AT "ABERDEEN," AN AIR BASE IN THE BURMESE JUNGLE, COLONEL PHILIP COCHRAN (LEFT) DISCUSSES EVACUATION OF WOUNDED RAIDERS WITH BRITISH OFFICERS
The unbelievable mistake of an English teletype operator shocked the U.S. with false news of invasion. The radio announcers, breaking in on the horse-race descriptions and the dramatic programs, caused millions of Americans to tremble with long-expected excitement. In baseball parks, games were halted and spectators offered silent prayers.
The retraction was a letdown. But the incident had thickened the oppressive atmosphere of expectancy. And the real war continued. Allied troops captured Rome. In the Pacific, U.S. troops fought on Biak Island, only 900 miles from the Philippines. Biak seemed only a preliminary to climatic new blows from the enormous U.S. naval power. Slow allied successes advanced the western arm of the gigantic pincers against Japan. From Burma came the photographic record on this page of an important fragment of this war's history - the fight by Lieut. General Joseph Stilwell's men to reopen the land route to China.
Stilwell's immediate objective was to drive the Japs out of Myitkyina, main barrier on the way to China. A good part of his success there has been due to a mixed force of Englishmen, Americans, West Africans and Gurkhas which has never been within sight of the city. Three months ago a U.S. air force, commanded by Colonel Philip G. Cochran, landed a small army of raiders in the jungle behind the Japanese. There they have harassed Japanese communications, won victories, suffered defeats and inevitably upset Japanese plans. Their tactics paid off last month when Stilwell's men took the Myitkyina airfield from the weakened Japanese. Colonel Cochran, who arrived in the U.S. last week, has become nearly as famous as Flip Corkin, the character in Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates whom he inspired.
Although the aerial tactics used by Colonel Cochran's planes were revolutionary, the ground fighting which engaged
the raiders followed an ancient pattern. These photographs by LIFE's William Vandivert are strongly reminiscent of
the grim and real pictures the great Mathew Brady took 80 years ago on the battlefield of America's War Between the
States.
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U.S. LIGHT-PLANE PILOTS
SUPPLY TROOPS IN JUNGLE |
Like jungle tactics, jungle uniforms are varied and unconventional. The U.S. light-plane men pictured below are sporting a raffish assortment of British campaign hats, garrison caps, overseas caps, pith helmets and baseball caps. In any kind of hat, these men do a good part of aerial trucking in Burma. Their handy little planes have become capillaries of jungle supply. The arteries are transports which fly heavy loads to big interior bases. From here the light planes fly to the troops. Sometimes they drop their loads by parachute, but their greatest advantage is that they can land and take off in tiny areas where larger planes would crash.
Ammunition is dropped by parachute to men of raiding columns waiting in rice paddy. Troops sometimes clear
strips through paddy so that plane can land, take out wounded.
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Barbed-wire entanglement and dugouts on hill kept Japanese from getting through for 76 days. But after continuous
attacks the Chindits were forced to abandon this block in the last week of May.
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