National Disgrace?

The Burma Road, ever since its opening in September 1938, has been the greatest racket in China. It has been, and still remains, both a national scandal and a national disgrace.

With a now-it-can-be-told flick of the typewriter, Chicago Daily Newsman Leland Stowe thus began a sensational dispatch on the No. 1 bottleneck of Allied world strategy.

Ever since it became a traveler's legend, the Burma Road has been a headache to the men who run it. Torrential rains, merciless bombing, malaria, red tape, British blockade, and technical ignorance have cursed the life of its officials. All these things Newsman Stowe airily brushed aside to come down like a Yunnanese landslide on one single fault: graft. Corruption, he implied, has caused: 1) swollen profits of greedy trucking firms; 2) indiscriminate dumping of war materials just within China's borders; 3) the failure of needed medical goods to get beyond Rangoon; 4) use of the Road's limited capacity to haul luxuries, to be bootlegged at fantastic prices.

Chinese officials irascibly pointed out what was unknown or unrecorded by Correspondent Stowe:

> The Southwest Transportation Co. which Stowe accused of lush war-wrung profits, is a 100% Government-owned subsidiary. All its profits go into upkeep and maintenance.

> The Chinese admitted setting up supply dumps close within their border, far from points of need. They tactfully avoided saying that, before Pearl Harbor, China feared Anglo-American appeasement of Japan with the possible reclosing of ,the Burma Road, as in the summer of 1940. Therefore they had hastened to haul as much material as possible from Burma to safe points under their own flag.

> Manhattan Businessman Alfred Kohlberg, director of the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, flatly contradicted Leland Stowe's third point. Mr. Kohlberg made a trip to China last summer, checked on arrivals of medical aid at Red Cross headquarters at Kweiyang. "At the time I was there," said he last week, "everything had arrived intact and checked to the dot with the detailed lists forwarded from New York."

> U.S. Lend-Lease officials pointed out that in the past few months 80% of traffic over the Road has been restricted to military needs.

The Chinese said that they had asked the U.S. to take over the Burma Road's administration, that the chief limits on the carrying capacity of the Road were the multiplicity of conflicting administrative agencies, their technical ignorance of trucking, lack of rolling stock. Last week they suggested that an Allied Commission, headed by America, take over the Road.

They did not deny many of Stowe's minor points: bootlegging of gasoline by penny-hungry truck drivers is an open scandal, as it is on many an American trucking run. Petty thievery is rampant: efficient policing is long overdue. The Chinese say they are combating these abuses, and they back up the statement with figures showing increasing efficiency. In July 1941 the road carried 3,864 tons of military supplies. In November it carried 17,500 tons. No comparable improvement in war effort has been demonstrated in the U.S.

Correspondent Stowe's parting snipe was a mixture of hysteria and bad taste: "The Burma Road abuses definitely threaten to throw a much larger burden of combat throughout eastern Asia upon the Americans and the British." The Chinese remembered that for four years they had borne all the burden of combat in eastern Asia.

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