Complication in the South

The Indian Ocean, long quiescent, woke to the thunder of a powerful naval attack.

Under Japanese noses a strong contingent of U.S. carriers and warships had come secretly--apparently from the Pacific--to join British, French and Dutch units. Last week this brand-new force gave the Japanese the hardest-hitting raid they had seen in this area since the summer of 1942.

The blow came three days after Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten moved from inland New Delhi to Kandy on the island of Ceylon off India's southern tip. Under command of salty British Admiral Sir James F. Somerville, the task-force carriers turned into a dawn wind, launched their planes near Sumatra.

Allied flyers (American pilots outnumbered the British 2-to-1) caught the Japanese with their kimonos up, peppered the island port of Sabang just off Sumatra's northern tip, salted down Lho Nga airfield on Sumatra proper. Japanese installations were torn, five small ships burned, 25 airplanes wrecked.

The only Allied casualty was one plane knocked down offshore. To rescue its American pilot--Lieut, (j.g.) Dale Christian Klahn of Laramie, Wyo.--twelve Hellcats swarmed over a nearby Japanese destroyer, pounded warming-up Jap planes on land bases. A British submarine went to the rescue. It surfaced under shore-battery range, coolly scooped up Klahn and submerged while 6-in. shells laced the water around the conning tower. For the Japanese it must have seemed a harebrained performance to salvage one expendable man.

For the Japs there was also more serious food for thought. Hit-&-run raids don't win wars--as the Americans in the Pacific know. But this one gave promise of bigger things ahead. For one thing, it meant that the U.S. fleet in the Pacific could reinforce the British fleet in the Indian Ocean. For another, it meant that even in that distant section of his domain the enemy could look for more carrier strikes, would even have to worry about the possibility of amphibious assaults.

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