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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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person out in one direction, and another in another. We come out bearing money for tung oil, and we come out bearing machinery, and we fly them in military material over the Hump. We went out and observed them building--what was that road they built? The Burma Road. We observed them building it in amazing time. I mean, all our people had reported that it couldn't be done. It just couldn't be done at all. I mean, you could never build a road without road machinery.

I think it was Stafford Cripps who certainly was the first person who made it clear to me what they had done. When he came back from China, he came back through Washington. He came into Washington unannounced, I know, privately. He told the Ambassador he wanted to see me. We were old acquaintances and friends, and I went out to the Embassy to lunch one day with just the Ambassador and Stafford Cripps. We had a wonderful talk. And Cripps was very excited about this thing that he'd seen, the building of the Burma Road.

He said, “In the morning you would go by a certain place, and it would just be covered with human beings like ants on an ant-hill, you know, walking back and forth with these yolks on their shoulders, with a bucket of earth at each and of the yolk. Carrying just two buckets of earth up to a certain place. You come back at night, and by George, the hill had been taken down and moved off, levelled up on a





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