World Battlefronts: On the Plains of Hukawng

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It will be months—perhaps many months—before Lord Louis Mountbatten's forces strike in strength. But, on the Burma borders, Allied power is already manifest. In the north, an Allied push clawed forward on schedule. Columns of crack Chinese troops in three weeks had advanced 50 miles, were at the southern tip of the 50-mile-long Hukawng Valley (see map). In the Chin hills to the south and west, where opium-smoking tribes men are still loyal, the British claimed the west bank of the Chindwin. The campaign has a limited but sharply important objective: to pry a right of way through the Jap-held hinterland for the builders of the Ledo Road (TIME. Oct. 11). In time, if all goes well, it will link India's Assam to China's Yünnan, reopen a channel of ground supply for the long-enduring people of Chiang Kaishek.

The Chinese, trained and equipped by Americans in India, carried the heaviest burden in this opening phase of the continental offensive. In the tortuous jungle country before them, supply was the key to military success. The Jap relied on broad rivers, motor roads and elephant trails leading from his main Burma bases to the northern front. Against his communications Allied planes hammered steadily all week. But the Chinese columns, commanded by Lieut. General Sun Li-jen (pronounced soon lee-run), a V.M.I, graduate, and hardboiled, aggressive U.S. Brigadier General Haydon Boatner, were venturing into an almost trackless wilderness. To avoid backbreaking ground porterage, to foil enemy infiltrations, they depended solely upon air supply. Tried out by British Brigadier Orde Charles Wingate's daring Burma raiders last spring, practiced by Chinese infantry and U.S. aviators back in India, air supply worked well in Burma last week. And it gave great promise for future warfare in Southeast Asia.