Things to Come

Singapore's fall was a kick in the stomach to Burma. If the Jap can keep to his schedule, his next stops are Sumatra and Java, Rangoon and the Burma Road. Had Singapore's collapse been delayed for perhaps another fortnight, a warmer reception might have been prepared for the Japs in Rangoon.

For Burma's defenders, second only to Douglas MacArthur and the men of Bataan Peninsula in their disregard of overwhelming odds (see p. 26), were really rolling.

True, Martaban had fallen and Japanese troops had made a second crossing of the treacherous Salween River. But Martaban, choked with decades of the Salween's silt, has little or no strategic value as a port for water-borne assault against Rangoon, across the Martaban Gulf. The Martaban-Rangoon railway is a flimsy affair. And troops crossing the Salween near Paan, 90 aerial miles from Rangoon, were met last week by deadly accurate British Blenheims, sowing thousands of pounds of delayed-action fragmentation bombs that cut the invaders to shreds.

True, the Burma Road was choked. But it was choked by hundreds of trucks moving supplies northward into China and returning with crack, seasoned Chinese troops, drawn from Chiang Kai-shek's elite divisions and equipped with rifles, bayonets, hand grenades, light & heavy machine guns, trench mortars and automatic pistols. Many of them were already in action on the Salween front. New arrivals strung out protectively along the Burma Road north of Lashio or skirmished with the Jap along the Thai border.

To give added edge to R.A.F. and American Volunteer Group forces, "hundreds" of U.S. and British flyers and planes, many of the latter withdrawn from the Middle East, arrived in Rangoon and at the south end of the Burma Road.

The Jap could be expected to move in fresh reinforcements for his battered troops, to provide his own naval support via the Strait of Malacca to the Burma coast. With Singapore gone, the United Nations could not be held to their earlier promise, to hold Rangoon until the last defender falls.

The Jap settled briskly to his task. This week the British conceded that renewed enemy pressure had forced Imperial forces back 30 miles nearer to Rangoon. The Allied line halted, reformed on the Bilin River's west bank. Rangoon's last stand seemed imminent.

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