By Air & Foot

Rangoon was shaky, but Rangoon was holding. Trembling under a quick succession of bombing attacks, the Burma Road port could thank a turbulent, twisting river and a fighting Allied air force for the fact that it was not in Japanese hands last week.

Certainly Japanese land and air forces did not fail for lack of effort. Ninety miles east of Rangoon they established a jumping-off spot at the smoking, Kipling-sung city of Moulmein, fanned northward along Burma's longest and swiftest river, the Salween, for a frontal assault against the curving coastal Martaban-Pegu railroad that leads into the Burma Road, feed line for seaborne supplies from the U.S. But there the advance slowed, then virtually halted.

For one solid week defending British Imperial troops systematically cut down a succession of small Japanese detachments venturing across the Salween. One large-scale crossing attempt was a dismal and costly failure: R.A.F. fighters and bombers pounced on invasion barges in midstream, left hundreds of the invaders dead, dying or scrambling in the swift water. The battered Japanese waited for fresh reinforcements from Thailand before risking another crossing attempt. Burma's commander Lieut. General Thomas Jacomb Hutton spoke confidently: "We are in a far sounder position to call a halt to the Japanese than before."

Over Rangoon a protective covey of American-flown Tomahawks (P-40s) and British Hurricanes beat off incessant waves of day & night bombing attacks. Paced by John Van Kuren ("Scarsdale Jack") Newkirk (25 Jap planes shot down), who cut short a week-old honeymoon last July to join the American Volunteer Group, the outnumbered U.S., British, Australian, Canadian and Indian pilots in Burma chalked up 122 enemy planes against only five losses for themselves.

Rangoon was shaky, but Rangoon was holding. In the line, fighting side by side with defending troops, were fresh reinforcements of Chinese soldiers, who had marched 1,000 miles by foot into Burma (TIME, Feb. 2). Wise to the ways of Japanese warfare, they would be a bulwark in the great battle that must surely come.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.