When the Rains Go

While the monsoon rains beat a devil's tattoo on the elephant-iron roofs of the Southeast Asia Command. Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten returned last week to his headquarters in Ceylon from a visit to London. In Britain he had conferred on measures to be taken when the monsoon lifts in the fall. By that time war materials of every sort can flow from the battles in the West to battles still to be fought in the East. Meantime, the Southeast Asia Command had time for recapitulation and appraisal.

In London, "Dicky" Mountbatten, looking fit and showing no trace of an eye injury received in the jungle last spring, told at last why operations in his command had been so maddeningly slow: landing craft allocated to him after the Quebec Conference had been sent instead to the Mediterranean, for landings at Anzio and on the Riviera. Result: he and General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell (who now sports his full general's four stars for the first time) had had to cut their campaign suit from a remnant.

Stilwell's Chinese-American army had been assigned to take Myitkyina; the late Major General Orde Charles Wingate's Chindits had the job of< Into Our Hands. The British Fourteenth Army had had orders to engage the main enemy strength in western Burma. (It did not attack, and Lord Louis did not say why.) The Japs "fortunately played into our hands," he said, by launching the invasion of Manipur. That cost the enemy 22,000 dead. This week the British were well over the border into Burma, the disease-ridden Japs in headlong flight.

Stilwell tallied more than 20,000 additional Japs killed by his forces. Allied casualties for the two campaigns were 10.000 killed, 3,000 missing, 27,000 wounded--but a quarter of a million had fallen as temporary casualties to tropical diseases, mainly malaria and dysentery.

That "Hell of a Beating." In a sweet-&-sour mood last week, Stilwell recalled the "hell of a beating" taken by the Allies in Burma in 1942, and noted similarities in this campaign--"but in exact reverse." Equipment captured intact by the Japs two years ago was recaptured intact and again put to use by its original owners.

Into the mile-high battle for Tengyueh (Tengchung) on the Burma-Yunnan border, went U.S. Tenth Air Force planes from India to help the Chinese in their stone-by-stone reconquest of the walled city. Near by, U.S. and Chinese engineers literally blew the top off Sungshan Mountain with three tons of TNT. The Japs manning the peak went with it. One more step toward reopening the Burma Road was taken.

About a thousand miles to the east, in China, the Japs stalled again in their drive down the Hankow-Canton railway from Hengyang and the twin drive toward Kweilin, where the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force base was threatened. The Japs' backing & filling, while increasing their already preponderant power, was puzzling. Of one thing observers were sure: it was now or never for the Japs. Within 60 days the Ledo-Burma supply route should be open. Thereafter, the Japs' last chance to cut China in half and wipe out U.S. A.A.F. bases near the China coast would be lost.

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