World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ASIA: Bustle in Burma

Dispatches from India noted the drying up in Burma of the monsoonrains. Over the radio crackled the words of Sir Rich ard Peirse, Commanderin Chief of the British Air Force in India: “We stand in battle array, not only ready to meet the enemy, but waiting to go out and find him. . . . We have covered the face of India with airfields.” Brigadier General Caleb V. (“Old Grizzly”) Haynes, reviewing the job he has done in directing U.S. air attacks from India, declared that Burma was no fortress, that Japanese facilities in the country had been “pulverized.”

Said the President of the U.S. to Congress (see p. 17): “The freeing of the Mediterranean . . . will lead directly to the resumption of our complete control of the waters of the eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. Thus we shall be enabled to strike the Japanese on another of their highly vulnerable flanks. . . .”

The steamy Southeast Asia theater began to pop with activity. Planes of the Tenth U.S. Army Air Force and the R.A.F in India intensified their harassment of the Burma coast, of Jap shipping around Rangoon, of Jap supply routes near Mandalay and along the Irrawaddy River. Allied-trained and equipped Chinese troops, based in India, skirmished with Jap troops along the North Burma frontier, forced their retreat and destroyed their lines of communication. Reports came of British submarine operations as far south as the Strait of Malacca, between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula.

All this might be a feint; it was conceivable that Lord Louis Mountbatten, Commander of the Southeast Asia theater, might launch his major blow, not at Burma, but at the Malay Peninsula. It was conceivable that last week’s threats were a nerve war. Lord Louis, still in London a fortnight ago, could not prepare a major campaign with a twist of his wrist. An invasion of the thick, mountainous jungle terrain of Burma called for a major effort, as the British had already found out.

Reports from Chungking indicated that the Japs took the threats seriously: fresh troops moved into the Arakan district on the Bay of Bengal; supplies poured into the Salween front on the Burma-China border.