What happens
The Pacific Story presents an episode about the Burma Road, a planned route through mountains and jungle linking China to Burma. Businessmen in an earlier scene debate the value of such a road, and Chinese leaders later decide to build it. Villagers from Yunnan Province are called to labor, and the road is carved from the mountains by hand, with dynamite, bulldozers and bamboo-tube charges. Once open, the road faces shortages, bureaucratic tangles, and pressure from Japan, which forces its temporary closure. The episode follows the road's reopening and its troubled operation, and closes with the American-built Lido Road taking shape in the same region. The episode was first broadcast on February 20, 1944 as part of The Pacific Story.
The Burma Road between Kunming in China and Lashio in Burma, through Yunnan Province, the Mekong and Salween river valleys, and the jungle mountains of the region, from the 1930s through the early 1940s.
Characters: Sam, Harricker, Denny, Jimmy, Haruka, General Chiang Kai-shek, Daniel Einstein, Harold S. Davis
Listen for: The dramatised accounts of the road's construction by hand and dynamite, and the Einstein Commission's inspection and reforms.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.