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