Word: burma
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China is Belden's special beat-but last April when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek sent his Armies slogging down the Burma Road to help Britain keep China's back door open, Belden went along into Burma. When he reached Maymyo he found two other members of the TIME & LIFE News Bureau already on hand at General Stilwell's mission-house headquarters-Correspondent Clare Boothe and Photographer George Rodger-so he decided to keep on going, borrowed a jeep and a Tommy gun and jolted his way south into the bloody Jap-trap at Yenangyaung...
Belden's great advantage was that he spoke Chinese as fluently as English and consequently could go more places and hear more things than any other newsman in Burma. He took down the stories of Chinese officers and soldiers in range of the Jap guns -and when he came up with the British he pitched in and helped them dynamite the second biggest bridge in the Far East-and destroy their oil fields and refineries. He just managed to beat his way back to Stilwell's headquarters by the skin of his teeth...
Safe out of Burma, Belden hopped right back into danger with only a week's rest-rejoining General Claire Chennault and his Flying Tigers at the chief A.V.G. air base in China. He stayed on there with U.S. Army pilots when the A.V.G. was disbanded -ate with them, slept with them, flew with them while they strafed Jap ground troops all over eastern China-dodged Japanese ack-ack, dog-fought I-97s and Zeros, bombed ships, docks and factories up and down the Yangtze...
Australians, guarding the gap above Kokoda, had tried to stop them along the single narrow trail that leads over the mountains. The Japs' methods were those they had used in Malaya and Burma. Monkeylike troops, with heads, legs and bodies painted green, filtered through the jungles. And the Australians retreated. Said an Australian officer: "They kept outflanking us and getting behind us. They could see us but we couldn't see them...
...admitted to the outside world through India's tight censorship: Japanese fifth-column work in the northeastern (invasion) provinces of Bengal and Assam has been on a "widely extended scale and with special direction to strategic points." In spite of the obvious reminder of Hong Kong, Singapore and Burma, Churchill summed up the Indian situation as "improving and, on the whole, reassuring...