Army & Navy – OPERATIONS: On the Road to Mandalay

Said the engineer wistfully to his passenger: “You oughta been along yesterday. Yesterday I had a steam locomotive.” Today was different. Like most of the trains on the Myitkyina, Mogaung & Mandalay Railroad, this was one towed by two jeeps mounted on flanged wheels.

From the Myitkyina station, recognizable only by untidy heaps of shrapnel-torn cars and scarred trees, the homesick locomotive man jiggled his train off over two streaks of rust into the thick, green jungle. Scaring up small clouds of fabulously colored butterflies, the train passed what the bombs had left of a small white church, a row of Chinese graves, a smashed Jap cannon, then rolled on over swamp-spanning bridges to a line of deserted dugouts, a small American cemetery, at last to the Mogaung terminal.

Motive Power. Steam engines are new and rare on the M.M. & M. The line was established solely with jeeps. Coupled for power (with a driver in each jeep), they run a daily shuttle over the 30-odd-mile road, towing six-car trains loaded with combat troops, casualties, evacuees, mules, equipment, food, high ranking officers.

The M.M. & M. was born of a desperate need three months ago and built largely from wreckage. Hemmed in by Japs, isolated by monsoon-swept roads, lacking an airfield, Allied soldiers at Mogaung had to make the railroad work—or starve. The rail line had been cut and was under enemy fire at some points; tracks were ripped up and bridges torn down. But there were boxcars, flatcars, and all other essentials except engines, which the Japs were using for machine-gun nests. Simply by switching wheels, G.I. railroadmen created the jeep locomotive and started to roll.

Burma’s Casey Jones. It was not smooth rolling at first. M.M. & M. “engineers” had to run a gauntlet of Jap snipers, take time out to fight back with Tommy guns. Hastily repaired bridges sagged dangerously, tigers sometimes trespassed on the right of way. But since the first run on July 18, the train has gone through every day, without fail.

One mechanical detail never has been licked: the one-ton jeep locomotives have no effective brakes. Pushed by a weight many times greater than its own, one jeep plowed into a bullock standing listlessly on the tracks, was telescoped into junk by the cars behind and tossed up on top of a boxcar. So far, ten jeeps have been wrecked. Drivers have escaped injury by leaping clear.

But the jeep has its good points: to turn around, it simply unhitches its cars, jumps off the track, bumps down the length of the train, and jiggles onto the track again.

Recently the onetime civilian railroaders who run the M.M. & M. set up a repair shop for twelve barely salvageable steam engines left behind by the Japs. After plugging 677 holes in the water tank of No. 1, they had it going in eight days. No. 6, hopefully named The Rangoon Limited, went to work last week. But in the absence of coal, the wood-burning engines are limited to short runs. The M.M. & M., which now extends southward beyond Mo-gaung, will have to depend on the jeep to pull it through eventually to Mandalay.