Pick's Pike

Allied troops in north Burma and southeast China were only 26 miles apart across the savage mountains. They fought toward each other in wild, monsoon-sodden terrain (see map). But even if they succeeded in joining, it would be only a token. The real consideration in this remote. Godforsaken battleground is a road--and the road has to wait for clean-up in the rear, and until other terrain suitable for road-building is cleared by the fighters.

When the road is done; it will link the Calcutta railhead of Ledo in India with China. Only then will Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell and his Chinese allies coming from Yunnan have made their objective. The road will also complete a backbreaking, distasteful job for dambuilder Brigadier General Lewis A. Pick--now a highway builder and the boss of Pick's Pike.

Through Monsoon and High Water.

Straight-backed, six-footer Pick once said: "I can keep up with Stilwell as fast as he can drive the Japs out of this area." He did. With 9,000 American engineer troops, a regiment of Chinese engineers and 10,000 native laborers, he had completed 167 miles of road and six airfields.

Last week he was working on the next 77-mile stretch to Mogaung, through rain that averaged an inch a day, had already washed out some of the 700 bridges on the twisting road. The road, he had promised, would stay open despite monsoon and high water.

Actually, the Ledo road was as much a drainage as a road-building problem. Drainage was Pick's specialty. His heart was still in the Missouri River Basin of the U.S., where he had been onetime Division Engineer. From this job came "Pick's Plan," a series of dams and reservoirs to tame the Missouri.

"I like to control water," Pick ruefully told an interviewer in Burma. "Here, on this road, water tries to control me."

But the water was losing out. Pick, an incessant worker and a hard driver, fought it 24 hours a day, using his equipment and men in shifts. Lead bulldozers, often within sound of the fighting front, were no strangers to the white-thatched engineer who trudged the job with his bamboo staff.*

Now he was approaching newly conquered territory, where the Jap had obligingly helped out by maintaining a surfaced road from Kamaing to Mogaung, there joining the railway and highway to Myitkyina (pronounced Mitch'-i-nah). From Myitkyina it could go two ways: through jungle track northeast to Lauh-kaung, south to Tengyueh, east to Burma Road; or it could go south from Mogaung to Bhamo, northeast to Tengyueh. The battle's course would dictate the choice.

Stilwell's Part. But first Stilwell must swab out Japanese pockets of infection--including Myitkyina, around which, for more than 40 days, his troops have been closing a circle at house-to-house pace. In about seven months Stilwell had driven almost 200 miles from Ledo, had knocked out about 17,700 Japanese casualties. His Chinese, Americans, British, Burmese and Indians had stamped out the 18th Japanese Division, whose fame at home was built on the rape of Nanking, the capture of Shanghai and Singapore, victories in Malaya and Burma. His troops had also badly mauled three other Jap divisions.

They still had many months of fighting ahead. But when Stilwell and Pick meet the Yunnan Chinese, Pick's Pike will be finished.

* On a photograph of himself and Pick together Stilwell once wrote: "To the old man with the stick."

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