NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 42, 19 February 1942, Page 6

NOTES ON THE WAR

NEWS

BURMA FRONTS

MOVE TOWARDS YUNNAN

Japan's attack on Burma, seeking to cut the railway from Rangoon to the Burma Road, is developing very quickly, and far from there being any signs of a check, today's reports indicate that the defenders are being driven from the positions they tried to hold on the Bilin River, between the Salween and the Sittang. The Sittang River is the last between the enemy and the Rangoon-Mandalay railway. The latest message received is not hopeful, and it is evidently going to be very difficult to prevent the enemy from reaching his first objective, the railway, and probably Rangoon as well. A Key Point. Supplementary to the campaign in J Lower Burma, another, aimed at Yunnan, is reported to be developing. Yunnan, or Kunming, is about 160 miles north of the frontier between China and Indo-China. It ■is about halfway along the Burma Road; that is, it is roughly midway between Lashio, terminus of the Burmese railway from Mandalay, and Chungking. At Yunnan the road is at its nearest to IndioChina. The city is connected by railway with Hanoi and the Haiphong district, at the mouth of the Red River, in the Gulf of Tonking. Double Threat. , The Burma Road is thus doubly menaced. If the threat to Rangoon develops into a Japanese success, the Burma Road traffic will be immediately cut off. Why, then, attack Yunnan? The campaign will be difficult, because the country is mountainous, and if the railway is an advantage to the Japanese, it is also to the Chinese, who have been preparing for a long time to resist a. Japanese invasion there. . The object appears to be to prevent the use of the road if it is fed otherwise than through Rangoon. There have been reports that a new road is under construction in Burma, by a route vaguely described as "much further north" than Rangoon. Air Attacks on Brest. Everybody must have been surprised to. read Mr. Churchill's statement that while the big German ships were in Brest, 4000 tons of bombs were dropped by the R.A.F., by 3299 air-^ craft. "Undoubtedly," Mr. Churchill said, "the ships had been hit several times," but the hitting was not sufficient to prevent their steaming to Germany. Brest provides highly, interesting evidence in the case Aircraft, v. Warship. The proportion of hits to bombs is astonishingly low, and is probably accounted for by the high altitude at which most of the attacks were made, to avoid losses of aircraft from the concentrated ground defences. Bombing from a great height is not accurate. The most accurate form of air attack is by dive-bombing, but this is not only very dangerous to the attacker when the defence is strong, but does not give great velocity to the bombs. In attacks on armoured ships, the high velocity due to the bombs falling from great heights is essential. Winter's Little Gift. Throughout the winter in Russia there has been a great enforced reduction in the use of large mechanised forces, including aircraft. It has been stated frequently that the Russians have short-circuited the handicap of the snow by fitting their aircraft with skis in place of wheels, but that the Germans have not. This reduction in the use of machines has been of advantage to the Germans because it has given them several months in which to accumulate stocks of oil fuel—both natural, from wells in Rumania, and synthetic, from the big coal-conversion factories- Germany, when the new offensive begins, will thus not be short of oil for a flying start. But the advantage is not one-sided, of course. Russia also has had the same opportunity, with much larger sources to draw upon.