Stilwell Road
Narrated by Ronald Reagan and produced by the Army Signal Corps in 1945, STILWELL ROAD uses stock footage and the ever-popular animated arrows spearheading their ways across maps of the Far East to tell the story of the Allied Armies' mission to reopen the old Burma Road, the overland supply route from India to China.
The Japanese army conquered and occupied Burma by the time America entered the war. `Reopen' is a misleading word to use. The completed road would contain nearly 1,100 miles of newly constructed road - from Ledo in India to Kumning in China - an engineering marvel completed in the face of a hostile enemy, in a land whose torrential monsoons made road construction, not to mention maintenance, a logistical challenge of the highest order in peacetime.
As usual with the documentaries from this period - at least the ones I've seen - STILWELL ROAD is relevant, coherent, and concise. Although it's a little too sketchily drawn to substitute for the...
Horrific task surmounted by unsubduable will.
An excellent tribute to the 63000 men who constructed the 478 mile road from Ledo, Assam, into East Burma, this documentary depicts many of the extraordinary achievements of military engineering required for the passage's completion, a 26 month ordeal completed in 1945 by bordering massive gorges, overstriding raging rapids and invading some of the world's most impenetrable jungles, with a cost of many lives and 150 million dollars. "We got run out of Burma, and it is humiliating as Hell", early in the film states "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, Commander of troops in the CBI (China-Burma-India) Theatre, and the veteran warrior, serving as Chiang Kai-shek's chief of staff returned with a vengeance at the head of his doughty troops, aided later appreciably by personnel from Australia, New Zealand and India under the leadership of British General Ord Wingate, whom we see just prior to his final, fatal flight. Incisively edited, and briskly narrated by Ronald Reagan, the 51 minute work reveals...
RONALD REAGAN NARRATES THE GRIPPING STORY OF WWII BURMA
Some of the worst fighting of World Ward II occurred in the jungles of Burma. Heat, disease, pestilence worked as allies to the Japanese as General Joseph Stilwell attemped to turn the tide and keep the Japanese out of india, and keep the road to China open.
This gripping story of a great leader caught between an armed and determined enemy and the politics of allied command is narrated by Ronald Reagan
Click to Editorial Reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment