Life Goes Over the Stilwell Road

Near the end of the long Stilwell Road at Kunming, a swarm of happy Chinese children with flags climb over an American jeep in the first truck convoy.

The first U.S. truck convoy to reach China since 1942 arrives at Kunming after a journey of 1,000 miles
In January a convoy of trucks formed at Ledo in India's tea-growing province of Assam and starteddown a fresh-cut road to the south. It is now the dry season in Burma and the trucks growled along in acolumn of dust. At the beginning they crossed a range of 5,000-ft. mountains but they were soon in thegreen valleys of northern Burma. At Myitkyina, captured by Allied soldiers late last summer, the trucksstopped for a while. When they heard the road had been cleared of Japanese to the south, the drive started off again, rolling past bodies of newly killed Japanese into the barren mountains and valleysof southwestern China. After a journey of 1,000 miles from Ledo, the trucks arrived at Kunming. It wasthe first convoy to China since the Japanese cut the old Burma Road in May of 1942.

When the trucks rolled into China, Chiang Kai-shek gave the new road a new name: The Stilwell Road.The Burma Road had begun at Lashio, which is still held by the Japanese to the south. The new road cutsacross the top of Burma to join the old one north of Lashio. While it was being built it was calledthe Ledo Road, or sometimes "Pick's Pike" after its builder, Brig. General Lewis A. Pick. Now theGeneralissimo had named the road after the American commander who was too plain-spoken with him to stayin Asia but who made the road possible.

A smiling Buddha, damaged by fighting along the road in Burma, is inspected by men of the convoy. This is a conventional Buddha, seated on a lotus leaf in formal attitude of contemplation. In peacetime Burmese Buddhist monks come out of their gilt temples in yellow robes at sunrise to make their rounds. Some hillbilly Burmese worship animals instead of Buddha.

In Chinese town of Paoshan, which is about halfway from Ledo to Kunming, part of the convoy pullsdown a narrow street. On the smooth old stones of the sidewalks stand the citizens of the town.These Chinese are used to the sight of trucks because the original Burma Road passed this way.Before the war, however, this part of China was almost never visited by white men.

A pontoon bridge is moored in the broad Irrawaddy River, which runs past Myitkyina and Mandalaysouth to Rangoon. In the first jeep at right is General Pick, commander of the road builders.Between Ledo and China, Pick's men built 600 bridges.

Crossing the Salween the trucks roll over a suspension bridge built by engineers.The upper Salween flows through mountains and gorges. The engineers also built a road from Myitkyina through the mountains in case Japanese held the drive south.

Just inside China a truck in the convoy tows a howitzer past caves dug in hillside by Chinese troops.At this point the Chinese stopped the Japanese penetration of Yunnan, the Chinese province which adjoins Burma.Later they crossed the Salween River to push the Japanese back.In January they joined other Chinese troops and Americans driving east through Burma.In the stretch where two drives met, U.S. tanks ran up and down the road to clean out the Japanese,and the way to China was open.

LIFE'S COVER: Lieut. General William Hood Simpson, commander of the Ninth Army at the Rhine, is anold soldier: tough-minded, dependable and confident. He is a tall man, lean and immaculately dressed.The most arresting thing about his appearance is his remarkable head. It is a head that reminds peopleof Biblical prophets, medieval aesthetics and ancient Egyptian kings. Wrote a LIFE correspondent, "Atfirst glance it seems so bony, so cadaverously lean that you think of it as a friendly skull.

Adapted by Carl W. WEeidenburner
from the March 12, 1945 issue.
Portions copyright 1945 Time, Inc.

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