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There were only tracks in North Burma — I never saw a road, or anything like a road. They were all mud-tracks and paths through the jungle. You couldn’t have any heavy vehicles at all. They used bullock-carts, and of course mules. We used mules for carrying. We couldn’t have gone half the distances we did and gone half the places we did without the mules. In times of fighting, we dug a big hole in the ground and they were kept in there, below the surface of the ground so they were protected against shells and so on; we needed to make sure they were kept safe because they were of great value to us.

The environment we were in also meant we couldn’t have any guns to begin with. They couldn’t fly them in, but eventually they did but what a job they had moving them around in the terrain!

Some of the vehicles were 1500 weight, so kept sinking into the mud.

Airfields were often very bogged down because of the mud, so when they flew planes in sometimes they would lay some kind of metal mesh on the ground to help them land and take off — it made a kind of runway for them. If they ran off that they were in trouble.

Transport was difficult in the circumstances, made even more so because some of the bridges had been blown up by the Chindits. In those cases we had to take all of our stuff down the one side and up the other side, but they did repair the bridges.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Richard Jones and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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