The Chinese Spring Festival is coming and I have heard firecrackers exploding in the Beijing suburbs. At this time 60 years ago, on February 4, 1945, people in Kunming also exploded firecrackers for another very exciting event: the first convoy of over 100 US Army vehicles carrying supplies for use against Japanese invaders departed India on January 12 and at last reached Kunming. The road the vehicles went along was the Ledo Road (later called the Stilwell Road), celebrated in both America and China. If you are familiar with the events of the 1940s, you know that the Japanese conquest of Burma cut China's last transportation link with the outside world (from Kunming to Lashio via the Burma Road, and then by railroad to Rangoon) at the end of April 1942. Until a new land route to China could be opened, the only way for war materiel to reach China was by air from northeast India via the hazardous "hump route" over the Himalayas. Opening a new land route to China was a consistent aim of President Franklin Roosevelt and General Joseph Stilwell from 1942 to 1945.

　　The construction of the Ledo Road -- from Ledo, Assam, in northeastern India, into Burma -- began on December 16, 1942. The road crossed mostly uninhabited areas of Burma with some of the most difficult terrain in the world, including tropical rain forest, torrential streams, terraces and canyons, jungle-covered mountains and swampy valleys. The monsoon season from May to October featured up to 356 cm of rain in the mountains. Leeches, malaria and typhus were among the medical hazards for the troops.

　　The commander of the effort was Brigadier General Lewis A. Pick. Troops nicknamed the road "Pick's Pike". (Here pike means "turnpike", but the name punningly echoes that of Pike's Peak, a well-known mountain in the Colorado Rockies.) Told the road could not be built, General Pick said the road would be built, "rain, mud and malaria be damned." Although he admitted that building the road was the toughest job ever given to US army engineers in wartime, he began around-the-clock construction. Chinese army engineers led by clearing a trace. An American engineer company followed, bulldozing the roadhead. An aviation engineering battalion cleared the right of way to a width of at least 100 feet, and other units graded sections of 10 to 15 miles. American and Chinese engineers installed drainage culverts. An engineer construction or combat battalion built whatever bridges were needed. Finally, an aviation battalion moved in to spread gravel for the final road surfacing.

　　It was a huge undertaking: engineers moved 13,500,000 cubic yards of earth in building the road. This is enough earth to build a wall 3 feet wide and 10 feet high from New York to San Francisco. Engineers dug 1,383,000 cubic yards of gravel from riverbeds to surface the road. If this amount of gravel were loaded on railcars, the train would be 427 miles long. The road crossed 10 major rivers and 155 smaller steams. Seven hundred bridges were built over the length of the road.

　　Construction was as much a drainage project as a road building effort. On average 13 culverts per mile were used, totaling 105 miles of pipe. Foresters gathered 822,000 cubic feet of lumber for use in building the road. One million board feet of lumber and 2,400 pilings were used in a causeway over the swamp. Engineers completed the longest (1180-foot) pontoon bridge in the world over the Irrawaddy River. The final estimated cost of building the road was almost $150 million, equal to roughly $2.25 billion in today's term.

　　　The greater cost was measured in human lives. Of the 15,000 engineers who built the road, 1,133 Americans died. The entire length of road was 1,079 miles, so the human cost is often stated as "a man a mile". The breakdown of the deaths: killed in combat, 624; dead of typhus, 63; dead of malaria, 11; drowned, 53; killed in road accidents, 44; killed in aircraft accidents, 173.

　　Despite countless difficulties the road was finally completed, and General Pick led the first convoy out of Ledo bound for Kunming on January 12, 1945. It numbered 113 vehicles (heavy cargo trucks, jeeps and ambulances). The convoy reached Myitkyina, Burma, on 15 January but was delayed until 23 January while the last Japanese units were cleaned from the road area by Chinese and American troops.

　　In the six months following its opening, trucks carried 129,000 tons of supplies from India to China. The 26,000 trucks that survived the trip were handed over to the Chinese.

　　Today parts of the road are still in use; some, such as the celebrated "24 Turns" switchback have become tourist sites. The road is a great monument to the American people's effort to help China fight Japan in World War II.