On the Road from Mandalay

It was good that the night was clear; mud could be a great handicap. The drivers were alert; the coolies worked hard, chanting as they loaded the trucks; the mechanics checked over the engines as if they were airplanes. There was a wonderful electric atmosphere. Even the Chinese drivers refrained from drinking. Some of the Burmese who wandered idly among the piles of stock and droves of trucks were Japanese spies, but no one seemed to care. The Burma Road was opening again.

To every Chinese, this was vital news. For the Burma Road, scratched almost literally by coolies' hands out of 715 miles of mountain and ravine from Lashio in Burma to Kunming in China, was no great shakes as a road but was everything to China as an idea. It meant as much to modern China as the Great Wall to ancient China. It represented a link with the world, foreign help, high morale, defiance. It represented the future.

At Lashio that clear night there were 2,000 U. S.-built trucks, into which 5,000 coolies of many tribes lifted cargoes of many sorts--wings of airplanes, lock nuts for lathes, rolls of adhesive plaster, flashlights, tins of high-octane gasoline, rifle barrels, barrels of kerosene, raw cotton: materials of war and of war economy. The loading dumps covered acres. Some $20,000,000 worth of China's future lay there.

China's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs T. J. Tcheng made a little speech: ". . .

Wine will be waiting for you when you reach Kunming." On the stroke of midnight, Burma time, British officials gave the word to go. At 12:07 the first truck bored away into the darkness. At 12:27 a score more started. By 2 a.m. the first convoy of 60 trucks had left. Other convoys formed behind it.

With luck the drivers would get to Kunming in eight days. During the three months the road was closed, droves of coolies had improved the shoulders of its hairpin turns, the surface of its straightaways. The first day dawned cloudy--good luck again, for the Japanese had announced their determination to blast the road off its hills with bombs. During the day raiders came over from their new bases in French Indo-China, and here & there they found the little ribbon and snipped it. But 75,000 coolies were waiting for them, and wherever there was a direct hit, this incredible labor swarmed on to the road and repaired it in a matter of hours. The trucks moved on.

In Chungking news came that the trucks were getting through. Spirits rose. British Ambassador Sir Archibald John Kerr Clark Kerr, beloved by Chinese as he loves them, invited hundreds to cocktails and dinner, where ambiguously mild white wine was passed and toasts were drunk to the future, creeping in along the Burma Road.

Meddling Through. Toasts were drunk in Tokyo last month, also to the future. German Ambassador Major General Eugen Ott, feared and respected by the Japanese as he does not fear and respect them, drank with Foreign Minister Kensuke Matsuoka, Italian Ambassador Mario Indelli and Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop's special envoy Heinrich von Stahmer to the future of the three-way pact. But last week there was mostly a show of temper in Tokyo. The opening of the Burma Road was bad.

It meant that the China conflict would go on and on. Worse than that, it seemed to mean that the U. S. was beginning to meddle in earnest. Those were U. S. trucks, U. S. goods, U. S. gasoline getting through by the Burma Road. U. S. advisers were at work in Chungking, U. S. loans were exerting their stimulus. In faraway Manhattan the events of the week were just a joke (Broadway wags called their theatregoing friends to ask if they wanted free tickets to the opening of The Burma Road).

Tatekawa's Task. The week brought Tokyo one big thing: hope of a non-aggression pact with Russia. There was nothing more solid on which to base the hope than German encouragement and apparent Russian willingness to keep the peace on all fronts. A new Japanese Ambassador, a man of grain as hard as teak, Lieut. General Yoshitsugu Tatekawa, reached Moscow, and went right to work to win what he calls "those simple Russians." Before the Japanese could proceed in the South, they must seal up the northern threat.

Clumsy, Slow, Vacillating. A lesser joy to the architects of Greater East Asia was British weakness at Hong Kong. That port of entry to China was closed at the same time as the Burma Road and was to have opened at the same time. But Japanese pressure resulted in a last-minute announcement that the port would remain closed to goods for China.

Smuggling was still in order near Hong Kong, and the New York Times's Hallett Abend reported that the U. S. was storing submarine spare parts there--a sign, if true, that plans had been made for joint British-U. S. action against Japan. But the British were obtuse as ever. From Hong Kong a vessel cleared last week loaded chockablock with 2,300 tons of lead concentrate--destined for Japan. In London influential Viscount Hisaakira Kano, manager of Yokohama Specie Bank's London branch, wrote to the Daily Sketch: "British diplomacy has been clumsy, slow, vacillating. One would have thought either that you support Chiang Kai-shek or you do not support him. Instead you smile first at one side and then at the other."

Resistance by the Chinese increased before goods could possibly have reached the armies. The Chinese were spurred by the knowledge that help was coming and that the Japanese had had to weaken China garrisons for the adventure in Indo-China. This was the final sting to rouse Japan. Against the outsiders who seemed to be causing all the trouble Tokyo's press began to rail. Hochi, which filters Berlin through Tokyo, cried: "With the reopening of the Burma Road, Britain and the United States are on the way to their crucifixion."

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