Weller's War

by George Weller

  A Ranger column, even though it strikes hard, moves with un-blitzlike slowness. Its only vehicles are two-wheeled bullock carts, drawn by the grey lowbrowed beasts that plod the flooded paddyfields. Sometimes the guerrillas have used elephants, but they have found them uncertain beasts. Elephants have been known to give away a promising ambush by a snorting trumpet of anticipation. They move silently enough through the jungle, but they leave behind a trail of disengaged leeches, clinging lightly to bushes and reaching thirstily for the bodies of men on foot. “When you see a bush ahead of you at a turning that seems to be alive and waving at you,” one Ranger told me, “you do not need to look at the trail for elephant prints. Take off your combat boots and you find them full of blood. The leeches get in through the eyelets.” Bullocks, loving water like hippopotami, can traverse almost any river, while elephants are sometimes swept away. One guerrilla elephant, caught by his chain on a rock, spent five hours “whirling in the current like a watch.” Bullock carts, which look like American prairie schooners sawed in half and covered with bamboo mesh instead of canvas, cost the Rangers two rupees (60¢) a day.

  The creeping guerrilla columns, bounded on the one hand by the dozing water beasts, leap directly on the supply side to the fastest vehicle known to man. The C-47s of the Combat Cargo Command, which at one time were supplying 300,000 men in Burma exclusively by air, are the long leg of the compasses which make up for the uneager, splay-legged bullocks. Unless the monsoon's mists hang too low on the mountains, or there is not enough sun to blink a signal to a searching plane, the guerrillas can always be sure that Combat Cargo will not let them starve. Occasionally a spell of misdrops or bad weather can put them temporarily on a diet of bamboo shoots and tadpole stew. But I have had two meals that I remember about fifteen miles behind the Japanese lines which were better and more various than what is served to the wallahs at the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi. A typical message from such an outpost, not intended to be sardonic, reads: “We have been feeding DC pilots. Have enough food but are completely out of cream and sugar. Please send us same.”

  Ranger teams usually consist of two to ten Americans, with riflemen from as few as ten up to and over three hundred. Almost all guerrillas wear the brown broadbrimmed Gurkha hat, and they like it double-lashed with a leather thong in front, cowboy style. Below that they generally wear green fatigues, green canvas jungle sneakers that come calf-high and dry out quickly, and a belt with a revolver and a grenade or two. The natives dress exactly the same, except that they have carbines instead of .45s. The minimum combat team is two Americans, an officer and radioman. The commanding officer is expected to do the most dangerous work himself, laying explosives under bridges, preparing ambushes and blowing up enemy supplies.

  It is this last job which is the real test of a clever guerrilla. “No matter how often our supply dumps are moved,” complained a Japanese officer, “they always seem to get blown up.” His troubles were due to the guerrillas a single Ranger force was able to throw out around his chain of camps.

  It is improbable that any outfit under the American flag is more knowledgeable about Japanese tactics almost on a folksy level. The Japanese naturally have a special distaste for the guerrillas. When one is captured, torture almost invariably ensues. A favorite device of the kempeitai in Burma is the water mask, an apparatus that straps a man's mouth open while water is poured into him. When he is inflated like a bladder, the Japanese m.p.s sit or jump on him until he talks or his organs burst. When the Japanese find the body of a Ranger they often cut off some part, usually his hands. The Rangers have no explanation for this mutilation. Perhaps it is obscurely connected with the fact that the Japanese, in lieu of sending home the ashes of a fallen soldier, nowadays cut off the end of his thumb, cremate that and send it to his family. After one recent ambush, where the guerrillas festooned a 120-yard stretch of road with simultaneously fused grenades, 104 cremated thumbs were sent to Japan.

