Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U Page B

and the British were in full retreat. Maymyo and Lashio were overrun and the Burma Road was gone.
    The rapid collapse of its entire Far Eastern empire was a humiliating blow to British prestige. Plans were soon drawn up for a reconquest of Burma, to be followed by Malaya and Singapore. Few, however, believed that an overland invasion from India was possible, given the harsh terrain along the Burma–India border, and instead most British commanders favoured an amphibious assault on Rangoon. It would be a repeat of the East India Company’s landing at Rangoon in 1824, which had caught by surprise the forces of the king of Burma. Winston Churchill pushed for Allied support, as without American planes and sea transport little would be possible. But the Americans were not interested. Roosevelt himself, whilst sympathetic to Indian desires for independence, was scathing in his views of the Burmese. He told Churchill:
     
    I have never liked Burma or the Burmese! And you people must have had a terrible time with them for the past fifty years…I wish you could put the whole bunch of them into a frying pan with a wall around it and let them stew in their own juice.
     
    For Washington, the main priority was not liberating Burma itself, but reopening the Burma Road. The US was now battling the Japanese across the Pacific and keeping the Chinese going was a top concern. Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were not entirely isolated as American pilots had begun flying the ‘Over the Hump’, from Calcutta over the eastern Himalayas to Yunnan. But this was an extremely dangerous route and capable of transporting only a fraction of what had been possible via Rangoon. Overland access was urgently needed, but for this the recapture of Rangoon was unnecessary. Instead, the Americans wanted to construct a new road, leading from Ledo in Assam across the northern fringes of Burma to Yunnan. Assam was still firmly in British hands and a railway line ran close to the Burmese border. From there to China was dense jungle and mountains, one after another.
    And so, over eighteen months, thousands of civilians and soldiers laboured day and night, in torrential rains, battling swarms of insects, leeches and deadly diseases, to build what would be known as the Ledo or Stilwell Road, a road that would skirt the base of the Himalayas and again provide direct access from India to China. Most of the soldiers involved were African-Americans, tasked with this gruelling and thankless job in part because their white superiors believed they had a natural ‘night vision’ that would allow them to work in dark jungle conditions. They were probably the first people of African descent ever in those remote hills and amongst the first Americans; for a while, the local Naga tribesmen assumed that all Americans were black.
    Meanwhile, under the brilliant leadership of General Slim, the British Fourteenth Army pushed east from Manipur. At the August 1943 Quebec Conference of Roosevelt and Churchill, authorization had been given to reopening the Burma Road, but not to any specific re-invasion of Burma. But in 1944 the Japanese launched their own massive attack along the Burmese–Indian border, and Slim turned this potentially disastrous development into an opportunity, defending the Manipuri capital of Imphal, smashing the Japanese while their supply lines were overstretched, and then chasing them, first across the Chindwin River and then the Irrawaddy. Mandalay was encircled and then taken. Maymyo itself was recaptured in a dawn raid by a Gurkha battalion and part of the Welsh Regiment. Before they left, the Japanese rather gratuitously destroyed Government House in Maymyo, the stately summer home of British governors.
    The Stilwell Road was finished and the Burma Road reopened, but only in time for this first (and so far only) direct passage from India to China to become redundant. In May 1945, the 17th Indian Division entered Rangoon unopposed and within three months the