Burning Man

The plane, shimmering in the violent sun, circled the wastes around the airdrome, glided home and touched the earth of India. U.S. mechanics swarmed to their tasks. U.S. officers, brown in khaki tropicals, made a respectful knot a little way from the plane door, waiting. Out stepped their commander, the commander of all U.S. Air Forces in India: Major General Lewis Hyde Brereton.

General Brereton's lively brown eyes took in two familiar shapes: a pair of Flying Fortresses, in their dull camouflage, standing on the tarmac. Seventeen days had passed since he led them on a flight to the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, where their bombs socked a Jap cruiser and a Jap troopship. On this Sunday morning, he had flown to the airdrome to reward the Fortress crews with Silver Stars* for their coolness and success under Japanese anti-aircraft and fighter fire. That honorable duty done (including the acceptance of a Silver Star himself), he performed one of the routine but important duties of every good commander. He inspected his men's kitchens--in this case, flyproof affairs which the troops had devised from airplane crates and wire netting. Then the General had a Sunday dinner of beef stew with fresh carrots and potatoes, cake and iced tea.

Afterward, General Brereton returned to New Delhi and the high-ceilinged hotel rooms where he transacts these days some of the most important business of World War II. He talked with officers, just back from hard-hit Burma, where he had sent them to study at first hand the sore need for air defense. In this same week, he flew across Rajputana to Karachi, India's great northern port on the Arabian Sea. He flew to southern India. He saw the signs of a vast job quickly done, but not yet completed: U.S. planes, pilots, crews, airdrome ground forces in ever-increasing numbers, flowing into India by sea and air, and nesting on scores & scores of airdromes.

If people at home wondered why they had heard so little from these forces (in three weeks, only the Andamans raid and two on Rangoon were reported), Lewis Brereton knew the answer. Except in direst need, he was done with sending insufficient forces into battle. When he struck, he would strike with enough to defeat and destroy his enemies, the Japs across the Bay. It was a resolve, a policy which General Brereton had acquired the hard and bloody way.

Journey from Defeat. On Dec. 7, Lewis Brereton was in the Philippines. He had been a major general, commanding one of the first Flying Fortress units in the Pacific, since July 11. He fought through the bitter days of plane losses on the ground and in the air to overwhelming Jap numbers. At last, after three weeks of uneven battle, rather than lose his remaining Fortresses and crews, he took them to Java.

There he sent them into brilliant but unavailing raids and battles over the Indies, the Java Sea, the Strait of Macassar. His fighter protection dwindled, almost vanished. Feb. 17, Brereton and Lieut. General George H. Brett, the top U.S. (and Allied) air commander in the southwest Pacific, agreed that Brett would take the remaining U.S. planes and crews to Australia; Brereton would fly with Britain's General Wavell to India, and there build a force to strike at Japan through China. It was a momentous decision, doubtless reached only after consultation with Washington and London.

Wavell, Brereton, a few other officers flew by night to Ceylon, then on to India. Brereton had with him a pistol, a few faded tropical uniforms which he had picked up from Australians in Java, and a blanket roll. He called the blanket roll "Baby," and it was precious: inside was $250,000 in U.S. currency. The money was to have paid and supplied U.S. troops who never arrived in Java. Like many another such bankroll, it had been handed out by Chief of Staff George C. Marshall in Washington, on the premise that you never could tell, and the hell with red tape.

In New Delhi, Brereton deposited Baby with Lloyds Bank, took one drink, put his gun in a desk drawer, and paused to ponder his asset: the cash; faith in Washington; faith in his own judgment that a mighty air striking force could be amassed in India. A few days later, 17 officers and men followed him to India in a PBY flying boat. They were the nucleus of his staff.