  To know what it means to be a guerrilla leader you have to spend a night lying flat in the rain with a telephone cramped against your ear, waiting for a message and listening with the other ear to the trigger-happy Kachins or Shans firing from the edge of your perimeter. Are they shooting Japs or nats? A silent green arc of Japanese flare rises from outside your farthest foxhole. Perhaps it is a signal for a concerted banzai charge. The frightened bullocks clamber to their feet, lowing wildly and struggling at their pickets. More flares greenishly scratch the night around you. The methodical Jap is tapping around the edge of your perimeter, like a blind man learning the outlines of a city block. The attack may come tonight or it may not come until tomorrow night. The danger hours are around nine, about two, and just before dawn. And then when your men—some of them only fourteen or sixteen years old, nearer Boy Scouts than soldiers—have tired of wasting ammunition, the dawn finally arrives. The Japanese, a night animal by preference in his attacks, has pulled back to sort out what he has learned. You may have to change your perimeter to cross him up, or you may have to break camp. Anyway, you can light your first cigarette.

  You are drowsing over your morning coffee when a far-off vibration starts the air humming and thrumming. The murmur grows, too constant and undiminished to be the sunrise gong in the village. And then suddenly, with a roar, a C-47 comes thundering over the green hill of your outer perimeter. Your Jingpaws, rubbing the silver bells in their left ears, arise from their trenches and wave upward at the plane's blind, froglike nose. As it stammers overhead you cry out, “Somebody get out those panels!” and your jemidar rushes to see it done. You polish your signal mirror on your knee, and get it winking. Then the plane begins its circling. First, from about 300 feet the rice sacks are pushed out, five or six at a time. Free-dropped, they hit hard and heavy. Then, while your bullock carts are being hitched to go out and get the rice, the grey-green plane's door expels other packages, their fall stayed just under and behind its tail by the abrupt opening of cotton parachutes. What is floating before you is probably salt, sugar, flour, K-ration and ten-in-one. Then, after new circlings, there descend under other canopies your ammunition, grenades, cartridges and the long black tubes that hold mortar shells. Finally, with a courteous special pass of the plane all to itself, there follows a last red rayon chute with a small and curious package, probably medicine but possibly mail. It will be half an hour before the bullock carts get everything collected and bring it in.

  The transport gives the green, new-cut bashas where you are living a buzz so low the bamboo poles tremble, scaring the crows and the crickets into silence. The kicker, near enough to be discernibly grinning, waves his hand from his open door like a railway mail clerk, and suddenly the plane is gone over the hill again, and the motors fade away and the silence descends. You can see the first bags of rice being heaved up by your coolies into the first bullock carts. It is quiet; the jungle is still awed. For a moment, during the drop, you are back at Binjan, at Myitkyina, at Bhamo, places where there are movies, nurses, adjutants and beer. Then, as the crickets take up again, and the crows venture their first remarks, you realize that you are alone once more with your Jingpaws, and that there are Japanese all around you. You are alone, that is, until darkness again circles the world and reaches Burma.

  RAINY MONSOON GIVING ROAD ACID TEST

  Bhamo, Burma, on the Stilwell Road—July 9, 1945

  Almost six months old now, Asia's most valuable and strategic highway, extending from Ledo, Burma, to Kunming, China, is at the halfway point in meeting its stiffest test, the monsoon. Will new stretches built by American engineers survive rising floods? In some places bridges have already been swept away and replaced. Will these temporary bridges endure?

  I have just completed a low-level trip in a grasshopper plane over the first 367 miles of the road from Ledo to Bhamo. Though some bridge sites were torn by violent floods and strewn wreckage, long columns of American trucks still plodded faithfully toward China. Tomorrow I will join one such convoy, driving a jeep, which I hope will achieve
the whole 707-mile drive from Bhamo over the Yunnan mountains and the Salween and Mekong rivers to Kunming.

  The last Chicago Daily News correspondent who drove the Burma Road was Leland Stowe, just before the road was sealed in December, 1941. In those days it ran from Rangoon north through Burma, veering east at Lashio. Now, instead, the road begins high in the Himalayan foothills of Assam and runs one-third of its length south before turning east into China. In a remarkable series of articles Stowe revealed that pilfering, squeeze, graft, and misuse of lend-lease materials prevailed. This drew strong protests from Chinese authorities in Washington. One of my aims is to determine whether this security situation has improved since the road reopened.

