 The National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated stations present the Pacific story. In the mounting fury of world conflict, events in the Pacific are taking on ever greater importance. Here is the story of the Pacific and the millions of people who live around this greatest sea. The drama of the people whose destiny is at stake in the Pacific War. Here, as another public service, is the tale of the war in the Pacific and its meaning to us and to the generations to come. The Burma Road, highway to the heart of Japan. Look here, Hardiger. You can see it for yourself. Well, that's a California newspaper, isn't it? Yes. Now look at that advertisement, right there. It looks alarming to me. Oh, in America they're advertising through trips from Liverpool to Hong Kong. Straight across America on the new transcontinental railroad. Yes. Atlantic to the Pacific. Interesting they're driving that golden spike to mark the completion of the railroad. Interesting. It's alarming. You gentlemen think this new American railroad will be in competition with our roots to the Orient? Direct competition. Not only this new transcontinental railway, it's the opening of that new canal, the Suez Canal. I've been watching that in the papers, Denny. This year is a turning point for us, gentlemen. 1869. Two new shortcuts to the Orient opening up. And how many of us realize the importance of this? Do you, Denny? No, I should say good men always do. It means that the most important route for our commerce might be across the United States on that railroad. It means far more than that. What are you getting at, Sam? Is that old idea of a road through Burma to China? It's not an old idea, Hardiger. People have been meddling with the idea for 30 or 40 years. Yes, but the need is becoming greater every year. I think Sam's is right, Hardiger. Of course I'm right. Here. Look at this map here on the wall. The same map you had up there for 20 years or... Now, look here, look here. Our ships have been sailing through the Bay of Bengal here, just below Burma, for a century. Yes. Now, look up here. Up in China? Yes. Follow me, Pencil. This is the Yangtze River. See, it goes up here, way up to here. You follow me? Yes, yes, I see it. Now, notice the little distance from the headwaters of the upper Yangtze in China to the northern reaches of the Bay of Bengal. Haven't I? Didn't realize they were so close. What is the distance between them, Sam's? Oh, about 600 miles, I should judge. That means that Kelkata actually is within 600 miles of the Yangtze River. Yes, by Overland Route. On the other hand, it is 4,300 miles by sea from Kelkata to Shanghai. I should say that's a valid reason for building some sort of route across Burma to China. It would give us a decided advantage over competitors for the China trade, despite that American transcontinental railroad and the Suez Canal. Are you thinking of some such thing as having Rangoon as the port of China? Perhaps. Or ships or boats could go all the way up to the Irrawaddy River to Burma, or up the railway to Lasso. Oh, Sam's, you're an incorrigible dreamer. I am a realist, Hardaker. Oh, you have only to look at the efforts that have already been made. Ventures, missionaries, explorers. But we are businessmen. Yes, but, Hardaker, you forget the natives are sending loaded packmules from Burma into China by the hundreds every month. And that's only a hint of what could be developed with a Burma Road. Oh, you mustn't be deceived. The natives are using packmules, but no British firms are sending consignments through their jungle wilderness. Not even our competitors. Hardaker, it's got to be done. And mark my words, if a road is not put through Burma, the time will come when... Interest in a Burma road into China waxed and waned for more than half a century. And then in 1937, the Japanese attacked China at the Marco Polo Bridge. But even then, in the first months of the Sino-Japanese War, China did not awake to the vital need of a road through Burma. China had half a dozen open ports with supply lines to the interior. She had two routes through Indochina. Then at Shanghai... The Japanese blasted Shanghai from the sea and from the air. Soon Japanese soldiers were attacking Shanghai, and Japanese warships were clamping a blockade of strangulation on the ports of South China. Then it was in the Chinese central government... If our southern ports are closed, we shall be cut off from the Pacific General. Our ports are not yet closed. Even so, we still would have the two routes through Indochina under the protection of the French flag. In time, the Japanese might close them too. That is why we must develop the Yunnan Road into Burma. Does the general mean that we must build this road? It may someday be our lifeline. It would be an enormous task. That is why there is no time to lose. But the terrain is almost impossible, sir. And there is