GREAT BRITAIN: Greatest Saboteur

Tall, trim Sir Reginald Hugh Dorman-Smith, Governor-eject of Burma, arrived in London impatient to dispel two nasty suspicions: 1) that many of the Burmese people had helped the enemy into their country; 2) that evacuating British forces had left Burmese earth unscorched. Said Old Harrovian Sir Reginald: “The Burmese with any stake in the country played the game by Great Britain. When the invasion began, the Japanese did not succeed in winning over a single Burman of any weight.”

If the Old Harrovian had been trying to put a good face on things with a bit of guff, he had been ingenuous. The left-wing Tribune screamed bloody murder: “The best people stood by us. What the common herd did doesn’t matter. British imperial rule defined in a flash!” Sir Reginald thereupon edited his remarks. Only 4,000 of Burma’s 15,000,000 people had actively helped the Japs, said he; they were extremists of the nationalist Thakin Party.

Sir Reginald painted a scorching picture of Burmese scorched earth, too. “Absolutely devastated. . . . Every town in the path of the Japanese Army completely destroyed [by sabotage]. There is hardly one brick left standing upon another in the whole of Burma.” Author of this devastation was a Royal Dutch-Shell petroleum engineer named Walter Leslie Forster. He had done such a job of smashing that “experts believe some of the oil wells will never produce oil again and it will be a long time before the Japs get any oil from the rest. At Rangoon we did what we could to destroy dock facilities. I doubt whether Rangoon has yet been used by the Japs.”

Saboteur Forster, 39, is a burly, hook nosed Yorkshireman who spent four weeks planning his Burmese masterpiece and nearly three years waiting for such a chance. Ever since the war’s outbreak he had been in oil-rich hot spots, scheming their destruction: in Rumania’s oilfields, where the Gestapo nabbed him (but had to release him because Rumania was neutral); in Iraq, when pro-Nazi Rashid Ali El-Gailani took over; in the Dutch East Indies, where he made mistakes he learned not to make a second time.

On his Burmese job Forster kept just ahead of the enemy. Under his direction, 20,000,000 lb. of machinery were blown into scrap, 600 oil wells became useless and generators, transformers and instrument panels were sledge-hammered into pulp. Sir Reginald called Engineer Forster “the greatest saboteur in history.”