Mountainous and malarial, northern Burma is terrible terrain for war, but the Allies resolved to fight there to keep China in World War II. The effort's executant, American general Joseph Stilwell, occupies center stage of Webster's chronicle, which benefits from the author's visits to battle sites and remnants of a supply road. Applying concrete visualization of the mud, leeches, and heat of tropical combat, Webster renders the misery experienced by soldiers on both Japanese and Allied sides, blending them with the tactical details of the war's ebb and flood in Burma. These flow into Webster's accounts of Merrill's Marauders, Wingate's Chindits, Chennault's Flying Tigers, and other such colorful objects of Eric Sevareid's and Theodore White's reportage, all under Stilwell's nominal control, as was, on paper but infrequently in fact, the military of Chiang Kai-shek. Stilwell's headaches running such a sprawling theater, while previously researched by Barbara Tuchman (Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45, 1970), are ably integrated by Webster into the infantryman's viewpoint: the result is a high-quality overview. Review "In World War II, Japan sealed parts of China. Nothing could get in or out. Disaster loomed. In The Burma Road-a gripping recounting of those dark days-Donovan Webster tells us the harrowing and heroic story of how China survived." -James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers
+