perhaps more malaria in that country than any other place in the world. Look here at the map. Yes, sir. The road must run from here in Kunming to either of these two terminals in Burma. Lasha-Opamo. That route would have to cross some of the deepest canyons in the world. Yes, and two mountain rivers too. The Mekong and the Sarween. What bridges would have to be built? This is no time to talk about details. It is a job that will take hundreds of thousands of workers. Here you see is a provincial road that runs from Kunming 263 miles west to Shaquan. We can use this road and then cut through the mountains here down into Burma. The news that the great road would be driven through the mountains from Kunming to Lasha-O came in an official announcement to the people of Yunnan province. They had heard talk of such a road. They were hardly Chinese mountaineers who had grown to understand and respect the awesome hardships of the mountains. They knew the deep rugged canyons, the heartbreaking heights, the rushing waters, the desperate jungles, and they'd learned to live with them. Into their country the call went out for labor for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who almost without tools, almost with their fingernails would have to scratch the road out of the mountains. But the road means nothing to us. No, we live eight days of walking from where the road will be built. Every village within eight days journey of either side of the road must provide workers for the road. Let the ones who will live near the road build it. Yes, they will benefit from it. While your village will benefit from the road, all villages will benefit from it. We must leave our homes and our families. Until the road is built, yes. Most of the people of my village will never see the road. The road will bring the world to you. Every village must build its part of the road. You will all gather here and bring your food and baskets and tools. I will guide you to the place. Between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese labored, as those other Chinese had toiled, to build the Great Wall of China centuries before. With hand chisels, the great stone rollers for smoothing the grades were hewn out of solid rock. Teams of bullocks dragged them over the jagged surface. Compressed air drills brought across the seas and dragged by burrows into the mountains were their only modern machinery. It is deep enough now. Not quite. Press down on it. Already for the dynamite. Yes, here is the bamboo tube. Is the fuse fixed to it? Yes, it is already. All right. Now. Yes. All shattered by the compressed air drills, deep into the shoulders of the forbidding mountains were rammed bamboo tubes filled with dynamite. Crude huses attached. Now it is ready. Stand back over there. Inch by inch, the road was scratched out of the mountains. Every pound of rock removed by sheer human muscle and sweat. Millions of tons moved by basketballs. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese swarming over the pain-wracked miles, struggling and suffering from dawn to dark. Stone gutters were built. Retaining walls of 50-foot logs were set up. All to keep the torrential rains from erasing the road from the side of the mountain. They built 2,000 culverts, 300 bridges. Across the rushing waters of the Mekong River and the Salween River were built suspension bridges, wide enough for one truck. As the crow flies, the distance from Kunming in China to Lashio, the railhead in Burma, is 360 miles. As the Burma Road was built, winding tortuously over ranges of mountains, climbing to altitudes of 7,500 feet, doubling back, turning and twisting, winding down to the levels of the Mekong and the Salween Rivers. As the Burma Road went, the distance was 726 miles. Some of it had been built with the help of modern tools. At one point on the road, painted in Chinese letters on the rock wall of a cliff, are these words. This road was built by natives of this district without the help of foreign tools. At last, after 16 months of feverish labor, the Burma Road was open to traffic on January 10, 1939. The Burma Road had not been open long before a trouble loomed down the horizon. In Tokyo, where military leaders had taken note of the construction of the road, there were vehement outbursts. 