Earthshaking!
Earthshaking!
Engineers moved more than 10,000,000 cubic meters (cum) of earth in building the road; enough to build a wall three feet wide and 10 feet high, from New York to San Francisco
They also dug 1,000,000 cum of gravel from river beds to surface the road; if loaded on rail cars the gravel train would be more than 600 kilometres long
The Ledo Road crossed 10 major rivers and 155 smaller streams; 700 bridges over the length of the road
Construction effort on this road became as much a drainage project as a road-building effort; an average 8 culverts per kilometre were used; this totalled 168.9 kms of pipe
Foresters gathered 23,000 cum of lumber for building the road
2,400 pilings and 3,480 cum lumber were used in causeway over swamp
Of the 15,000 engineers who built the road, over 60 per cent were African-American. Among their (white) officers, many led post-war integration efforts
The longest supply line