While wandering the less traveled paths of the Internet today, I came across an online version of a Life magazine story from August 1944 about the Ledo Road, built across northern Burma from India to China. It's a fascinating historical piece for many reasons:
- The Ledo Road was one of the most difficult civil engineering feats of the Second World War, carved through the foothills of the Himalayas out of dense tropical jungle.
- It was intimately associated with the airlift of supplies from India to China known as 'The Hump', which we examined in Weekend Wings #10.
- The road faced natural obstacles of terrain, weather (particularly during the monsoon, which dumped enormous quantities of rain and turned the soil to incredibly thick, glutinous mud - see the first picture below), and disease: obstacles so great that they threatened to curtail the entire project many times, even without enemy resistance.
- By the time the Ledo Road was completed, it had lost most of its strategic value due to developments in other theaters of war. The immense cost and effort to build it proved to have been largely unnecessary - indeed, wasted.
Nevertheless, the project was heroic in every sense. The article has many historic pictures of the construction, and the men who built it. Here are three to whet your appetite, reduced in size to fit this blog.
Those who know military songs will understand the reference to 'hairy ears'.
If you don't know it, and can tolerate some fairly serious profanity,
do an Internet search for the phrase 'Engineers have hairy ears'.
If you don't know it, and can tolerate some fairly serious profanity,
do an Internet search for the phrase 'Engineers have hairy ears'.
There are many more images at the link. Highly recommended reading for history buffs and military enthusiasts.
Peter
2 comments:
Peter,
My grandfather, Col William J Green, was Gen Pick's chief engineer on the Ledo road from fall of 43 until completion. He told tales to his kids, including my dad, of hair raising jeep rides across gorges, and having parts worked on in Japanese machine shops, some of which may have been true.
After the war, he also worked as chief engineer building the US air base at Thule, Greenland.
By the time I got to know his, he'd retired to Sun Valley AZ, where he played a lot of golf, and came up to MN for a visit with my Dad and another brother who lived nearby. He was an old school type, and didn't show much in the way of emotion.
Thanks for the article.
Matt Green
St Paul MN
Great link and truly a monumental undertaking!
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