When Brereton's men first assembled in New Delhi, turbaned maharajas in the convening Chamber of Princes, and members of India's Legislative Assembly, crowded the city's hotels. Miss Hotz, manager of the Cecil Hotel, offered Brereton & staff tent space on the garden lawn. "But, oh, Miss Hotz, you will spoil the hollyhocks," a woman guest protested. Miss Hotz risked the hollyhocks. Later, Brereton found working and living space at another hotel, where an air conditioner presented by General Motors officials in Bombay now cools his sleep and labors.

Brereton, in India, like MacArthur in Australia, cannot forget the men he had to leave behind, the ground men of his forces in Bataan, the pilots who died over Java. He never forgets that many of them died because he had to send them into battle with too little, too late. They were young, gay, brave. Says Lewis Brereton: "It just burns me up, night and day."

Looy, dot Dope was the nickname, borrowed from Milt Gross, which Lewis Brereton's Army chums pinned on him years ago. It was a mark of affection and respect. Brereton, from the start of his Army career, was dopey like a tiger.

He is one of the very few Army officers who began their military training at Annapolis. He finished his four years (1907-1911), then frankly confessed to himself and others that he was a natural-born landlubber; the sea made him literally very sick. He got out of the Navy and transferred to the Coast Artillery in 1911, when he was 21. His brother Bill, whom he followed into Annapolis by three years, is now a captain, U.S. Naval attache in Buenos Aires.

Brereton went into the Signal Corps, which then fostered Army aviation. He started flying in 1912, when such veterans as Lieut. General "Hap" Arnold, Major General Follett Bradley were also finding their wings. On varied combat and staff service in France, Looy, dot Dope won a mess of medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross. Explaining that one, he later said: "I was flying like hell to get home, and a lot of Huns got in the way."

Pug-nosed, unhandsome, 5 ft. 10 in. tall, Brereton managed to live and fly toughly in the easy peacetime days. He drank, but he was always airshape next day, and he expected his subordinates to be the same. He sometimes laughed at rules and pernickety superiors. He never fawned for promotion; between wars he was 20 years rising from captain to colonel.

Always a proficient cusser, he swears in several languages including the Malay, which he acquired in Java. His Malay profanity now impresses the whiskered, turbaned Hindu who serves him in New Delhi. Brereton has a bitter joke to the effect that a soldier these days is bound to be a language or two behind in his swearing, what with repeated retreats through successive countries. He hopes that he has added the last language of retreat to his Rabelaisian vocabulary.

Brereton gets along well with his British colleagues in India. When the British in the Mid-East, India or the Pacific are criticized in his presence, he says: "We have no right to pass judgment. . . . We've shown nothing yet that stacks up to the Battle of Britain." But he clings fiercely to his Americanism. He has commanded his secretary to fine him a rupee (50-c-) every time he uses a non-American expression. Total fines up to last week: two rupees, for two "Rightos" over the telephone. His unceasing fear is that he will catch himself describing an air battle as "a jolly good show."

For languages, official data, conversations, anything to do with flying and fighting, Brereton has a prodigious memory. He also has a genius for forgetting his own effects and personal affairs. He usually travels with mountains of luggage, is always losing parts of it. His impedimenta normally include a typewriter which he never uses; a bedroll in which he wraps his Scotch and sherry; a variety of medicine bottles whose corks invariably pistol out at high altitudes, soaking Brereton's stuff and inspiring him to further flights of language.

Brereton, in brief, is the kind of professional fighting man who endured peace and prepared for war. He is also a professional, military airman, who now has a task made to order for the airman and the airman's weapons.

Four in One. Lewis Brereton's Allied chief, General Sir Archibald Wavell, said in a New Delhi broadcast last week: India will be defended by a powerful air fighting 'force which will attack the enemy ships as they approach, and by a land striking force which will concentrate rapidly against any threatened point.

As for naval power, in force sufficient to fend off the Japanese from India's shores, General Wavell talked of that as something in the future. Evidently, the Royal Navy's recent losses (two cruisers, a small aircraft carrier) and tremendous merchant losses in the Bay had left India sadly crippled at sea.

