CAMPAIGN IN BURMA

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 87, 14 April 1942, Page 5

CAMPAIGN IN BURMA

CORRESPONDENTS'

TRIALS

(By TelegTaph—Press Association—Copyright.) (Rec. 9 a.m.) SYDNEY,. April 13. Correspondents ' reporting the Burma war are finding it a hazardous and more or less unsatisfactory task, reports Mr. Wilfrid Burchett, who represents an Australian news- ■ papen in that theatre. "In the past few days," he says, 1 have been bombed, shelled, machine-gunned, and have narrowly escaped being burnt •to death." The huge area over which the fighting is taking place and the sketchy nature of communications intensifies the correspondents' problems. To get a first-hand story of front-line fighting entails 600 miles of travel before a telegram can be lodged. HIGH WEEKLY AVERAGE. . A visit to all the fronts involves a 2000-mile journey, mainly because of the lack of an inter-connecting road network. Most correspondents average at least 1500 miles of travel weekly, necessitating high-speed but roundabout car journeys over long stretches of dry, shadeless road.

A front in any recognised sense of the term hardly exists in Burma. There is only an area—often 20 miles deep— in which fighting is going on, and while correspondents are visiting what is nominally the front ■-fighting often breaks out in their rear.