10 months before the road was completed, the British steamer stun-hauled sail from Odesa, we, the cargo for China, took over the Burma Road. What was in the cargo? Russian arms and ammunition for the Chinese. Then this material arrived in Burma even before the road was completed. Yes, sir. It was unloaded for shipment by rail to Lassio and from there over the Burma Road into China. Yes, and within the next month, five more ships brought the cargo of war material for transport over the Burma Road. Has no effort been made to halt these shipments to China? Yes. Protests have been made to Sir Archibald Douglas Cochrane, the British governor of Burma. It has been pointed out that this might involve Burma in our war with China. Yes, but this has not stopped the traffic general. The material brought by the next four ships was shipped by boat up the Irrawadding River to Burma and from there over the Burma Road into China. Then the military stores were sent by riverboat instead of over the state-owned railways, huh? Yes, sir. But that was only for a short time. No traffic is moving over both the railroad to Lassio and up the river to Burma. You have found out what these shipments are, actually? Yes, sir. They are airplanes, anti-aircraft guns, and ammunition and small arms. Yes, yes. And now we have intelligence that there is a project to build a railroad from Burma to Yunnan into China. We will put a stop to the shipments of material through Burma to China. Any road that is used for war traffic will be bombed. Sir, have you noticed that the Japanese government will assume no responsibility? The steel ring of the Japanese was closing in on China. In November 1939, the Japanese took Nanning and thereby cut off the most important route for gasoline imports. Now gasoline became as precious as pearls. Traffic on the Burma Road dribbled down to a trickle, not only because of the shortage of gasoline, but because of the red tape of its operation. All right, get in there. Don't push me. You'll get worse than that before this is over. Don't let that jailer scare you. That's what he told me, too. You have plenty of time to think it over. When are you going to bring us something to eat? When the time comes. That's what that jailer always says. What do they lock you up for? They said for selling some of the gasoline out of my truck. Is that all? What are you in here for? They said I was carrying private passengers and cargo in my truck. Oh, you are a driver on the road, too? I was. I came all the way from Singapore. I came from Shanghai. I volunteered to drive a truck on the road to help to do as much as I could for China. But you got sick of it, of the small pay. Well, so did I. Not only the small pay, but everywhere you turned, you hear of graph. I could hardly live on the money they paid me. That's why I started siphoning gas out of my tank and selling it. Didn't they give you just enough gas to make the trip? Yes. But I learned how to coast down the long grades with my motor off to save the gas to sell. Could you save much? Enough. We called it white wine. White wine, huh? We called the private passengers yellow fish and the private freight we hauled pigeon cargo. Did you save any of the money? No. Just spent it. If they paid us enough money to live, if they ran the road like a business, I wouldn't be here in jail. Who's the boss of the road? Who runs it? There's a dozen agencies and bureaus and everyone interferes with the other. As soon as there's trouble, everyone of them says it's the other's fault. And driving over that road is dangerous. Why, over a thousand trucks have gone off the road and been smashed up down in the canyon, and I've seen many of them. Yes, and not only that, look at those inspectors. There's custom houses and checking stations all along the way. Look at that place at Kung-Ming. Eight desks. And you've got to check through every one of them before you can drive to the next station. That's not as bad as some of those other stations along the road where the inspector sits reading while you're waiting to get through. That's at one team. I've seen as many as 250 trucks waiting to get through the customs there. This Burma road isn't going to do China any good running like this. It'll never do anyone any good unless someone comes in and straightens out the whole thing. The situation on the Burma road was critical. But it was to become even more so. More and more supplies were going into China through Indochina. Then in June 1940, France fell. French Indochina lay open before the Japanese without the backing of the motherland. The Japanese demanded that the passage of Chinese goods over the Indochina railway stopped. And with scarcely more than a protest, the French stopped it. Now the Burma road was practically the only route from the outside into China. But the greatest blow was still to fall. Under pressure from Japan, the British government has agreed to close the Burma road to the transit of war materials for three months. It has become known today that the subject has been under negotiation for several weeks. With Britain being blasted unmercifully from the skies by the German Blitzkrieg, the Churchill government entered into this temporary agreement with the Japanese government. World reaction to the closing of the Burma road was electric. It struck China a deadly blow. Why did Britain do it? Where does America stand on this question? Now that the Japanese have forced the closing of the Burma road, they are concentrating on ending the smuggling of supplies