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The Burma Road

by Donovan Webster

Farrar, Straus and Giroux $190

How easy it is, faced with the plethora of modern military misadventures, to forget how the world appeared during one of its darkest hours, more than half a century ago.

Hitler's mechanical goliath was smashing  across Europe,  cutting swathes of ruin to the English Channel and Mediterranean Sea. The British Isles were under siege.

Japan had invaded China, severing all her sea trade routes with the fall of Shanghai in 1937. The Japanese were remorselessly spreading  across the Pacific,  hitting Pearl Harbour, and  invading parts of Southeast Asia - the Solomons, Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma (now Myanmar) - capturing more than three times the area that Germany had conquered, under the imperial auspices of 'Asia for the Asians'.

China was choking, gasping for life, desperately  taking in supplies down its only route to the outside world: a thin, two-lane  road that had been frantically cut through jungle and over mountains from Kunming to Lashio in Burma.

Japan seemed intent on cutting China off from the rest of the world, and with the island nation's invasion of Burma, it was only a matter of time before the final link was severed.

It was a time for heroes.

Enter US General 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell  and British Lieutenant-General Orde Wingate  - the former a cranky, hard-nut West Point graduate, the latter an evangelical egomaniac. Each had been bruised by his respective military administration, each considered unorthodox strategies, and each maintained visions of grandeur throughout his military career.

The cartographic principles that Donovan Webster charts in The Burma Road were simple: enter Burma, push the Japanese out, cut a road from India to join up with the Lashio link into China, and pave the way for an Allied attack on Japan from the west.

However, reality would intervene with a terribly cruel play of its own. The plan would dissolve into a campaign from hell, a fetid slog through a tropical horror-scape, until both sides would be waging war with wasting men. Their soldiers' rancid bodies continuously oozed from sores, ulcers, lice bites and rotting leech heads; they were wracked by dysentery and diarrhoea; and they struggled through endemic typhus and malaria. Battling for life would be harder than battling the enemy.

Solidly backed by diaries and interviews, Webster's  book is a hugely informative and anecdotally fascinating read about a near-forgotten chapter of the second world war.

His topics and subjects range from Chiang Kai-shek  (who grudgingly  offered troops while holding the US  to a supply ransom) to Mao Zedong's  rising in the north and the wavering fealties of Burmese revolutionary general Aung San.  'Wingate's Circus', the legendary fighting Chindits,  plough their own path through the discourse, while the local Kachins hack the ears from the enemy for keepsakes and book-keeping.

When  Stilwell questions a Kachin soldier on the veracity of a Japanese death count, 'the Kachin unhooked a bamboo tube hanging on his belt. He pulled a stopper from the tube's top, and ... dumped a pile of small blackish lumps ... resembling bits of dried fruit, apricots perhaps ... onto the table-top. 'What are those?' Stilwell asked. 'Japanese ears,' the soldier answered. 'Divide all these by two and you know exactly how many Japs I've killed.''

Reaching into the experience and ability he has honed telling more personable tales for Outside magazine and National Geographic, Webster fills the chapters with similar chilling - and often amusing - observations.

But shining through the publication is the true grit, in the purest sense, of a group of men battling against diabolical odds to open the road into China.

In the end, they were successful, but by then the war had passed them by, and the Allies had decided to take Japan on via the Pacific route.



The Burma Road