August seventh, 1945 - 'Thy Brother's Blood': Reminiscences of World War II - Cover Story

Christian Century, August 16, 1995 by James M. Gustafson

In my distress I cry to the Lord, that he may answer me: "Deliver me, O Lord, from lying lips, from a deceitful tongue."

What shall be given to you? And what more shall be done to you, you deceitful tongue? A warrior's sharp arrows, with glowing coals of the broom tree!

Woe is me, that I am an alien in Meshech, that I must live among the tents of Kedar! Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace; but when I speak, they are for war. - Psalm 120

There are certain days in history that we never forget. We will never forget the night when Desert Shield became Desert Storm. We never forget where we were and what we were doing when critical events occurred: in my memory, for examples, the day the iron mines closed in Norway, Michigan, when I was five years old, never to open again; the day the Germans invaded Poland in 1939; the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941; the day that John F. Kennedy was killed; the day that Martin Luther King was assassinated; and so forth.

One such day was the seventh of August, 1945. I was in central Burma, at a point on the map called Panghkam, near where the Shweli River, forms the border between Burma and Yunnan Province in China. I was 19 years old, technician fifth grade, a high-speed radio operator in the signal section of the Headquarters and Service Company of the 209th Engineer Combat Battalion of the United States Army.

There were seven of us in the signal section. We had two pyramidal tents for our living quarters - one of which contained our little telephone switchboard. We had a tent in which our radio and cryptography equipment was housed, and a tent in which Johnson, a blond Californian, repaired our equipment. We had our own water supply - a poncho fixed on bamboo poles that caught the rain so it flowed into a 52-gallon steel drum. We were on the very edge of a clearing; on three sides of us was jungle.

About 100 feet from our tents was a Shan burial ground. Several hundred yards farther was a marketplace where every fifth day the Kachins and the Chins, indigenous tribal people, would come from the mountains to exchange goods with the Shans, who were Buddhists and lived in the valley. In another direction, through about a hundred yards of jungle, was the battalions medical section, and beyond that, in the clearing, the battalion headquarters we had built, and the H & S Company area. Below us were rice paddies. Each clump of bamboo marked a Shan village. Across the valley were mountains with many shades of tropical green, and the trails to Kachin and Chin villages. The beauty was breathtaking.

My tentmates were Joe Eberle, signal section chief, half German and half Filipino, a tile setter from Los Angeles; Fox, an overqualified ultra-high-speed radio operator from New Orleans who had spent the early part of the war in Washington and had expected to stay in New Delhi; and Ehlenfeldt, a generalist in signal operations from Minneapolis. Eberle and Ehlenfeldt had been with the 209th from the beginning, and had just gone through their third monsoon season in Burma. Fox and I were replacements.

The 209th had been building the Ledo Road from the very northeast frontier of India, in Assam, to the point where it connected with the old Burma Road from Lashio to Kunming. That connection had been made on January 23, 1945. Our last engineering achievement was the construction of a one-lane suspension bridge over the Shweli between Panghkam and Namhkam, the home of Dr. Gordon Seagrave of Burma Surgeon fame.

The British under General Orde Wingate and Corps Commander William Joseph Slim had gone into central Burma, south of us, from Kohima and Imphal in India, the deepest points of penetration by the Japanese. Merrill's Marauders and later the Mars Task Force had spearheaded the American invasion from the north, up the mountains, over the Pangsau Pass to the Irriwaddy Valley and down to Myitkyina; then on to Bhamo and over the last mountain range, and finally to Wanting on the China border. The 209th and our colleagues in the 236th had constructed the road, keeping a supply route open to Merrill's Marauders.

The main purpose of the American operation in Burma was to provide a supply route to China that would be secure from Japanese naval power. It was one of those ventures that only a nation with great resources would undertake, since it involved operations that bordered on the impossible. The famous C-47 flying box cars flew the "Hump" from Chabua, near the end of the Indian rail system, to Kunming and other places in China, but a road and a pipeline were needed to supplement what the air force could do. Yes, a pipeline from Calcutta to Kunming. I invite you to look at a topographic map to see what that entailed. And a road over what were formerly jungle trails used by the tribal peoples. The monsoons were not considered obstacles, though we had 28 inches of rain in one week during my monsoon season in central Burma. How does one maintain a dirt road over mountains during the monsoon? Convoys were delayed up to three weeks because of the difficulties of keeping the road open between Bhamo and Panghkam, the section the 209th was responsible for maintaining once the road was finished.