into us. China faces despair. Our morale is lower than at any time since the outbreak of the war. While the Nazi bombs rained down on Britain during those terrible summer months of 1940, Americans railed at the close of the Burma road. Britain didn't have to close that road just because the Japs yelled about it? Why did they do it? It says here in the paper that they closed the road to relieve the tension between Japan and Britain for one thing, and to give the Japanese a chance to work out some kind of a peace deal with the Chinese. Oh, nonsense. As if Britain and China had stood up together against Japan, what could Japan do? They could go in and close the road themselves and that would mean some kind of it. Even before Britain agreed to close the Burma road, she was aware that her decision would be attacked. But Britishers knew the gravity of their situation better than any others. It is not very proper for Americans to protest the shutting off of supplies over the Burma road while they continue to sell great quantities of oil and scrap iron to Japan. Rain drove down over the Burma road through the three terrible months while the Chinese waited in despair and while Britain fought for its life and daily expected invasion from across the channel. Through those months, public opinion throughout the free world surged with bitterness. When October came, Britain was still standing up to the Blitz. The Nazis had failed. America's foreign policy had become sterner. And in the first week of October, Sir Robert Craigie informed Foreign Minister Akira Arita that Britain would reopen the Burma road at the end of the three months period. October 18th. Have you ever seen such a celebration in your life? Never. I came all the way up from Rangoon to cover this story. Oh, was that so? Well, I came from Calcutta for the same purpose. Just look at the bonfire. Yeah, they light up the whole countryside here. I guess the trucks are all loaded and ready to go. Well, the first fleet is. But they tell me there's 100,000 tons of supplies in that pile of air waiting to go into China. Chinese will certainly need it. And piled up here at the border since last July when the road was closed. I wonder if they've got enough trucks to move it. Well, I understand they've got about 2,000 trucks. But I don't know if that's going to be enough to understand the gear for getting these supplies to Kunming. Oh, look, there's the Chinese vice minister of foreign affairs. He came down from Chongqing to start the first fleet of trucks on its way. Are all the drivers in their trucks? They will be ready in a minute, sir. All the drivers were guests at a big blow out here tonight. Sort of a send-off. Well, they've got a rugged 10 days of driving ahead of them. All the drivers are in their trucks now, sir. Good. Give them the order to start. Yes, sir. Yeah, there they go. They're on their way to China. The Burma Road was open again, but the amount of freight that passed over the road was disappointing. This became a matter of great concern to the United States. For the United States had now entered into a lend-lease agreement with China, and it was imperative that the supplies reach China. At length, after communications between Generaless Amor-Jungai-Shek and the American government, three American specialists in motor transportation were sent to China to unravel the knots in China's lifeline. When Daniel Arnstein, Harold S. Davis, and Varko Hellman arrived in China, things began to happen. 15 days, Daniel Arnstein and his associates inspected the Burma Road and its administration. Then the three of them went to Rangoon, locked themselves in a stifling heart hotel room, and dictated their report to two bewildered Burmese stenographers. Have all three of them gone? Yes, but they will be back soon for the revised report. They boiled it down from 139 pages to 35 pages. I have never seen such men in my life. That big man. Mr. Arnstein? He is like a hurricane. He sweeps through everything. He tired me out with all his energy even before we started writing the report. They say he owns 8,000 trucks and 7,000 taxicabs in New York. Mr. Davis is almost the same. He is big and powerful, and he knows all about trucking, too. I think they have worked together a long time. But Mr. Arnstein must be the boss. He is the boss, and Mr. Davis keeps the records and gives technical advice. Well, then Mr. Arnstein will pay us. No, Mr. Helman handles the money, and he is the diplomat. Mr. Helman is different from Mr. Arnstein and Mr. Davis? Yes, he is a banker and a specialist on transportation. I have never seen such men. They went over the road and into every office like a cyclone. They inspected everything, and they saw everything. When they rented this room and stripped down to the waste before they started dictating the report, I didn't know what they were going to do. I have never seen such men. The way they dictated, naming names and telling about inefficiency and bungling... I thought they would never get through. 