  The Burma Road is now in every sense an American highway, studded with American convoy stations, automotive repair companies, and hospitals. American investment is gigantic. Our engineers keep the twin-lane route open by a constant battle with landslides and mutilations of the surface caused by the unceasing trucks. Nothing ever comes down the most valuable highway of America's Asiatic battle. Everything goes into China without anything coming out, and that “everything” is American.

  The revival of the Burma Road was urged by General Stilwell, but opposed by Lord Mountbatten as impractical. As Mountbatten claimed, most of the tonnage—now nearly 50,000 a month—is carried by American Transport Command “Hump fliers” from numerous air fields around the Chabua-Ledo area. But the Burma Road has made it possible for thousands of trucks (which could never have flown) to go to China under their own power. It has made possible the American-built pipeline and newly-completed telephone line which parallel the road and are serviced along it. The Burma Road thus does three jobs which aviation never could.

  On a cost basis, like everything else in the war, it is impossible to determine whether we are getting our money's worth. If the United States adopts a vigorous foreign policy in this area, something may be recovered in future highway tolls. But the cost of all we now supply to China is so colossally high in transport terms that valid comparisons are impossible.

  American critics of the quantity furnished China under lend-lease often overlook this. They compute lend-lease on the factory side, omitting the huge distribution overhead. If the costs of transportation and delivery are included, the true generous dimensions of America's aid to China are revealed.

  The eventual opening up of China's coastal ports will modify but not dismiss the permanent importance of the road in American foreign policy. China is now divided into Communist Kuomintang and Japanese-occupied. Whatever divisions persist after the war, free entry into China remains important for America's interest.

  The Burma Road is the twin of the American-built highway from the Persian foothills in the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf. The former is the eastern back door into Asia and the latter is the western. The Persian road is vital in determining the balance of power in oil on which the United States depends to replenish overdrawn resources. The Burma Road is the key to Anglo-Russo-Chinese relations, wherein all the great powers are involved.

  LUCK AND NINE GEAR SHIFTS MAKE ANYONE A MOTORIST

  Burma Road Deserves Its Title: “Infernal Gate”

  Kunming, China—July 18 & 25, 1945

  You too can learn to drive the Burma Road. You can, that is, if mud is your preferred habitat, if you can skirt a precipice by inches and not go over, if you can sleep in a rain-soaked bedroll, shave by a side mirror, and live off K rations eaten sitting on the hood of an overheated motor. And learn to drive with a trailer.

  Americans call it the Burma Road. The Chinese call it the Infernal Gate. You have to travel it to find out how much better is the Chinese name for that 700-mile rollercoaster of mud from Bhamo to Kunming—the best argument, in monsoon time, for air travel.

  I have just finished driving the Burma Road in a lame convoy of battle-worn American vehicles. My steed was a war-weary, road-saddened jeep with no speedometer, defective tires, imperceptible brakes, no tools and no relief driver. Behind this pathetic orphan rattled a helpless trailer, striving with guileful persistence to drag the entire combination over precipices whose sides are already littered with the carcasses of far better vehicles. Bravely lettered with the words Chicago Daily News, this pathetic tandem struggled in mud so high that the frogs were staring in over the dashboard and multi-ton bulldog tractors occasionally were required to pull us through. Repeatedly this sponge-bath on wheels was passed by long columns of brand new lend-lease jeeps driven by Chinese soldiers.

  China needs vehicles. What China needs, America tries to provide. That is why over a thousand miles from India through Burma to China is one squirming, swimming, bumping line of American vehicles. That's why Americans taking convoys through—nameless sergeants, lieutenants, captains and plain G.I.s who wallow like swine and whom nobody cares about—gradually go grey. You can look over the road's outside edge and wonder how they do it.

