History Friday: The Burma Road

Recovering on Orchard Road
Is this my second or third iced tea?
1318 hrs.

The image of unsung heroes scraping a truck route through the planet's densest jungles and highest mountains - under fire, no less - to feed and arm the people of China was too good to resist, so it was with great anticipation that I picked up Donovan Webster's The Burma Road.

What I was hoping for was a dramatic and detailed retelling of what it took to construct this feat of combat engineering and human endeavor, so initially I was disappointed. (Lesson one: pay more attention to subtitles.) Using the construction of the road as a backdrop, Webster chose instead to cover the entire China-Burma-India (CBI) theater in World War II, with an emphasis on Burma and India, and some of the more colorful personalities who drove the progress of the war in this part of the world.

CBI for the Rest of Us

As a campaign history the book suffers, perhaps unfairly, because the standard for World War II historians has risen drastically in recent years. Just when you thought everything about the conflict was that could be known or written has already seen the light of day, we have had a cascade of superb books that have, in many cases, redefined how we relate to and understand the war. Three examples among many:

• The first two books of Rick Atkinson's planned "Liberation Trilogy" (the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn and the even better Day of Battle) not only amount to the best accounts of the North African and Italian campaigns ever written, they are compelling a complete rethinking of how we must view the war in Europe.

• Over in the Pacific, John Parshall and Tony Tully, both part-time American historians, have written Shattered Sword, an account of the Midway battle emphasizing the Japanese side that casts new, unexpected, and iconoclastic insights on the American victory in that pivotal battle. So much for the Hollywood version.

• Edward S. Miller, another gifted amateur historian, offers in his superb War Plan Orange and Bankrupting the Enemy, together bringing to light the long overture to the war against Japan that most popular histories skim or ignore completely. 

Burma Road does not approach the insightful yet accessible scholarship of those accounts. What Webster does instead is to consolidate the works of others with his own on-the-ground research to fill a gaping hole in the popular history of this "tertiary" but locally critical theater in World War II.

Most works about CBI have focused on either personalities (Stilwell, Merrill, Wingate, Chennault) or units (the Flying Tigers, the OSS, the Marauders, the Chindits). Webster pulls these disparate threads together into a single tapestry that gives a good feel for the region's "War-on-a-Shoestring" as the world focused on Europe, Africa, the Atlantic, and the vast Pacific.

Picking Nits

I have a list of minor quibbles with the book, most of them rooted in Webster's background as a journalist rather than a military hitorian, that are illustrative of the issues that might keep The Burma Road from taking its deserved place among popular World War II histories:

• Webster refers to an officer "retiring his commission" when what was meant in the context was "resigning his commission."
• Throughout the text, Webster comes across as something of a Stilwell partisan. I tend to sympathize with "Vinegar Joe" myself (his assessments of Chiang were politically incorrect but fairly accurate), but his lack of political acumen consistently undermined his tactical strengths.
• The maps in the work are far too few, and the few there are are not very helpful in orienting the reader.  What is worse, the symbology - the way he represents different units and their movements - would cause a corporal to giggle.

Despite these quibbles, I enjoyed Burma Road and at a well-written 335 pages, I found it a worthy read, if for no other reason than it gave me a new point from which to re-commence my own studies on the CBI theater. For anyone largely unaware of the progress of the war on China's southern border, I highly recommend it.

Comments

[Adam Daniel Mezei]

Hi David,

Great post. I was recently reading quite a bit about the CBI theater as part of my coverage of Hannah Pakula's biography about Madama Chiang, THE LAST EMPRESS which is turning out to be quite good (I'm about half-way through). It spurred be to go out and grab the Jay Taylor G-mo tell-all called, naturally, THE GENERALISSIMO, as well, which I should be getting into during these early 2010 weeks. If you haven't picked up the former, I'd suggest it as a possible add to your collection.

I wanted to ask you, however, if you could recommend a good Orde Wingate title. It doesn't have to necessarily be a biography, although that would be very welcome, too. I've read much about him as part of his clandestine activities in pre-'48 British Palestine, and his training of Yishuv members in guerrilla warfare, much of which he'd picked up during his time in the CBI theater. But a full book which reveals the man I haven't yet covered.

Thanks again for the title tip-offs. My bookcase grows as I read your marvellously well-crafted posts.

[PekingReview]

Hi Adam,

At some point in my reading I plan to get back to the subject of the Chiangs, and the two books you mentioned are on my wishlist. Sadly, much of what has been written about China's 20th Century Leaders, from Pu Yi to Deng Xiaoping, has been tainted by sycophancy, venom, or self-interest. Anything that casts a balanced light on the figures of the Chinese revolution is a welcome addition to the literature.

For the Orde Wingate book, pick up FIRE IN THE NIGHT by John Bierman and Colin Smith, which is the most balanced (and highly readable) account of his career to date. The authors manage to celebrate what made Wingate such an effective warrior while making clear the why the British Army leadership found him such an irritant.

One example of the latter from Wingate's Palestine days: the British Army establishment was largely composed of two kinds of officers: Orientalists who were sympathetic to Mohammad Amin Al-Husayni and his anti-Zionist activities, or those who didn't care either way. As an outspoken Zionist, Wingate made few friends among the Sandhurst Alumni Association.

Let me know when you get through Jay Taylor's book. Thanks!

[Chris Carr]

Good post. Piqued my interested to go buy and read, Shattered Sword.

Cheers from Cal Poly ...

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=757704788]

Thanks for the fulsome reply, D. I've vaguely heard of Fire In the Night, and I'll see what I can track down on abe.com. Have you visited in the Wingate Institute in Israel, incidentally?