Jewels of Bengal

As the Japanese squeeze India through Burma and the Andaman Islands, they grasp at the biggest remaining segment of Britain's Empire. They close on United Nations routes to China, Russia and the Middle East. But, aside from India's strategic values, India also has an industrial area which is well worth grabbing for itself.

Indian ironmasters in the Fourth Century knew how to work bigger masses of iron than any European foundry could handle 1,500 years later (Europe and the U.S. caught up in the 19th Century). Now, at the great Tata works in Jamshedpur, 135 miles inland from Calcutta, the inheritors of that tradition produce most of India's steel (1,250,000 tons per year--about 1 1/2% of U.S. production). They make armor plate, steel bars for guns, shells, other munitions. At last reports, 600,000 complete shells and 150,000,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition had gone out from Indian plants to British war zones. Also near Calcutta are many of India's textile mills, its richest coal and iron deposits.

Southward, in the State of Mysore, is another great industrial concentration, where Indian workmen produce iron & steel, even a few airplanes (trainers and Curtiss Hawk fighters). Now the British wish that more of India's industries were on the west coast, fewer on and near the Bay of Bengal's vulnerable shoreline. India's industrial prizes, in the Calcutta area, lie at the end of the shortest sea and air route from Burma.

To the south is Ceylon, only 50 miles from the Indian mainland, across a string of partially submerged sandspits called "Adam's Bridge." Once in Ceylon, holding its naval base at Trincomalee and the great commercial port of Colombo, the Japs need not cross Adam's Bridge. For they would then have the Bay of Bengal. If they dominate its routes to Calcutta and Madras, the Japs will be very near to having India.

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