The writer of the following dispatch is a former Kansas Citian and worked here on the Associated Press staff before he left for assignments in New York and overseas.

BY CHARLES A. GRUMICH

In the Burma Jungle (AP) - The Ledo Road is a highway of untold stupendous statistics and in personnel as American as transcontinental route No. 40.
  Traveling its full length by foot and jeep, I found unmatched hospitality and innumerable surprises. There were comforts and hardships, the latter smoothed away by diligent improvisation of American GI's, calmly completing an "impossible" task.
  The road now pierces the Hukawng valley and helps supply the Allied drive aimed at linking an Assam railhead to China. Curling through the Naga Hills, which would rate as mountains in any league other than the Himalayas, it is a monument to American engineering and the expertness of Negro truck drivers from all over the United States.
  Probably there never has been a road carved out under similar conditions or with such speed. Engineers, at one period, were bulldozing toward the Japs at almost a mile a day. The road is constantly under maintenance against the ravages of Nature. At one road block an engineer officer said:
"Wait a few minutes and there will be road."
  With only a hillside to the left and a precipice to the right, I could not believe it, but a few strokes of a bulldozer sculpture and we sped over a freshly made lane as safe as Grand Central parkway, if not as elegant.
  Over the more difficult terrain of this scenic route, alternative tracks often are used, road gangs short-cutting and bridging more laborious ways while convoys of hundreds of trucks follow the old, quickly carved roadbed.

Race With the Japs.

  Rumor has it that the engineers listen to Japanese broadcasts urging them to hurry up and finish the job so that the Japanese can link up their own Burma Road, which is snailing along with oppressed native hand labor struggling under enemy lash - a contrast illustrating the ultimate hopelessness of the Japanese war effort: Lack of modern machinery and necessity of forcing labor on oppressed peoples.
  One compromise with ordinary military road construction lies in the fact that this hairpin highway - difficult in spots but boulevard smooth and wide in others - is wide open to aerial observation. The thickets on both sides are necessarily cleared to permit the road to dry out under the sun. Nevertheless, it is so built that enemy bombings would affect minimum damage and repairs would be no more than routine maintenance after a landslide.
While the project calls for great engineering skill, it also demands diplomacy. The engineers have established a mutual admiration society with the sturdy, fierce-looking little natives whose friendship is essential.
  In a Basha camp one night I found a key to Naga lore through my hosts, Capt. James Long of McAllen, Tex.; Master Sergt. James Sale of Phoenix, Ariz., and Lieut. John Felder, Corpus Christi, Tex.
  "It is a strange country," said Long. "I stood on a hilltop in the rain and watched the clouds recede into the valley, rain there, and then come raining back uphill gain."
  This is an observed fact, but the Texas in him came out when he told of lemons plucked in the jungle which made two gallons of lemonade each.
  These engineers think the stories of Naga headhunting are mainly eyewash, and says most Nagas are pro-Ally.A local legend tells of one who came in with seven Jap dog tags strung around his neck, and carrying a dah (chisel-shaped knife) which had certainly seen recent action.

Rescue Pilots in Jungle.

TRAFFIC JAM ON LEDO ROAD - THE LEAD CAR OF A CONVOY BOGS DOWN ON WHAT DRIVERS CALL A TOUGH SPOT ON THE NEW SUPPLY ROAD TO CHINA AND A CATERPILLAR GOES TO THE RESCUE.

  The natives will promptly plunge into the jungle and bring home any engineer who has strayed and they have brought in many bailed-out pilots for a 100-rupee reward when they could get a higher price from the Japanese.
  One of the best characteristics among the Nagas is what I call a 2-way baksheesh. Elsewhere in the Orient the white man is the perennial target of beggars, with whom I have experimentally argued that baksheesh should be forthcoming from both sides. The proud Nagas agree with me. An American cook who handed out bits of white bread was delighted to find chickens brought to the Basha by the appreciative Nagas in return.
  The Ledo road in a way is back-tracking the Stilwell trail into Burma, where the old walking general is redeeming an abiding and obsessive pledge to reopen the overland route to his beloved China.
  "Hellgate" is a suggestive title of approach to Burma; there begins a long winding climb against the Himalayan backdrop. One is in range of snow-capped mountains, Everest-like in grandeur. It takes the mind off the feet as you wind upward, always finding another upgrade around the corner until the Assam-Burma border is reached in the Pangsau pass.
  Staked beside the pass is a sign which says: "Welcome to Borderville."
  It is topped by another: "God Be With You."
  Technically, this is not the Stilwell trail, for he and his straggling party came out on the jungle trails which crisscross the road and are still marked by the bones of the thousands who perished while fleeing the Japanese two years ago. But this is one of the means by which Stilwell craftily plans to avenge his "hell of a beating" in the Japanese conquest of Burma.
  Not all the home comforts are available, but the boys manage with some entertainment supplied by stars from home and others screened out of army personnel.

Meet Capt. Melvyn Douglas.

  One night a leather-lunged canary, commonly known as a Missouri mule, misstepped and got hung up on a road embankment. The muleskinner, using some choicest language, looked up at a man advancing, gasped and rasped: "Are you Melvyn Douglas?" Captain Douglas it was, and he turned his touring swing band of GI's out to help boost the mule back topside. The band had just played a roadside engagement and was en route to the next date.
  American atmosphere is well established inside Burma, where I spent a night in a comfortable Basha first aid station, stilted up so close to the road that trucks seemed to be rumbling through the sleeping quarters.
  This was "Shangri La," and not so far from the original strange fictional oriental paradise. Shangri La was manned by Pvt. Charles Rivino, 27, of Forest Hills, Long Island; Sergt. D. H. N. Topolski, 26, New Britain, Conn., Pfc. Adam W. Adamsky, 29, of New Kensington, Penn.; and Pvt. Henry Calders, 24, of Blythe, Calif., who is quite naturally known as "Dr. Kildare."
  The road is even provincially American in spots, with small specialized communities representing the same hometown or the same area. At one stop the sign on a comfortable-looking tent said :step in," with an appropriate picture of a pretty girl attached. So I stepped in and asked for a spot.
  "Sure," said Cpl. Joseph Warner, 21, of South Philadelphia. "We're entertaining everything up to majors, sleeping on the floor." It was a military police unit controlling traffic over the upper stretches of the "highway to Tokyo."