NEVER FALTERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 136, 11 June 1945, Page 7

NEVER FALTERS

AIR SUPPORT IN BURMA

CAMPAIGN BY NO MEANS FINISHED

(R.N.Z.A.F. Official News Service.)

RANGOON, June 6.

It would be a grave mistake to assume that because the port of Rangoon has been recaptured, the Burrn^ campaign is finished. Retreating slowly through the Shan States, in eastern Burma, the Japanese continue to resist fiercely. Their morale appears to be undamaged, and it is still necessary to kill every man before their positions are taken.

In addition, it is estimated that there are 15,000 Japanese behind the British lines in territory not yet occupied. Fierce clashes occur frequently, usually in the vicinity of the Meiktila-Ran-goon road, as they endeavour to escape eastward. This is proving a menace to British communications, and armoured cars must accompany convoys. Hampered by heavy thunderstorms and incessant rain in the monsoon area and by intense heat in the dry belt, the R.A.F. fighter group continues to fly almost non-stop in support of the Army above which it has fought so magnificently throughout the entire Burma war.

In their role of mobile artillery, the fighters are steadily winking the Japs from their foxholes and bunkers and are driving them down through Tenasserim.

On a barren, treeless dry belt airfield, a fighter pilot, Warrant Officer E. J. (Ted) Caskey, of East Road, Toko. Taranaki, described a typical sortie. "The Army gave us a target," he said. "We could see nothing, but we thoroughly bombed and strafed the position, although we thought there might have been a mistake. Later we got a 'strawberry' for killing 300 of the 400 Japs entrenched there."

Pilots arrive back from these sorties tired and drenched with sweat from hours of low flying in the fierce sun. Although it is cooler, squadrons operating in the monsoon areas south of Rangoon are constantly endangered by heavy storms. But the attacks against enemy airfields, installations, and communications never falter.