Crow’s Road out of China

Just tidying up before the end of the year – back in the autumn I published the previously unpublished wartime diaries of Carl Crow – The Long Road Back to China. Crow went up the Burma Road to Chungking (Chongqing) in 1939, stayed a few months to observe the Japanese onslaught on the city, then headed home via French Indo-China. He took the train that ran from Kunming to Hanoi through Yunnan. The book has a lot of pictures but some didn’t make it due to size or timing. So here’s a picture of the train line that ran down to Vietnam from Yunnan at the time and a rather fingernail biting bridge along the route:

When Crow got to French Indo-China he stayed for a while in Hanoi staying at the Hotel Metropole (now the Sofitel Metropole) pictured below:

…and then he got an Air France plane to London and then the boat from Southampton home to New York.