Detroit News - Back door route a du

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Subject: Detroit News - Back door route a dubious lifeline for China's Chiang

Back door route a dubious lifeline for China's Chiang
Posted on 9/22/99, 09:22 AM CST. Email this story to a friend.
Source: Detroit News.
Posted by: ShweInc NEWs

LASHIO, Myanmar -- The Burma Road was the Holy Grail of the
China-Burma-India theater in World War II, but in the end proved almost
irrelevant to the larger conflict.

Imperial Japan had been grabbing chunks of China since the early 1930s,
unimpeded by either the United States, the biggest backer of Chiang
Kai-shek's government, or Britain, the colonial power in India and Burma.

In 1937, Japan launched an all-out invasion and seized all of China's ports.
Chiang retreated to the mountain refuge of Chungking.

Washington and London, neither at war yet with Japan, established a back
door supply route for China starting at Rangoon, Burma's biggest port.

Munitions, including disassembled aircraft to be flown by the American
volunteers of the legendary Flying Tigers, were carried by train to Lashio,
loaded on trucks and driven to Kunming in southern China over a road hacked
out of the mountains by Chinese peasants.

The track was barely 9 feet wide in places. Corruption, theft and simple
ignorance of truck maintenance meant the Chinese government received only 20
percent of the supplies earmarked for it.

The line was cut when Japan captured Rangoon and Lashio in the six months
after Pearl Harbor. Much-reduced supplies had to be flown from India to
China over the Himalayas, a deadly route known as "the Hump."

The Western allies' goal became reopening the road to supply the Chinese war
effort against the 20 Japanese divisions deployed there and win areas for
air bases for the bombing of Japan. Chiang was more interested in
stockpiling supplies for a post-war showdown with Mao Tse-tung's communists.

It wasn't until 1945 that a new land route was opened. By then, China no
longer figured large in American plans. Japan was being bombed from bases
established through the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific.