SHIPPING SCORE SET AT 50 FOR I-B EM
Officer Total Drops To 70 A new Adjusted Service Rating score of 50 for enlisted men and 70 for officers was announced today by Theater Headquarters, which said the plan will go into effect the day after Christmas. A total of about 9,300 enlisted men and 840 officers will be returned to the United States under the plan, which was adopted by the I-B Theater at a time when War Department point totals are 55 for enlisted men and 73 for officers. Persons also made eligible under the Theater plan are enlisted men who have completed three and a half years of service, female enlisted personnel who have completed two and a half years of service, male officers having completed four years of service, and WAC officer who have completed three years and three months service. The plan encompasses personnel in the Air Forces, Base Section (which includes Karachi base officers and enlisted men), Intermediate Section and Delhi. A Theater spokesman said all of the personnel affected will go to Calcutta for shipment, except those persons stationed in Delhi, Agra or west of those cities. Meanwhile, the point total for the return of nurses to the U.S. was reduced to 10. A spokesman declared that the total of 1,355 nurses present in the India-Burma Theater Aug. 31, had been reduced to 455 by Dec. 14. By Feb. 1, he said, there will be fewer than 100 nurses left in this theater. An important factor in the return of nurses to the States in large numbers, he said, was an extreme shortage which has been reported in both military and civilian requirements. Theater Headquarters also disclosed today that the last Category Four unit had left Calcutta Dec. 9. The following shipping schedule has been set up for the only other units which will leave the Theater as Category Four units from Karachi, after which only casuals will remain in the Theater: Departing from Karachi Dec 23 on the Hawaiian Shipper for Seattle will be the 888th Ord. HAM Co., 151 QM Laundry Platoon, Hq. 12th Bomb Group, 81st, 82nd and 83rd Bomb Squadrons, 434th Bomb Squadron, 238th Medical Dispensary, 11th Air Base Command Detachment, 2086th Engineer Aviation Battalion, 455th QM Laundry Platoon and the 18th Special Service Co. Departing from Karachi Dec. 29 for New York on either the Gen. Callan or the Gen. Stewart will be the 1359th Engineer Dump Truck Co., 23rd Signal Heavy Construction Battalion, Hq. and Hq. Det. 198th Ordnance Battalion; 175th MP Co., First QM Butchery Platoon, 111th QM Bakery Co., 44th Field Hospital, 270th MP Co., 165th Ordnance Tire Repair Co., 3150th Signal Service Co., 699th MP Co., 889th MP Co., 3416th Ordnance Medium Automotive Maintenance Co., 94th Machine Record Unit, 1388th Engineer Forestry Co., 320th Depot Repair Squadron, 3099th QM Salvage Repair Co., 3438th Ordnance Medium Automotive Maintenance Co., and the 51st Fighter Control Squadron. 105,000 Pounds Turkey Scheduled For I-B Xmas The Army's first peacetime Christmas in the India-Burma Theater is going to be just as Stateside as 105,000 pounds of fresh turkey, Christmas trees, religious services and special parties can make it. Dividing up the turkeys will be 72,000 men who will sit down Tuesday to dinners that will be identical in every section of India and Burma. Here's the menu: Turkey, dressing, giblet gravy, mashed potatoes, buttered peas, buttered carrots, chilled tomatoes, sweet mixed pickles, cranberry sauce, mince pie a la mode, hot rolls, bread and butter, coffee, candy and nuts. There's so much turkey on hand, Quartermaster said, that there will be enough for an encore on New Year's Day. A Christmas Tree in every Red Cross club is the ARC's goal in its contribution to the yuletide gaiety. The Darjeeling forests have been stripped of 500 of their choicest evergreens to be the shining center of club festivities. Thirty thousand Christmas gift boxes will festoon the base of the trees in hospitals and outlying units, the Red Cross announced. Midnight masses on Christmas Eve will draw thousands to worship at Catholic Services in chapels throughout the Theater, with the largest single mass at Monsoon Square Garden in Calcutta. A 30-girl choir will sing traditional music. Regular Protestant services and Catholic Mass will be held on Christmas Day. Col. Beach, Theater Chaplain, said Christmas parties will be held as in the I-B custom, for many Indian children with funds derived from collections that have accumulated during the year. GI's will entertain the kids in some cases and in others the parties will be run by Missionary groups with the aid of GI contributions. Col. Beach flew this week with a quantity of communion wine to Chabua to be used in services in the Chabua-Ledo area. Perhaps the most elaborately decorated chapel will be Theater chapel in New Delhi. Lord Wavell offered the services of his Superintendent of the Viceregal Gardens who has applied his expert hand to arranging the altar with banks of cut flowers, ferns, potted palms and other floral decorations. Preceding the Catholic Midnight Mass there will be a Protestant candlelight service. Radio entertainment throughout Christmas week will feature the traditional carols and religious music. The highlight of Christmas Day will be a one and three-quarter hour Command Performance broadcast studded with Hollywood stage, screen and radio stars, with Bob Hope as master of ceremonies seconded by his sidekick, Bing Crosby. Providing a closer touch with home were the Expeditionary Force Messages which hundreds of GI's were sending home to convey the season's greetings. Although the words were "canned" at the flat rate of Rs. 1, As. 11, nevertheless they were calculated to bridge in a swift caress the thousands of miles of ocean and desert between the soldiers out here and their loved ones. By SGT. JOHN McDOWELL Roundup Staff Writer KARACHI - At least once a week for the past three months, the Negro Quartermaster truck driver from Malir Replacement Depot had exchanged his khaki uniform for a black and white checkered shirt, white baggy Punjabi trousers and a white fur hat, and had strolled non-chalantly down into Karachi's MP-guarded brothel district. Last week, the amorous G.I. embarked on another of his pilgrimages among the dark-eyed, bespangled entertainers of Karachi's bordellos. But he forgot one important item of his disguise - his shoes. Two members of the Karachi MP detachment, while patrolling the out-of-bounds area, spied an "Indian" sauntering down a crowded street wearing a pair of G.I. shoes. The MP's stopped the "Indian." "Where d'ya get those shoes, Joe," they demanded. "Nay mallum, sahib," was the answer. All other questions met with the same reply. Exasperated, the MP's decided to take the "Indian" theft suspect for questioning by the Indian police. "Get into that jeep, Joe," one of the MP's snorted. And the "Indian" scrambled halfway into the waiting vehicle before he remembered he wasn't supposed to mallum English. Under a new barrage of questioning, the "Indian" admitted he was a G.I. At the Karachi stockade, he talked freely of his extra-curricular activities along the narrow streets of Karachi's out-of-bounds area. "Had no trouble with the Indians. I speak their lingo okay. Guess they thought I was Indian, too." he explained. Then, with a chuckle, he added, "They sure enough must have took me for an Indian 'cause I always paid Indian prices! |
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GIANT AAF FACTORY AT BANGALORE CLOSED HQ., ARMY AIR FORCES, INDIA-BURMA, CALCUTTA - Another chapter in the history of the Army Air Forces in the Far East has come to a close with the announcement that the United States Army Air Forces have ceased operating the Southern India Air Depot at the Hindustan Aircraft Ltd., Bangalore. A small custodial detachment will remain at the airfield until disposition of the heavy factory machinery is completed and the requirement for the field is determined, according to Maj. Gen. T. J. Hanley, Jr., India-Burma AAF commander, who announced the closing of the depot. Fashioned after the production "giants" of America, Hindustan Aircraft Ltd. was constructed in 1940. In January, 1942, it began the maintenance and repair of American fighter and bomber craft and RAF and Dutch flying boats. USAAF CONTROL The following year, it was placed entirely under USAAF control with the Air Service Command as the operating agency. The plant is owned jointly by the governments of Mysore State and India. Almost overnight Mysore State became air-minded and rightly so. For with a Japanese army threatening at Imphal, India was for the first time feeling the full impetus of winged warfare. The local populace swarmed to the Southern India Air Depot, the installation's USAAF designation, to work on the "big birds" of the sky, to learn American methods, mass production in styles contrived by persons like Henry Ford and in places like Dearborn. It wasn't easy for Indians to learn so much in so little a period, but it was managed. Before long the huge Liberators, sleek Mitchells and C-47's were beating a crippled path for treatment in the plant at the hands of the Air Depot's capable personnel. LIKE US In every detail, the Southern India Air Depot clad itself in the garments of wartime America, even down to the five o'clock whistle. American G.I.'s and civilians worked hand in hand with the people of Mysore State. Transportation of all descriptions brought the shifts to their jobs. Under the USAAF set up of technical orders and rigid inspections, the plant was chiefly concerned with third and fourth echelon maintenance. From April through September, 1945 alone, 81 salvage jobs, 67 major repair assignments and 140 major overhauls were completed. These figures show only one phase of the operations that were carried on at the plant, but they leave no doubt that the plant was doing more than its share in the battle of "keeping 'em flying." The Liberators, Mitchells and C-47's that once stood on the repair lines at Bangalore can be found today scattered over the globe. |
