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Show BURMA v I By Daniel De Luce (WNU Feature Through special mr range-meat range-meat with Collier's Weekly) Greatest reservoir of fighting manpower man-power to whip the Japanese lies in free, unoccupied China. For five years the Chinese soldier has proved himself every bit as coura- geous and clever as his Japanese i enemy. He has hung on in the face ' of discouraging odds, lacking modern mod-ern weapons and an air force. Anglo - American arsenals should eventually be able to furnish fur-nish him with these new arms and give him the support of a combined armada of airplanes. However, "the day" is indefinite. In 1943? Perhaps longer. There is a lot of spade work to be done, for a great Allied offensive on the Asiatic Asi-atic continent. It is required chiefly in Burma. And it is being planned right now by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, General Wavell and General Sul-well. Sul-well. Allies Need Burma. The transfer of a thousand bombers bomb-ers and a thousand fighting planes from America to China could be made in seven days. But once having hav-ing got the air fleet to China, the Allies would be little better off than before, unless they had Burma. For the air force would need fuel not a few thousand gallons flown laboriously over the Himalayas, but many thousand tons. And where is the oil for the future planes of China? In Burma. Bur-ma. "Oh," you say, "weren't the Burma fields scorched by the British? Or was that just another newspaper story?" Yes, the Burma fields were scorched, thoroughly scorched. At the moment they're useless. But listen to the man who did the scorching. scorch-ing. "If the Japanese brought in 15,000 specialists and 50,000 tons of equipment equip-ment and machinery, they could get Burma producing again within a few months. But they have neither the specialists nor the equipment. We have both. We can soon have the wells flowing if and when we recapture re-capture Burma." Scorching of Burma. For the story of the scorching of Burma, let's begin looking into a little red cloth-covered notebook which this itinerant war correspondent correspond-ent bought in Mandalay for ten annas, an-nas, before the ships were bombed and burned down on Good Friday last year. I had it in a sweaty pocket pock-et of my khaki shirt when I jeeped through Yenang-tuang, oil capital of Burma, on Thursday, April 16, 1942. Yenang-taung in Burmese, means "stream of the smelly waters." Some centuries ago, silk-skirted natives na-tives scooped up the pungent black liquid and burned it in crude lamps at home. Came the white man. In the last 60 years thousands of derricks der-ricks sprang up on the drab hills. Burma oil, a million tons every 12 months, began lighting many a lamp in greater Asia. Then came the Jap. He was about 30 miles south of the oil capital and pressing hard last April when I walked into the main oil-field headquarters head-quarters and met a lean, hard, eagle-nosed English civilian loading load-ing his .38 army revolver. He was Walter L. Forster of the Shell Oil company at Cairo. He had supervised the demolition of the Rangoon refineries the previous month, then calmly departed and was now in central Burma to finish similar assignments here. At work or play, Forster likes dynamite. Knowing his specialty, the British government had sent him late in 1941 to Russia, to advise the Soviet engineers in their program of scorching the earth. He quickly decided that the Russians knew more than he did, but he stayed to learn their methods, and visited secret areas of the Caucasus. He remarked afterwards that the Reds had carried out factory wreckings wreck-ings in one day that Anglo-American experts had forecast might take six months. y "But I wish the Russians could ( have seen our job at Rangoon," he V, mused. "Smoke up to 15,000 feet. Vapor up to 19,000 feet. Not a drop of oil left for the Japs, nor a piece of workable machinery." After Rangoon was gone, Forster tackled the pipe line which had run more than 300 miles down-country from the Burma oil fields. He plugged the pipe with cement at river riv-er crossings, smashed the section i pumps, wrecked bridges. Then he i turned to the oil fields, i The last job, he said, was blowing up the big powerhouse. "I've got 6,300 gallons of oil in drums stored above the transformers," transform-ers," he said. "Got oil piped in here to the main room, too. And the jets j will turn on after the explosion. Nice fire we're cooking up!" |