Story from Burma

Reinforcements reached Burma last week. They were Chinese reinforcements: thousands of war-hardened soldiers, whose officers generally scorned the markings of rank, shared their men's Spartan fare and, in their tattered uniforms, looked like the lowest private. Many of the soldiers bore U.S. weapons. Quickly, with the British and Indian troops who had retired from Rangoon, they formed a new defense line across central Burma.

Rangoon and Southern Burma were lost. But the troops who lost the south had learned, the hard way, how to fight Japs. They might still be too few, but no longer would General Sir Archibald Wavell have to say of them that they were ill-trained for Burman war (see p. 18). Last week the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald's correspondent, W. S. Mundy, cabled to N.A.N.A. an account of the retreat of 1,000 British troops from Rangoon.

Mundy rode in a jeep, between two tanks, along a road lined with Japanese snipers and machine gunners. The column had to stop; the fire was too hot. The officers decided to let the tanks try to break through. Wrote Mundy: "Racing toward us out of the sun were great swarms of planes, and as they roared overhead the crimson orbs on the wings shone down on us. . . . I counted 40 bombers, but fighters weaving in and out and chasing one another in jubilant sweeps around us were too difficult to count. . . .

"They took their time. . . . They swooped lower over the road, then swept steeply up into the clear blue sky. . . . Another few hundred yards along the road . . . nine bombers detached themselves lazily from the cloud of aircraft that now followed us almost like an escort. . . .Again there was the whistle of bombs, again the earth rocked as we threw ourselves into a ditch. . . . Fighters came in the wake of the bombers, with white smoke from spitting machine guns around their noses like halos, and the never-breaking whistle of bombs seemed to be all around us again. . . .

"There was a new note in the air now. It was a sound like shough or a steam train getting under way. . . . I threw myself into a ditch again. . . . Then the Japanese straggled away over the horizon. . . .

"I had seen men face danger and die with a nonchalance I shall never forget. For five days they had not eaten or slept. . . . They waved us on with cheery smiles, and as we passed them the colonel's parting words were still in our ears: 'We expect they'll come back to give us another pasting; you boys had better push on.' "

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