Postponed Decision

The British were ready to admit that the second Burma campaign, like the first, had been lost. The winner: Major General Masakasu Kawabe, Commander of the Japanese.

British and Indian troops were in slow, steady retreat last week before the jujitsu jabs of the Japs, who infiltrated their positions and threatened to cut their thin communication line. The British would probably be lucky if they could withdraw intact to India before the imminent season of monsoon, malaria and mud.

In the short and dismal history of the second Burma campaign the British never had made their purposes clear. A major accomplishment would have been the seizure of the Jap base at Rangoon on the Bay of Bengal. In the end the British would have settled for the little harbor and air base of Akyab, about 325 miles north of Rangoon. But even Akyab now was beyond reach -- at least until the end of the monsoon, some time in October.

The London News Chronicle wrote the epitaph on the grave of earlier hopes : "Nothing less than a full-scale sea, land and air assault can blast (the Jap) out of Burma." From Chungking, TIME'S Correspondent T. H. White filed a dispatch through U.S. and Chinese censors: "It is no secret anywhere in the world that the decision of the Battle of Asia will be fought in Burma some time in 1943 or 1944."

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