CHINA’S SUPPLIES

Grey River Argus, 18 February 1943, Page 1

CHINA’S SUPPLIES

New Allied Plans LONDON, Feb. .14. China will benefit immediately from Um Far East conferences at which for months past the problem of how best to supply China by air until the Burma Road is re-opened has been given continuous study, savs the Bombay coi respondent of the “Daily Mail.” The plans which the experts had worked out will operate immediately. Another result of the conferences will be lhe. speeding’ up of supplies to (he British and Indian troops lighting the Japanese in the wild Arakan country, where supply and communication problems grow more difficult as the monsoon approaches. ■ A message ‘from Washington says that the chief of the lend-lease China section (Mr Franklin Pay) announced that more lend-lease material had gone to China in the last month than in any month since the Japanese, cut off the Burma Road. New airfields were being built from India to China, and the number of ferry service transport aeroplanes had been greatly increased. The construction was being rushed of new roads to China to'speed up the transportation of materials landed by air. The Japanese had captured the majority of the lend-lease supplies landed at Rangoon, but more fighting equipment had been delivered to China by air than had ever traversed the Burma Road. Burma’s fall meant more than the cutting off of desperately needed supplies. . It meant throwing back Chinese transportation io the man and animal power basis. Internal transport was now moving ihrofigh the ingenuity of the Chinese, wdio were using an evilsmelling fuel derived from vegetable oil. Chinese petrol carried more than 1,000 miles by horse-drawn carts and river junks.