Burma Road

The most famous of them was Gregory Boyington, a commander who went by Pappy.

He had flown with the American Volunteer Group in China before Pearl Harbor, fighting the Japanese over the Burma Road in a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk.

By the time he got to the Corsair, he was already an experienced combat pilot with a gift for aerial tactics and a complicated relationship with military authority.

The unit he commanded, Marine Fighting Squadron 214, became the Black Sheep Squadron.

And when it was damaged, it tended to stay flyable longer than any engineering specification would have predicted.

Over the Himalayas, on the routes the crews called the Hump, C-47s hauled supplies from India into China after Japan cut the Burma Road.

The hump was one of the most dangerous air routes ever flown in wartime icing.

Violent weather systems that materialized without warning.

It is the shimmering wail of a hundred sirens bouncing off the echo chambers, which are a bombed city's dead buildings and deserted docks.

If you were on Bataan that night or the Burma Road three months later or Guadalcanal a year later, you know that when a howitzer shell explodes, the jungle screams back.

From Rayburn's gavel, to the warning signal of the D-Day Armada.

Our glossary of war words reached round the globe and back again.

And in fact, they contributed very little to the war.

The Burma road was before

the war started.

Okay, so was Major Hashida the only one that we know of, or were there others?

The American Volunteer Group, or AVG as the pilots came to call it, flew its first combat mission on December 20, 1941.

Twelve days after Pearl Harbor, a formation of 10 Japanese Ki-48 light bombers was inbound for Kunming, the southern terminus of the Burma Road, the main supply lifeline for Nationalist China.

Four P-40s from Hell's Angels intercepted them over the mountains.

east of the city.

Second, Burma was a significant producer of timber and agricultural products.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the invasion of Burma was meant to cut the Burma Road, the crucial supply line that allowed American aid to reach nationalist China.

The invasion of Burma would begin in late 1941 and would accelerate through early 1942.

The invasion of the Philippines, which began on December the 10th, just days after Pearl Harbor, served multiple strategic purposes.

The fundamental strategic doctrine guiding American policy was Europe first, which meant that the European theater and to defeat Nazi Germany received priority over the Pacific.

Additionally, China's geography made it extraordinarily difficult to supply.

China could only be reached through supply lines of extraordinary length and complexity, either through the port of Rangoon in Burma and then overland via the treacherous Yunnan Burma Road, or through the port of Hong Kong, which of course fell almost immediately to the Japanese.

The first Sino-American loan agreement had specified that the United States would deliver commodities worth forty-five million to China in nineteen forty-one.

Operating behind enemy lines as the fifty-three oh seventh Composite Unit, Victor and his special ops brothers fought through grueling jungle terrain in the Burma campaign.

Their highly dangerous mission was to cut open the Burma Road, seize critical Japanese airfields, and literally carve an Allied path through the jungle straight to China.

[laughs] When you look at Victor's history, the global grid clicks perfectly into an alignment.

My own master's degree in Chinese religious studies, the very destination Victor was carving a physical path toward amidst the fires of war.