THE BURMESE CAMPAIGN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25736, 6 January 1945, Page 4

THE BURMESE CAMPAIGN

In the campaign which is being fought by the Fourteenth Army in Burma the public is less interested than it should be. It is not only concerning the public in New Zealand, that this may be said. The observation applies with so much force to the public in Great Britain that it was alleged there that the troops engaged in the campaign were “forgotten men.” The fact is, of course, that the war in Burma is overshadowed by* the war on every one of the fronts in Europe, in each of which greater masses of troops are employed and, moreover, "the operations are, being conducted in theatres where place-names are identifiable and, unlike many of those in Burma, are generally pronounceable. The circumstance, also, that there is no one front in the Burma war but that the fighting is being carried on in four sectors which are not contiguous tends to create some confusion in people’s minds and to lessen the interest that might otherwise be taken in it. It would be a grave mistake, however, to suppose that the issues that are at'stake are not supremely important or to regard the Burmese campaign as something in the nature of a sideshow only. It has been a hard uphill struggle in which the Fourteenth Army has been engaged and the conditions have probably been ,more consistently difficult than those that have been encountered by the Imperial forces in any of the other scenes of war. The successes of the Allied troops, which comprise men from the United Kingdom, from India and Burma, from-East and West Africa, from the United States, and from China, have not been dramatic, but they have been the result of dogged fighting and, measured in territory won, have been distinctly impressive. The latest report is that 80,000 square miles of Burma have been cleared of the Japanese, this area representing nearly one-third of the entire Burmese territory, and at the present time the indications seem to be that favourable results may continue to be expected. Of the four sectors in which operations are being conducted, one which is sometimes called the Salween front is an allChinese area and the Allied Command, which has latterly met with a good deal of success, is responsible directly to Chiang Kai-shek. The Arakan sector, on the coast in the south, just'inside the Burma frontier, has been treated on both sides as a holding sector, but the occupation of Akyab, which is reported this morning, is an encouraging sign of aggressive activity there. In both the Imphal and Myitkyina sectors, considerable progress has recently been reported on the part of the Allies, and this has been the more satisfactory and the more noteworthy from the fact that it is upon aerial transport that the armies have had to depend for their suppliesi A writer in The Times declares that “the great reliance placed on aerial supply, and the amazingly efficient system which has been developed, undoubtedly present the most remarkable feature of these operations at the present time.” Whole divisions have, during the monsoon season, been maintained for months on end in this way. The ratio of line-of-communication troops to combat troops must, it is suggested, be five times greater than in any other war area. That supplies may go astray, even on comparatively short routes, is not altogether surprising. But it is not in the course of aerial transport only that stores may disappear. It is on record that a whole trainload of milk went missing some months ago and'that it has never been traced.