Burma Road
From Free net encyclopedia
The Burma Road is a road linking Burma (also called Myanmar) with China. Its terminals are Kunming and Lashio, Burma. When it was built Burma was a British colony.
The road is about 1,130 kilometres long and runs through rough mountain country. This remarkable engineering achievement was built by 200,000 Chinese labouers during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and completed by 1938. It had a strategic role in World War II, where the Allied Powers used the Burma Road to transport war materiel to China. Supplies would be landed at Rangoon and moved by rail to Lashio, where the road started in Burma. When the Japanese overran sections of the Burma Road the Allies flew supplies over the Hump and, under the command of General Stillwell, built the Ledo Road to connect Assam in India to the northern section of the Burma road.
Other
During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Mickey Marcus built a make-shift road to Jerusalem that was called the "Burma Road" after its strategic predecessor. During the independence war in Israel; the Jordanians surrounded Jerusalem and blocked all roads to make it a siege. Jews in Jerusalem were suffering, Israelis who were trying to come in to Jerusalem to give the people of Jerusalem food and weapons got shot at and lost a lot of lives. The Israelis were trying to find a new way to get in to Jerusalem, a secret way that the enemy would not know about. This road helped Israel re-conquer Jerusalem, and take it over from the Jordanians.
Burma road is also a name given to rice pudding by the British Army, origins are from the Army serving in India.
Burma road is also a name given to the main passage way, Deck 3, on former Mackenzie Class ships (HMCS Mackenzie (261), Saskatchewan (262), Yukon (263) and Qu'Appelle (264)) that served in the Canadian Navy until the late 1990s. The passage way connected all parts of the ship and was used to "store" the ship with supplies.
Burma Road in Nassau, Bahamas, was the scene of rioting in 1942, when workers building an airport demonstrated for better pay and conditions. This was the inspiration for Ronnie Butler's 1967 song Burma Road.