Confidence on the Arakan Front

In view of what was happening on India's eastern border, New Delhi's communiques seemed unduly confident, unduly self-assured. By them, Viceroy Sir Archibald Wavell, his deputy, General Sir Claude Auchinleck and his India-Burma-China theater commander, Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten almost daily assured the world that there was no cause for alarm. But Washington was worried, anyhow. And so was London.

It was not so much that the Japanese troops had managed to fight, by their own peculiar brand of military osmosis, from the jungles of Burma onto the Manipur plain of India. It was that British troops seemed unable to fold them up now that they were on Indian soil. So, in spite of New Delhi assurances, the spring-legged little invaders seemed a greater threat every day to the Bengal-Assam railway.

The Jap's aim in this drive was perfectly plain. In fact, Tokyo announced it to the world itself. Over in China, said Tokyo, Claire Chennault was readying an air attack on the mainland of Japan. It could be stopped only by cutting the railroad. Whatever the Jap's estimate of Chennault's intentions was worth, his estimate of the importance of the Bengal-Assam railway was exaggerated not a bit.

The Railway and Chennault. Over that road, flow all the supplies that get into China from the outside world, including fuel for Claire Chennault's tiny but vastly effective Fourteenth Air Force. The supplies are unloaded at the Assam terminus, transshipped to aircraft and whisked over the Hump, the Allies' aerial makeshift for the lost Burma road.

In China, Claire Chennault said nothing for publication. Pitcher Chennault was shown at baseball with his deputy and battery mate, Brigadier General Edgar ("Buzz") Glenn, between raids constantly carried out by the Fourteenth on Japanese fields, troop installations, shipping off the South China coast. But if the railway should be out, there would be little left to Chennault & Co. but baseball, until a new supply route should be opened.

If the Japs should succeed in what they were attempting, the only new route for the moment seemed to be the tortuous one up the Brahmaputra by boat, then by transshipment to a spur railroad line, and thence to the Assam airfields.

The Railway and Stilwell. Lieut. General Joseph Stilwell's announced aim was to recapture North Burma. His real reason for the objective was to obtain more supplies for Chennault and the Chinese. If he could succeed, the tiny trickle from the railway-Hump route could be roundly increased by trucks over the Ledo road.

In the course of that vital but perilous job, ''Vinegar Joe" had turned one of the great Allied tricks of the war. He had shown the hollowness of the carefully nurtured doctrine that Burma's mountains and jungles were impossible to Anglo-Saxon troops. In a great and winning gamble to drive the enemy from North Burma, he was beginning to win. Joe Stilwell was fighting on the "impossible" ground, taking supplies from the air, pushing doggedly toward the Jap's pivotal base at Myitkyina. Wingate's Raiders, Merrill's Marauders and Joe Stilwell's force of Chinese and Americans had shown there was no unsolvable mystery about Burma fighting.

But Joe Stilwell's supplies also flowed up the Bengal-Assam railway, along with the gasoline and parts that still give the tightly knit Allied Air Force control of the air and the power to lay down what the Burma fighters needed on the Allied "dropping grounds" in the jungles. If the railway fell, Joe Stilwell's venture would fail. The Jap had made a neat estimate of the situation.

These were the things that had Washington and London worried.

This week while Stilwell's troops diligently cut enemy supply lines in North Burma, the Jap stood on the outskirts of Kohima, was only ten miles from Imphal, only 35 miles from the railway. Said New Delhi: ". . . Slightly increased pressure on the Arakan front."

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