Episode 24 - “The Road to Mandalay”

Summary

EP24 spends little time “at sea,” and the US Navy is barely present. As a result, this episode helps round out Victory's worldwide coverage, as had EP10's South Atlantic footage. Bennett was challenged here to craft music for EP24's various Asian locales, plus a fine extended concert march in Part Three. The eighteen-day recording-to-airdate interval (1–19 April 1953) matched EP23 as the series’ shortest, but there are few Bennett re-uses, with almost all the music newly scored.

EP24's settings are nearly all Asian: China, Siam (now Thailand), Burma (Myanmar), India, and the Indian Ocean; the never-reprised opening music [A] sets the stage. Chronologically, this installment reaches back as far as any in Victory, to the late 1920s and the now-discredited “Tanaka Memorial” document. EP24 then quickly moves at 1:31 [B] to Japan's 1937 offensives in Shanghai, Nanking (Nanjing), and Hankow (Hankou), with J-5a at 1:55 and then two summary gunshot executions at 2:11, footage widely shown in prewar Western newsreels: “The Japanese slash at the vast, unyielding body of China. China bleeds from a thousand wounds, but her 500 million people will not be subdued.” China's longtime leader Chiang Kai-Shek and other military leaders meet at 2:20 [C], and millions of uprooted Chinese migrate west and south to Chungking (Chongqing), destroying anything in their path of possible value to the invading Japanese army.

A memorable vignette at 3:19 shows Chinese refugees struggling to bring a sizable boat along with them as they flee inland. Perhaps a hundred men and women are yoked together in elaborate harness, and they struggle along their mountainside path to pull the vessel upstream—and seriously uphill—through human effort alone. At 3:43 are more of the endless lines of refugees [D], and then at 4:12 [E] an overflowing train taking the uprooted Chinese to Chungking.

The animation-map at 4:45 illustrates China's sole lifeline, originating at the Burmese port of Rangoon (Yangon). Supplies were moved north by truck or rail to Mandalay and then Lashio, after which the Burma Road, completed in 1938, allowed passage to Chungking. Victory's viewers now hear the two most-used Bennett melodies in EP24: [F] at 4:46, symbolizing the Burma and Ledo Roads (= “ROAD”), and [G] at 5:08, which will reappear at 18:25 to begin the third strain (= “TRIO”) of Part Three's expansive concert march.