Burma Go Bragh

Gunboats prowled along the Arakan coast and up the muddy Irrawaddy. Mechanized units rumbled over Burma's uneven dirt roads. At key airdromes R.A.F. transports stood ready to fly crack combat units where they were needed. Burma's garrison of about 50,000 British and Indian troops was three times prewar size and growing.

The troops, many of whom had fought Japs at Myitkyina and Akyab, were taking on a new kind of enemy--organized brigands called dacoits who held Burma's hinterlands in a reign of terror. In a single recent month Burma has reported 1,350 dacoities.* Because frightened paddy field workers cowered in their homes and half Burma's fields lay fallow, Burmans went hungry and Indians and Chinese starved for lack of Burma's rice.

Last week a new British Royal governor, pink-faced Sir Henry Knight, 60, who looks like a retired lightweight champion, punched out his challenge to dacoity--"Burma's Public Enemy No. 1." He had two jobs in Burma, which he linked together (perhaps unfairly) with a threat; his soldiers would "take immediate action against people who make subversive speeches" because "in some cases there is a direct connection between subversive activity and dacoity."

Clearly, Sir Henry meant Burma's powerful nationalist movement, whose leader, youthful (31) U Aung San, has vehemently denied any connection with dacoity. Aung San (whose thousands of turbulent followers like to call themselves the "Irish of the Far East") had once collaborated with the Japanese and later, when the war's tide was turning, went over to the Allies. As the hope of independence grew in neighboring India, Aung San's demands for Burmese freedom have become more threatening. With Sir Henry Knight in Rangoon, however, Aung San might think twice before acting. In India 15 years ago, Knight had crushed a local civil-disobedience campaign by summarily executing six of its leaders. *Robbery by a band of five or more.

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