Robert Seedlock, 91; Retired General Led Burma Road Project

Retired Army Gen. Robert F. Seedlock, 91, who led the arduous construction of the Burma Road that broke the Japanese blockade of China during World War II, died May 5 of heart disease in Arlington, Va., his family reported.

As a colonel, Seedlock oversaw a force of 1,000 U.S. engineers and other troops, plus 20,000 Chinese laborers, as they built more than 600 miles of road across the Himalayas between China and Burma, often in extreme weather and under the threat of attack.

Gen. Lewis A. Pick, who supervised the road’s overall construction, at its opening in January 1945 called it “the toughest job ever given to U.S. Army engineers in wartime.”

After the war, Seedlock remained in China where he was part of Gen. George C. Marshall’s failed mission to mediate a settlement to the civil war that led to the communist takeover of the country.

A native of Newark, N.J., Seedlock spent most of his childhood in Cleveland.

After two years at what is now Case Western Reserve University, Seedlock won an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy from which he graduated in 1937. He later earned a master’s degree in civil engineering at MIT.