TRUTH ABOUT BURMA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 May 1942, Page 3

TRUTH ABOUT BURMA

GREAT & GALLANT EFFORTS MADE BY HANDFUL OF MEN ORDERED TO DO IMPOSSIBLE. BITTER MILITARY TRAGEDY. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, May 12. The British forces in Burma have never totalled as much as 30,000, while one tank brigade equipped with light 12-ton American tanks has been the sole armoured support. This is revealed by the military correspondent of the “Daily Express,” who says: “The truth about Burma can now be told. Probably over half our troops—British, Indian and Burmese — have been killed and many wounded, and large quantities of six and fourwheeled vehicles and field guns and anti-aircraft guns have been lost. “The Chinese who were sent originally to aid General Alexander did not exceed 6000 to 8000. They were illequipped, but they fought with the utmost gallantry.” The Calcutta correspondent of the Associated Press of Great Britain in a delayed dispatch graphically telling the story of the British army’s retreat in Burma, describes it as the toughest evacuation of the war. “Haggard, weary riflemen of’half a dozen one-time crack British battalions, armoured car crews, and wiry Sepoysare approaching within a few score miles the mountainous frontier of Assam, where the Japanese can and must be held at bay,” he writes. “They are foot-slogging through dust, on oozy or flooded paths, and in dank teak forests, and they are swimming muddy streams. These dwindling columns of dirt-caked troops are fighting for their very lives —fighting on and on, as they have been doing since January against an enemy more numerous, more skilled in jungle warfare, and continually reinforced by land, air and sea. ' “What has happened in Burma has constituted a military tragedy for the United Nations which is as bitter, in its way, as Singapore, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines were, and perhaps as avoidable. For the pitiably small handful of Imperial soldiers who lost Lower Burma and the few under-strength Chinese divisions, there can be nothing but praise. They were ordered to do the impossible, and their casualties were appalling. For hundreds of miles it was a case of fight, withdraw, and fight again. The fall of Rangoon doomed Burma, and the British ranks knew that as well as their officers, but they kept on fighting. Surrender is not in their vocabulary.”