NEW MUSEUM A brand new museum has just recently been opened in the Salween river area not far from the western border of China. It is unofficially being called " The Hump Pilot Museum", and very few of those it honors will ever get to see its displays.
A main portion of the modern exhibition buildings showing starkly white against a dense green forest background is a large aircraft hanger which houses a
B-25H which is typical of so many of the cargo planes which hauled massive amounts of supplies of all kinds from India, over The Hump, into China. If an group of veterans has been slighted by the American people it has to be those who served in the CBI region.
In fact, the vast majority of American don't even know where Burma was. I say "was" because it now called " Miramar". It is that long mass of solid land, heavily populated by varied tribal groups, which stretches in long sweep to t the south between India and China; briefly touching Laos and it shares the long leg to the sea Thailand. On the west side Miramar fronts on the Bay of Bengal and touches Bangladesh.
The Americans started building the Ledo Road in December of 1942. The 45th Engineer Service Regiment worked in un-surveyed territory. Peaks mounted as high as 4300 feet along a 103 mile trail and the terrain demanded that about
l00,000 cubic feet of earth and rock be moved in ever mile constructed. In 1943 four units - the 848th, 849th, 858th and 1883rd - joined them and the lead bulldozer reached Shingwiyang on Dec. 27th l943 - three day ahead of schedule. Fifteen thousand men worked on that road.
An unusual fact: sixty percent of the American troops were blacks. As the construction crews drew close to the end of their work which would increase our ability to bring in supplies,and equipment, General Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese leader decreed that no black soldier would be allowed to set foot in China proper. The rule was, later, modified to allow a few blacks to go as far as he 823rd EAB built that first segment along a narrow, steep trail cut through un-Kumming for road work. His only stated reason: his Chinese troops had never seen black soldiers.
The new museum has high walls showcasing documentation of various actions
when the road was under construction. I doubt seriously that any of this has been - or will ever be - graphically displayed.
A.L.M. February 5, 2006 [c428wds]
