Quiet in the Bay

Ominous quiet fell over one of the Allies' most ominous war zones, the Bay of Bengal. Where was the great Japanese naval force -- three battleships, five carriers, supporting cruisers and destroyers -- which raised havoc in the Bay last fortnight? If the warships and bombers were still in the Bay, they kept to their holes in the Andaman Islands. They made no move across the Bay toward India, nor toward Ceylon at India's southern door.

Only British and U.S. flyers broke the quiet. R.A.F. bombers from India or Ceylon, raiding the Japs' Port Blair in the Andamans, wrecked a nest of Jap flying boats. From India, Major General Lewis Hyde Brereton sent U.S. Flying Fortresses 750 miles to Rangoon, where they bombed troopships arriving to reinforce the Japs in Burma (see p. 22). Evidently, the Japs did not control all the air all the time.

When the Japanese entered the Bay in force, the British cried out for U.S. naval help. Perhaps the U.S. had given that help without sending a ship into the Bay. The Pacific Fleet, based on Pearl Harbor, but continuously fanning out toward Japan's home waters, is always a brake on the Japanese Navy. If the U.S. Fleet tightened the brake a little, with a feint toward Jap waters, the Japanese may have had to pull their warships from the Bay of Bengal in a hurry.

In this game of naval balances battleships may still count heavily, and in the Pacific the Japs have more battleships to start with than the U.S. has. Before Dec. 7, they had at least twelve and were building at least three more monsters of somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 tons. They have lost at least one (the old Haruna). So the Japs probably have eleven battleships in service today--considerably more than the U.S. regularly bases in the Pacific. But in tonnage and fire power the fleets have somewhere near parity; and, if the Jap battlewagons are scattered from Nagasaki to Ceylon there is always the chance that a bold move by Admiral Nimitz might catch up with a weaker Japanese unit.

Flight from Madras

War was on its way to Madras, and the panicking people were in flight. The British had warned them to expect bombing and invasion, to get out of town if they could; and 130,000 of the 650,000 people were.

On smaller roads and cart tracks (the main roads were strictly military) there was an endless train of automobiles, rattling bullock carts, and two-horse tongas, normally used for Madras' internal traffic -- all piled Okie-like with chattels. Behind the carts were tied goats, cows and water buffaloes, and behind them walked scantily clad, long-haired Telegus and Tamils, male and female alike bearing huge bundles. The exodees stopped here & there at free food dumps along the dusty roads.

The people of Madras did not know where they were going; just away from a war from which (as refugees all over the world have learned) there is no escape.

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