CHINA-BOUND CONVOY APPROACHES MYITKYINA ON STILWELL ROAD. ROAD BUILDERS KEPT PACE WITH ADVANCE OF FIGHTING FRONT, JUST BEHIND RETREATING JAPS.

   In the last days of January the land blockade of China was broken. For the first time since the Japanese cut the Burma Road in 1942, a truck convoy reached Wanting with supplies for the Chinese armies. Thus one prong of the pincers around Japan were strengthened. On the other side of the pincers American troops were about to capture Manila.
   The truck convoy reached China via the Stilwell Road from India - a road named by Chiang Kai-shek after the former American commander in the CBI theater. Cut out of the mountains and jungles of Burma by the sweat and blood of American and Chinese engineers, it includes in its 1,000-mile length the new Ledo Road and the old Burma Road. It leads through an area with one of the greatest rainfalls in the world, over sheer cliffs and tangled swamps infected with jungle leeches and malarial mosquitoes. At one time more than 80% of the men working on it were sick with tropical diseases.
   At the ceremony dedicating the road one man was missing. General Stilwell who left China after disagreements with Chiang Kai-shek, was in Washington.

Sgt. Robert B. Goodman confers with three Chinese drivers at Myitkyina. Soldiers call road "Pick's Pike" after Brig. General Lewis A. Pick who built it.

American and Chinese flags are attached to truck. Opening of Stilwell Road will help to satisfy China's urgent need for more trucks. There are only 6,000 trucks in China now, all old.

Convoy gases up at a completed pipeline from Ledo in India. This is temporary end of the line which is used mostly to supply airfields and construction gangs along the Stilwell Road.

Americans clean their guns at Myitkyina motor pool. The town was taken from the Japs during the monsoon of last summer. Its fall made completion of road possible.

Allied leaders confer in Myitkyina. L. to r.: Lieut. Gen. Daniel Sultan, Maj. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Maj. Gen. William Donovan.

Near a signpost just outside of Myitkyina, General Pick, road engineer, jokes with a Chinese soldier., Jap tankettes and dead Jap soldiers were still lying at sides of road.



Adapted from the February 12, 1945 issue.
Portions copyright 1945 Time, Inc.


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