February is Black History Month and this year marks the 400th anniversary that blacks were brought to Bermuda as indentured servants. Throughout this month, The Royal Gazette will feature people, events, places and institutions that have contributed to the shaping of African history. The Ledo Road, which was later renamed the Stillwell Road in honour of United States Army General Joseph W. Stillwell, the commander of the China-Burma-India Theatre in the Second World War, was built during the war in response to the Japanese Army's capture of the Burma Road, the main route for Allied military supplies between India and China.Without a land route, the Allies were forced to fly supplies to the Chinese over the Himalayan mountains. The 271-mile Ledo Road ran from Ledo, India, to a junction on the old Burma Road at Shingbwiyang, Burma. The Ledo Road is considered a wartime engineering miracle owing to the obstacles that were presented. Six African-American companies — a headquarters, service and four combat engineer units — did most of the construction. The US spent about $149 million to build the road.In December 1942, construction of the road began in Ledo, with more than 15,000 American troops, of whom at least 60 per cent were African-American. There were also 35,000 local Indian, Burmese and Chinese workers. Gorges, jungles, mountains, mud, rivers and swamps covered much of the land that needed to be worked on. The road crossed the Patkai mountain range through passes that were sometimes as high as 4,500 feet.Black soldiers working on the road were given second-hand equipment such as shovels, picks and bulldozers that needed repairs. They also worked seven days a week, both night and day. During the five-month monsoon season, an average of 140in of rain fell and the heat sweltered. Overall, 1,133 American soldiers died, many of them from equipment accidents, malaria, typhus or combat.The Ledo Road was finished in January 1945 and the first trucks from India reached Yunnan, China, on January 28, 1945. The road's importance was diminished because the Second World War ended in August. Also at the time, the soldiers received no recognition in the US for their labour in Asia. Besides terrible conditions, black soldiers were also subjected to racial discrimination, which was common at the time. On their journey from the US, African-Americans were forced to bunk in the lowest levels of the hull of the transport ships and often had to shower with seawater. Their meals on the Pacific Ocean voyages consisted of hardtack (sea biscuit), beans and cold pork, which were of considerably less quality than the rations supplied to white soldiers and officers on the same vessels. The African-American soldiers who had helped to build the Ledo Road were finally honoured in February 2004 when representatives of the US Department of Defence marked African-American History Month at Florida A & M University in Tallahassee by publicly recognising the survivors and their efforts in India and Burma.• Sources: Rudi Williams, “Black WWII Vet Recalls Terrible Time Building 'Ledo Road,'” Defense.gov News Article: Black WWII Vet Recalls Terrible Time Building 'Ledo Road', Department of Defence, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=25745; Burma Road, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/85526/Burma-Road; “Burma's Stilwell Road: A Backbreaking WWII Project Is Revived,” Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-road30-2008dec30-story.html#page=1