139 pages. It was Mr. Helman who boiled it down to 35 pages. I wonder what the Generalissimo will think when he reads it. I don't know, but we had better get the report ready. Mr. Arnstein will be back in a few minutes. The report was neatly prepared to Generalissimo Mocheng Kai-shek. The Arnstein Commission had pulled no punches. The report blasted the inefficiency of the operation of the highway and spared no feelings in saying who was at fault. It set forth a plan for having 8,000 trucks running on the road at one time. Within a matter of hours, after Generalissimo Mocheng Kai-shek read the report, things were happening. The director of the One Ting Customs Office situated on the border of China and Burma. Effective immediately, the One Ting Customs Office is to remain open 24 hours a day. No delays in keeping traffic moving. Wall directors of truck operations. Effective immediately, all authority for the operation of trucks on the Burma road would be concentrated in one agency. The 16 separate agencies which have here to fore been concerned with truck operations will relinquish all authority for the single day. All supervisors of transit. Effective immediately. Any truck delay of more than one half hour on the Burma road is to be reported to Generalissimo Mocheng Kai-shek personally at once. All instances of trucks being held. The red tape of the operation of the Burma road was cut. The bottlenecks opened up. The driving time cut in half. The tonnage increased. Recommendations were made that a pipeline 700 miles long be built alongside the road. That the highway be given a hard surface. By November 1941, the great twisting, winding, writhing road was moving freight in greater quantity than ever before into fighting China. The next month, Japan was at war with the United States and Britain and was driving to close the Burma road. There were great numbers of trucks and at Rangoon destroyed all installations that could be of value to the Japanese. The Burma road is now closed and China is shut off except by air from the outside world. But in December 1942, a few months after the Burma road was closed, U.S. Army engineers were starting the new Lado road from India into Burma. The dynamite is in place, sir. Very well, Blast, when you're ready. Yes, sir. Stand clear! I'll get your men in there and set your necks Blast. I'll have the bulldozers up here to push through. Yes, sir. All right, jump to it. Come on. Are you making any progress, Lieutenant? Oh, major seat. Well, this might as slow going, sir. Yes. We're facing worse conditions here than the workers faced and digging the Panama Canal. Oh, I've never seen such jungles. You never know when you're going over a ledge down into a gorge. Get out, major. Another Jap sniper, eh? Anybody hit? Anybody hit down there? Yes, sir. The corporals hit. Well, take care of him. And sergeant. Yes, sir. Take your squad and hunt down that sniper. Yes, sir. All right, bring up the bulldozer. All right. Come in with the bulldozer. I see. It seems to be the only way to make any progress through this jungle, following the jungle trails. Well, it's not only the jungles and the muck and rock and the dust, but it's the millions of mosquitoes and blood-sucking leeches. Oh, you'd better step over here, sir. Yes, sir. Well, I will. Look at that bulldozer. Power through that rubble. It's going to take a lot of grading to put this road through here. Hey! Good lord! That bulldozer is heading right for that ledge. Watch out for that sniper. Send a detail down to the bulldozer, Lieutenant. Yes, sir. Keep the crew on the job. We've got to get this road through. And our time is running short. Coming operations in Burma, the Lado Road and the Burma Road will be important objectives. These arteries, built at the cost of suffering and bloodletting and death, are China's lifeline to the south. The Lado Road will be a supply line for the Allied forces, and ultimately will be the link between the supply bases in India and the Burma Road into China. Together, these roads bid fair to be the highway to the heart of the Japanese on the mainland of Asia. You have been listening to the Pacific Story presented by the National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated independent stations as a public service to clarify events in the Pacific and to make understandable the cross currents of life in the Pacific Basin. A reprint of this Pacific Story program is available at the cost of ten cents. Send ten cents in stamps or coin to University of California Press, Berkeley, California. The Pacific Story is written and directed by Arnold Marquess. The original musical score was composed and conducted by Thomas Palusso. Your narrator, Gaine Whitman. This program came to you from Hollywood. This is the National Broadcasting Company.