a while and didn't even bother to turn it over and look at its face...
