I considered adding this to the Force-Feeding Myanmar thread, but considering the immense sacrifices made by some good American soldiers back in World War II, I felt this deserved it’s own thread.
The LA Times has this story about Burma’s old Stilwell Road project being revived.
Excerpt: "It was a road some said couldn’t be built. Most of the men ordered to make it happen were African American soldiers sorted into Army units by the color of their skin.
"As World War II raged, they labored day and night in the jungles of Burma, sometimes halfway up 10,000-foot mountains, drenched by 140 inches of rain in the five-month monsoon season. They spanned raging rivers and pushed through swamps thick with bloodsucking leeches and swarms of biting mites and mosquitoes that spread typhus and malaria.
"Some died from disease or fell to their deaths when construction equipment slid along soupy mud tracks and dropped off cliffs. Others drowned, or were killed pulling double duty in combat against the Japanese.
"They gave their lives to build a 1,079-mile road across northern Burma to reinforce Allied troops, a project derided by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as ‘an immense, laborious task, unlikely to be finished until the need for it has passed.’
“Not long after the thankless job was done, two atomic blasts finished the war with Japan, and a hard-won passage that soldiers called ‘the Big Snake’ was abandoned to the rain forest. The road had cost 1,133 American lives, a man a mile.”
(End of exerpt.) Well, it’s being revived now, by India and China, in a bid to make it the first overland trade route between those two countries since the end of World War II. Supposedly, millions in the region could be lifted out of poverty if the road becomes a reality. But for me, the story of the men who had to cut the damned thing in the first place is what’s really fascinating.