The scrapbook of an African American soldier during his time constructing the Ledo Road, later known as the Stilwell Road, built as a supply route to China after Japan’s invasion of Burma. The road was an almighty and dangerous task, and of the 15,000 American engineers involved (60% of which were African American), 1,100 are believed to have died: of the 35,000 Indian and Burmese workers, no count was made of the casualties.
Internal evidence suggests that the album’s creator came from Norfolk Virginia, and he is likely to be the prominently featured slim man, often wearing small round sunglasses, frequently posing with one foot on a truck or chair. As to the photos themselves, most show fellow soldiers in rest periods, several in poses with either trombones or rifles. There are a few landscapes of jungle, some of the works with machinery, and a couple of local residents. One outlier is a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi: although it is an original print, there is no suggestion that Gandhi went anywhere near the project. It is certainly interesting that the album’s creator should choose the great anti-imperial agitator, and we note among the clippings an eloquent letter to PIC magazine “After all the fighting and dying the Negro does he must come back to the United States to face the white man’s Jim Crow laws”.
The clippings are a combination of nostalgia for home, and accounts of the venture itself, and manuscript captions include one yearning for ‘the kind of Christmas that I once knew and hope for again insted [sic] of Fox holes and mud and Trucks not Guns not that but peace at home with love and understanding for ever’. Lines of text clipped from newspapers are used as captions for original photographs and even when the photos themselves have been lost, these give the pages a haunted quality.
