Jungle Tale

The sign reads: "Welcome to Burma--Courtesy of the Hairy Ears." It stands beside a crude road that plunges through the jungles, curls around the southeastern slopes of the mountains on the India-Burma border. The Hairy Ears are the U.S. Army engineers who for ten months now have been working on a prodigious undertaking--the "Ledo Road," a new route into Burma. Last week the Army proudly unveiled it (see cut).

On from X Base. More than a year ago pint-sized Captain James Arthur Kehoe, onetime Kentucky tobacco farmer, sallied into the Burma jungles with a bowie knife and a sackful of cheap watches for trading (TIME, May 31). Kehoe was off to negotiate with Naga headhunters for military outposts and to survey the wild country through which the new road was to pass. Last December the engineers moved surreptitiously into rolling green tea gardens on the far eastern fringes of India's Assam Province. There they set up "X Base" near a little one-lane gravelly road which British Indian labor had started. On Dee. 15 they started work.

They were Negro and white troops. Advance contingent was a regiment of engineers who had built Army bases in Canada. Their camps were exotic--clusters of bamboo bashas (huts) surrounded by giant hardwoods, wild growths of pale orchids, glistening green jungles. But incessant rains drenched them. Roving Jap patrols sniped at them. They were enervated by the heat, plagued by hordes of mosquitoes and bloodthirsty leeches that suck a man white if he drops from wounds or exhaustion.

They followed the trails left by the Burmese who had fled from Jap troops in the interior. The trails, sometimes less than a foot wide, trickled through the matted jungles and crossed ledges which dropped hundreds of feet into gorges. Dynamiting crews went first to blast away the heaviest barriers. Behind them bulldozers slashed into the undergrowth, rocky banks, viscous mud.

Landslides, mud, dust often wiped out the engineers' work as fast as they finished it. Asked about progress, Colonel Charles Gleim, formerly construction engineer of the Lincoln Tunnel, commander of the advanced engineers, answered: "Doing great. Only lost half a mile this month." Bulldozers, trucks, tractors slid or were knocked over mountainsides in drops of hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet. One 'dozer operator ducked as a clod of dirt hit his head, looked up and saw a whole mountaintop coming down on him. He jumped clear. His bulldozer was buried. To exhume it the engineers had to blast away tons of rocks.

On to Japan. Far ahead, Chinese combat troops under U.S. Brigadier General Haydon Boatner ranged through the jungles, driving back Jap patrols. As the road advanced further into enemy-held territory security guards had to be mounted over the laboring Hairy Ears, who kept their own guns constantly at hand.

Last week work was far enough along for the Army to reveal the project. How far the Army had clawed its way into Burma was not disclosed. Also secret was the road's specific destination. But the general direction was obvious: towards the enemy entrenched in northern Burma.

Primarily the Ledo Road will be a supply line for Allied troops when the widely heralded Burma campaign finally gets under way. Secondarily, when the Japs are cleaned out, it will serve as a link between the supply routes of India and the old Burma Road to China. Before the Welcome-to-Burma sign stands another fingerpost erected by the Hairy Ears. This one reads: "To Tokyo."

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