For air defense, Lewis Brereton shares responsibility with theR.A.F.'s canny, ruddy Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, formerly head of Britain's Bomber Command. What each of them has and will have, neither Washington nor London is telling the Japs. General Brereton already has some Flying Fortresses in India. At the airdrome where he awarded the Silver Stars, correspondents saw a small city of walled tents, workshops, a hospital--all manned by U.S. personnel. The daily scene on India's airways, and in the great supply network feeding India from the U.S. via Africa, is testimony to growing U.S. air power in India.

On Ceylon--key to the approaches to India's eastern shores from the Indian Ocean--the R.A.F. has already shown its defensive strength by knocking down at least 75 Jap planes in one week. Undoubtedly, such an all-important bastion as Ceylon figures in Lewis Brereton's plans.

His Fortresses now defend India. But they do more, and the forces which he will eventually have must do much more. General Brereton in fact has three other jobs: to establish an aerial supply line to China; to succor his immediate U.S. chief, Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell in Burma; and to develop India, apart from its own defense, as a base for striking at the Japanese wherever they may be within bomber range.

For these tasks, General Brereton and Air Marshal Peirse need a great deal more planes and men. They are getting both. The prayer in India last week was: get them faster.

The Defense of India is a multitude of things. It is General Brereton, telling maharajas that he has no time to shoot tigers with them. It is Air Marshal Peirse, putting off invitations from hostesses of New Delhi. It is General Wavell, tired at the long day's end, rolling up to his great villa off Roberts Road, just down the way from the Viceroy's house, where the tombs and half-ruined temples of dead empires rear around Lady Wavell's meticulous gardens. It is the vast, wedge-shaped mass of India's 1,808,000 square miles, its 389,000,000 people. It is President Roosevelt's emissary, brash Louis Johnson, astonishing one & all with his tact, his breezy aptitude with Indian leaders, his assurance that the U.S., in offering technical aid to India's war industries, is not planning post-war robbery. It is the Indian-owned Hindustan Times, intoning to Colonel Johnson: "We suggest . . . that it is his duty to tell the British Government, in language that they will understand, that they must first secure the cooperation of the people of India before thinking of the defenses of India."

General Brereton's job is in the air. Others must worry directly about the failure of the Cripps mission, the Jap's fifth column in the uncertain, undependable Province of Bengal, the doubt that the soft, pliant masses of southern India would be much help in the military defense of India. If Lewis Brereton's burning determination to hit and beat the Japanese wins Indian friends for the Allied cause, so much to the good. His business is with fighting.

As a fighting man, General Brereton can appreciate and understand the fighting men of the Indian Army. There are wiry, highland Gurkhas, who once each year must cut a wild goat in half with one swoop of a broad kukri; black-bearded Sikhs, whose proud name stands not for race or religion, but for a blood brotherhood of warriors; turbaned Pathans (pronounced pet-ahns). Indians like to quote the current figures on their Army: 1,000,000 men, "well equipped."

Now U.S. newcomers in India see Sikhs in tanks and pursuit planes, Gurkhas driving armored cars. But any soldier with General Brereton's penetrating eye is bound to spot a flaw. Due partly to circumstances, including the necessary drain on Indian manpower and equipment for other theaters, the Indian Army as a whole is not a modern army. The British began woefully late in the game to modernize their Indian troops. In spirit, the Indian Army today is still an army of lances and banners rather than tanks. Its British officer caste is little changed, and the Indian officers now being commissioned have been indoctrinated in the old tradition--a tradition with more grandeur, more Kiplingesque affection between officers & men, than effectiveness for 1942 war. General Wavell said last week: "Our defense is growing . . . [but] I'm not suggesting that it is anything like as strong yet as I could wish.. . ." But, thanks in great part to the R.A.F. and Lewis Brereton, General Wavell was also able to say:

"[India's defense] is much stronger than it was even a few weeks ago, and completely different from our comparative defenselessness against air attack a few months ago. Before very long, it will be much stronger still."

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