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To honor General Joseph Stilwell's part in the Burma campaign, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, who had forced "Vinegar Joe's" recall, last week named the newly opened Ledo-Burma highway Stilwell Road. The General was not present to see his dream of a new route from India to China come true. TIME Correspondent Theodore M. White, who was, cabled:

All other convoys will be different. Ours was the first. The sun was burning through the morning fog at Myitkyina [pronounced Myit-chi-nah] when we set out, 100-odd vehicles in line. The American drivers, white and colored alike, the Chinese engineers, were especially selected from units that had slaved to build the road.

The route goes through jungle for the first two days down to the Shweli. Little by little, the jungle opens, gives way to rice paddies and Shan villages.

Combat Wreckage. Battle scars are everywhere. When we rolled into Bhamo there was a Jap tankette still rusting by the road and outside one dugout, two feet from the highway, lay a Japanese soldier still unburied. His pants and wool puttees were dried on his body, but his chest, exposed, was now a hollow framework of ribs through which red dust sifted.

We made Bhamo the first day, rolled down into the green folds of the Shweli on the afternoon of the second and then were strung up at Namhkam three days. The Japanese were 14 miles up the road and the war was still going on.

At last General Sun Li-jen kicked off to clear the road to the junction with the paved Burma highway at Mongyu. We went up to watch. An infantry company lay waiting on a hill a mile from the Pinghai pocket, while below two tank units rolled back & forth through the Jap positions, machine-gunning and chewing up the banana thickets. Then Chinese infantry groped in to hunt for snipers. It was good to see these Chinese troops. They had fed well for a full year, their uniforms were clean, their helmets sat jauntily on their heads.

Friend or Foe? American tanks from the west clanked into Mongyu at 11:30. The first American, Brigadier General George W. Sliney, hiked in on foot with a platoon of Chinese troops from the Burma side. The cocky little foot soldiers who had mopped up the north Burma jungle saw a knot of blue-grey, raggle-taggle men at the junction and wanted to fire on them. Sliney threw himself in front of the Bren gun. They were Chinese from the other side of the block and they cheered and yelled as the American walked in.

The soldiers were laughing, chattering and shouting "Ting hao!" ("Good!") to everyone. The blockade had been broken; they had done it. Some of them were sitting happily on the last Jap machine-gun emplacements directly in the fork of the road, where the dirt track of the Shweli Valley spilled on the black asphalt surface of the main Burma highway itself. A little distance off, Chinese soldiers stood gaping with peasant eyes at the monstrous steel hides of the American tanks.

We raced ahead on the last twelve miles into Wanting. As we rounded a bend we saw what seemed to be the Chinese Army. They were dressed in ragged uniforms, patchworks of grey and faded blue. Their guns were old and worn and they were hauling their artillery up the inclines by ropes.

Open Road. In 20 minutes we were at Wanting, a ruined little border town of grey, drab buildings roofed with corrugated iron. The route was open and behind us lay a clear line of land communications that reached to the wharves of Calcutta.

At 8:30 the next morning the convoy was ready to roll again. Overnight the Chinese had strung up archways on the road with tin plates bearing the old war slogans and new ones hailing the great Allied victory. Over the plank bridge to China was an archway covered with bamboo leaves and branches. A new sign said: "Ledo Road 478 mi.--Burma Road 566 mi."

The lead jeep of the convoy stood on the edge of the clearing with all the beflagged trucks behind. The band played the national anthems and the soldiery of the two nations stood at attention in a square. On a platform were T. V. Soong, Marshal Wei Li-huang, Generals Daniel Sultan, Claire Chennault, Howard Davidson of the Tenth Air Force and Lewis Pick, builder of the Ledo Road.

The Absent One. There was one man missing. "Newsreel" Wong, China's greatest cameraman, said it in his tortured but fluent version of English: "You know, I look into the sun and you know, I think I see somebody there. It is 'Uncle Joe' and he smiling at me and wearing his campaign hat. I think I see him there like shadow in the dust by road. I want to shoot picture, but I can't."

In an hour the speeches were over. The long convoy rolled over the little bridge. Thg first convoy had reached China.

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