World: Flesh v. Machine

All day the bombers roared over Toungoo. When the Chinese soldiers gazed into the sky, they saw only the red daub of the Japs’ rising sun on the wings. Not since the battle for Toungoo began had the Chinese seen an Allied plane.

The planes dropped bombs new to the Chinese: 50-lb. incendiaries which spattered phosphorus. Soldiers burned to death where they fought. Others stripped off their flaming khaki and fought naked, with wounds and burns open to the angry Burmese sun.

First into the native section of Toungoo, with its wooden houses, then into the neat streets where the stone houses and churches of the British stood, the Japs pressed the Chinese ever backward. There were some 20,000 Japanese; the weary young Chinese commander had only 8,000 men. The Japanese had plenty of tanks and artillery; the Chinese had no tanks, almost no artillery from Chiang Kai-shek’s meager stocks in China. They had to fight with rifles, pistols, light machine guns. Sometimes the Chinese called out to the Japs: “Lao hsiang (old countryman), don’t fight!” But the Japs fought.

Many of the simple, helpless Burmese peasants had fled their farms, depriving the Chinese of guides, carriers and food, but otherwise not aiding the Japs. But some Burmese sold out to the Japs; some actually joined the Jap Army. At night sudden fires set by Burmese traitors betrayed Chinese positions. Burmese guerrillas caught two Chinese soldiers, chopped off their hands. But the Chinese fought on, and the Japs came on.

Four for One. At a Chinese command post, north of besieged Toungoo, a U.S. jeep chattered to a stop. Out jumped Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell, the U.S. officer who commands the Chinese in Burma.*

General Stilwell chain-smoked cigarets in a long black holder, incessantly chewed gum, exchanged orders and information in his fluent Chinese (the fruit of 13 years’ service in China). When Jap bombers broke up his conferences, he calmly took cover and kept on chewing gum. He soon saw that the Japanese blocked the way to Toungoo, that relief of the town was impossible without air support. A Chinese field radio flashed an order to the commander in Toungoo; at an appointed place and hour, he was to lead his men in a break through the Japanese lines. General Stilwell would attack from the north, drawing off as many Japs as he could.

The Chinese had no choice but to abandon the town. Across brushlands and rice paddies, they rushed from the sheltering trees and houses of Toungoo. Jap artillery fired pointblank. The Chinese scattered, broke through to the Sittang River, waded and swam it, under constant fire. They took their losses, but they won through to the main Chinese forces in the north. For every dead Chinese on the fields and hills around Toungoo, they left four dead Japs.

Said the Chinese commander, crying his need for U.S. bombers: “We’ll give flesh and blood. The Allies must give machines.”

Advance on India. Toungoo was one of the two points in central Burma where Allied troops had taken a stand against the Japs advancing from the conquered south. The other was Prome, where General H. R. L. G. Alexander had, to some extent, refitted his battered British Imperials after their retreat from Rangoon. Last week they had to retreat again. They abandoned Prome, but they were still between the Japs and thevaluable oilfields of Burma’s Irrawaddy Valley.

From British, Indians and Chinese, the story was the same: they were dying and retreating because the Japs had plenty of bombers, while the Allies had almost no aircraft left in Burma.

At week’s end, 75 Japanese carrier-based planes attacked the harbor, airport and railway of Colombo, on the island of Ceylon, India’s very appendix. Ceylon was alert, and the defenders rose up and knocked down 32 of the enemy, more than one in three. This score suggested that the British may be better stocked with aircraft in India than in Burma, but it also acutely reminded the Allies that every mile of the Japanese advance in Burma was also an advance on India. As a further reminder the Japanese next day bombed two towns on India’s mainland. Britain and the U.S. had very little time left for Sir Stafford Cripps’s war of wits and good will in New Delhi, even to move up the air reinforcements which alone could save Burma, the Bay of Bengal’s approaches to India, and one of the last routes of supply to China.

* A news cameraman recently approached General Stilwell in Burma, asked him to pose. General Stilwell pointed to some Chinese troops, said: “Take a picture of the Chinese; don’t take me. The Chinese are the big story of this war.”