The Ledo Road: African American Soldiers and Nurses in WW2 Burma

Published in

Afro-Asian Visions

6 min readJan 19, 2021

In the run-up to U.S. Black History Month we feature a post by Geraldine Seay (Phd), author of Call and Response: the Literature of Jim Crow (Florida, 2019), who spent ten years researching and gathering the oral histories of some of the 6,000 African American soldiers and nurses who helped build the Ledo Road, Burma, in World War II. (See her website www.ledoroad.org )

One evening in 1997, I was talking to my mother’s lifelong friend. My mom had recently died, and I spoke frequently to her friends afterwards. On that particular evening I was talking to Ms. Lillie Lesesne and just generally making conversation. I casually mentioned that Mom had said she was in WWII.

Ms. Lesesne said, “Yes” she had served in the Army as a Nurse.

I asked her, “Oh where did you serve, Ms. Lesesne?”

She said, “The Ledo Road.”

Now I was listening and asked, “Where is that?’

She said, “Burma. The China Burma India Theatre of Operations. CBI for short”

The hair on the back of my neck stands up every time I think about that conversation and her answer of Burma. As a researcher I knew I had actually stumbled on something that most people had never heard of. I talked with her for a good while about her memories and made arrangements to meet her in Pittsburgh to take her oral history.

I asked Ms. Lesesne of her first memory of the road. She immediately talked about how the heat hit her when she exited the plane. She said she’d never encountered heat like that, and it took her breath away. She continued to talk about this layover until she could catch the train to LEDO and then travel to Tagap where her 335th Station Hospital was located. She remembered how she couldn’t stay with the other white nurses or eat in the mess hall. She had to stay by herself in what to her appeared to be an airplane hangar. When she was getting settled, the door opened and three white men approached headed to the other exit door which led to the mess hall. As they passed her, she noticed that one was a prisoner accompanied by the military guards. She realized that the white prisoner could eat in the mess hall but she could not. That would not be the last slight she suffered.

Ms. Lesesne, a nurse from the Ledo Road (from https://www.ledoroad.org/335th-nurses)

I spent a good deal of time with Ms. Lesesne during that visit, naturally. But the added bonus was that she took me to the homes of another Ledo Road participant: a Black journalist who had been a certified war correspondent. Following that visit, Ms. Lesesne gave me the names and addresses of several more Ledo road vets. I spent the next several years traveling to the homes of the vets to take their oral histories. This project changed the way I researched because instead of going to whatever official records there were, I listened to the men and woman who had served. Their stories would be the basis of the research. That search took me to several archives that housed various official documents and photos. In each case, serendipity took over, and I was able to find artefact after artefact that pertained to the China-Burma-India Theater of operation. I received help from other CBI Vets both white and black and even requests to help locate various men who had served. You’ll see the photos of many on my web site that one Commander of a truck brigade was looking for. He found one of those vets and the two of them reminisced. (www.ledoroad.com)

Contrary to popular opinion, the vets’ memories were not always filled with resentment or anger. They talked about the most dramatic parts of their experience, and the innovations they came up with. Most often they spoke of the poor supply and equipment they were asked to use. There were trees to fell, but the equipment for that task was not appropriate for the job. They needed rock as a base for the road, and they had none. This is where their ingenuity took over. They were always able to find a “work around” as we call it today. They were always able to make the project work.

They did speak very highly of the GM trucks they used to drive the highway: “nothing like a 4-ton GMC Truck.” One vet recalled his first drive on the completed road. The truck carried bombs. His first drive was to transport the bombs to the destination in China, and his first drive over the road was at night. He spoke of it as if were yesterday. How nervous he was and how dark it was. But he got it done. Can you imagine a young man barely 20 years old being asked to gather that much courage? He also spoke of the racism that existed on the road between many of the white officers and the black soldiers who were building the road. Many of the men and women spoke of the outright refusal of the white officers to promote the men or to give them credit for the innovations they brought to the road.

However, most of the vets spoke about the Chief Road Engineer Pick with respect. One vet recalled a white officer having kicked a Black GI. That was not going to stand. Pick had to escort that white officer out of the area the same night of the occurrence. The men seemed to all respect their commander. It would be Pick who would stand up for the men who built the road, as he was directly related to the integration of the army having been appointed to sit on President Truman’s Board to look into same. His reported stance with the Ledo Soldiers seems in direct opposition to his treatment of the American Indians in 1942. The Sloan-Pick Act flooded 155,000 acres of Indian land to build a dam. The Secretary of Interior set forth to provide monetary compensation to the tribes affected and also to allow them access to the lands. Pick “revoked” the whole Compensation Package and forced the Tribe’s leader to sign the document. The Chief “sobbed” at the signing: a shocking decision that still reverberates.

These vets upon their return to America took up the long fight for civil rights. One vet wanted to go to law school in Memphis; he was denied because none of the law schools accepted Black students. So, he started his own law school. He and his school became very important, prestigious and influential in the coming years. The truck driver mentioned earlier became one of the most important civil rights men in Chicago, and he pastored a Black mega church. Ms. Lesesne continued her nursing in the Public Health area and worked with Jonas Salk on the Polio Vaccine. Each of these folks made an undeniable sacrifice spending their youth building the Ledo Road and would go on to form a broad base for the civil rights movement. As one of the soldiers from the 45th Engineers told me, when the whites in Tallahassee screamed he’d “go to hell ” for working on the civil rights movement, he yelled back that he’d “already been to Hell” and he’d come back. These men and women were truly the Greatest Generation, and I’m so proud to tell their stories.

Story by Geraldine Seay

**Note: We welcome more stories/ posts about African Americans in Asia and the decolonizing world this Black History Month!

The Ledo Road: African American Soldiers and Nurses in WW2 Burma

Written by Su Lin Lewis