  The problem children are the big trailers which have to fight their way around bends and start minor avalanches when their corners tear away the earthen embankments. The grades tilt up to 16%. In thirteen places you climb over passes more than 7200 feet high. That means you must have complete mastery of either the nine possible forward gear shifts of a jeep, or the fifteen of a big truck. When you come to one of the half-mile-long mudholes called a camp, you have to be able to back your vehicle-trailer combination as well as manage it in forward speeds. A trailer will jackknife seemingly without provocation and be found biting at your elbow when you think it is stretched out tailwise behind. Front-wheel movements are reversed, as everyone knows, in going backwards. But in going backwards with a trailer, they are reverse-reversed for the starting impetus, then must be changed to plain-reversed. A trailer asked to back at too sharp a curve rises in the air on one wheel, making piteous sounds. If these fail, it tries to turn over.

  While all this is happening there are always seven Chinese urchins at hand, grinning and calling “Ding hao!” (super-okay) with thumbs upraised.

  Every convoy is broken down into sections called “serials.” You stay in position unless you break down. When the convoy commander was at the top of a serpentine road up a mountain he could talk with the sub-commander of his last section just crossing a bridge below. “Hello, C-serial, this is Charley-Charley. We are about ten miles ahead of you and 4000 feet above. I can see you crossing the bridge but I do not see the wrecker. Over.”

  “Hello, Charley-Charley You do not see the wrecker because the mess-trailer in B serial fell out with a broken spring. The wrecker stayed with him. Over.”

  Every convoy on the Burma Road goes armed, even though bandit attacks have almost ceased. The road camps do not provide any guards, and the tired drivers have to stand their own sentry duty. The military police control the camps and the hours of departure, which are usually from four to seven in the morning. You get up an hour and a half before you leave and you do your own grease job which has to last two hundred miles. A hundred miles of Burma Road is considered equal to a thousand miles of American highway in wear and tear.

  The style of thought of Americans on the Burma Road is optimistic, but sardonic. Here is what the m.p.s have to say to their guests at Mong-Yu, the last stop in Burma before Wanting, the Chinese border station. Their placard reads:

  Take a look at the side walls of the tents you occupy tonight. The convoys before you have taken down these walls and used them as rugs, mattresses and drapes … Saki is Bu-How (no good). We use it for a gas substitute here, so if you want to drink it, go ahead. But wait till you get back home … Villages are off-limits. The women may look good to you, but don't let that fool you. The bugs are here if you are really looking for them. … Keep the villagers out of your convoy area. They will steal you blind when your back is turned. But any native you see walking post is an American soldier who has done more to lick the slanties than many of you will get to do or have done. Treat them with respect. Most were given discharges from the army at an age when you were in high
school.

  At the Salween River gorge, which is something like the Grand Canyon done in green, I saw a truck which had fallen about 100 feet straight down, then caught on a jutting rock. In its suspended ominousness it suggested the Infernal Gate more than do those ferociously cannibalized, wheelless, motorless skeletons flanking the roadside which salvagers have hauled up from limbo. When Americans get through salvaging the cargo and whatever else they can of martyred trucks, the Chinese start in. The result looks like a rusty shell cast aside by a mammoth beetle. Some are bullet-ridden, for it is not long since Japanese Zeros veered like butterflies through the valleys, scourging the convoys. But today when you see, as our convoy did, the body of an American negro G.I. at the roadside, stiff in death, and hear a report that three drivers were killed at Mong-Yu last week, you know it's the Infernal Gate, not the Japs, which led these unmentioned heroes through a gate even more infernal.

  “I keep ready to jump any second,” is the remark you hear most often, for almost every curve is blind and unmarked. One merit is that little traffic is coming at you. Anything coming toward you, in Burma Road slang, is “reverse lend-lease.”

  Almost three hundred convoys of all sorts, lengths, and make-ups have mastered the Burma Road since it was opened in late January. At that time the seven hundred miles from Wanting, the Chinese border post, to Kunming were smooth by Asiatic standards. Now they're rowelled, rutted and puddled. My average speed actually driving was about seven miles an hour. My average progress for ten days of infernalization was three miles an hour. The clouds overhead buzzed and murmured day and night with hump aircraft, traveling at 200 miles an hour.