World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ASIA: No India for the Japs

Indian troops of the Fourteenth Army, including the veteran 5th Division, last week wrote a successful conclusion to a chapter of the Burma war which had started very unhappily. From the northwestern Burma town of Tiddim the Japanese in March 1944 had launched a drive against India, 20 miles away. By the time the British captured Tiddim last week and pushed 30 miles farther south to Falam, at least 50,000 Japanese had been slaughtered, and the threat to India was ended.

The Burma theater, where more than a dozen British Empire divisions are now engaged, has been doomed to scant world attention. Nonetheless, Britons, Indians, West Africans have paid heavily in the inhuman jungles (battle casualties for the first six months of 1944: 40,000; disease casualties: 237,000).