Typical of the fight in the India-Burma Theater against scrub typhus is this laboratory scene showing a technician examining specimens in some test tubes. |
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Indian troops load gasoline drums for mechanized British troops in Burma. The bags in the foreground contain supplies which will be dropped by parachute before the plane lands on a rough dirt strip in a forward area. |
AACS SERGEANT RECEIVES AWARD KURMITOLA, INDIA - T/Sgt. William E. (Mooze) Herrman of the 12th Army Airways Communication System, a trouble-shooter for the organization's entire Burma network both in and out of combat, recently was awarded the Legion of Merit, according to an announcement this week. The citation paid tribute to the communications technician for his achievements between Sept. 22, 1944, and Feb. 14, 1945. During most of this time Herrman was setting up and servicing communications equipment along jungle air strips being used in the Battle of North Burma. Presentation of the award was made by Col. Albert J. Mandelbaum, C.O. of the Fourth AACS, who recalled how Herrman and his crew were dumped onto a new air strip just being opened seven miles from Jap-held Bhamo. |
Ledo Hospital Wins Grid Game By SGT. ED DAYTON LEDO, ASSAM - The 25th Field Hospital All-Star Indians took the 967th Engineer Maintenance Co. Tigers, 19-0, before 3000 football fans at the hospital gridiron last week. It was the second straight win for the 25th, which had previously defeated the 967th Engineers, 6-0. The Indians wasted no time in going after a touchdown. After two running plays, Tom McCormick, 200-pound half from Philadelphia, unloaded a pass to Nathan Goldman, of Akron, Ohio. It was good for 30 yards. McCormick repeated on a beautiful deception pass to Woody Underwood, of Cape Giradeau, who accepted the pass in the end zone. McCormick kicked the extra point and the 25th had a 7-0 bulge. The opening of the second quarter found the Indians resting on the Engineers' 28. Running plays carried to the one and McCormick blasted across right end for the score. The point try was nil. Another touchdown, gained in the third quarter, was a repeater of the first score. McCormick's end runs carried the Indians downfield and the McCormick to Underwood combo was good for another six points. With two minutes remaining in the game, the Engineers unleashed a passing attack, but to no avail. |
After China's strict ration on beer and cigarettes, this unidentified GI loads up on both for his sojourn here while sweating out the move to a replacement depot. |
WRITER CITES HEAVY TOLL TAKEN BY PLANE CRASHES IN THEATER NEW YORK - (UP) - Airplane crashes took the lives of more than half of all Americans killed in the India-Burma Theater during the war, with combat and illness accounting for most of the remainder, writes A. T. Steele in the Herald-Tribune from New Delhi. Steele said, "Although the great majority of American dead have been given proper burial in temporary army cemeteries, several hundred bodies remain to be located and recovered in the jungles of Assam and Northern Burma where so many Americans died helping to establish and maintain aerial and overland supply lines to China across the Himalayan Hump." Steele says of 3,300 reported American dead in the India-Burma zone of operations, three-fourths are reported buried. But a difficult task remains of finding the bodies of 300 scattered through the forests and wilderness along combat trails and at points of known air crashes. Steele said "one United States Army search team will be sent to Siam to seek out and remove the bodies of at least 125 American prisoners of war - victims of Jap cruelty and neglect as slave laborers on the Siam-Burma railway." As for the 150 to 500 Americans listed as missing in action in this theater, he adds, little can be said except that the search goes on. While it would be cruel to hold out undue hope to relatives and friends it is possible a few Americans reported missing may still turn up alive. Many of those who died fighting with Merrill's Marauders and while piloting planes across the Hump had to be buried temporarily where they died. Steele said, "Finding these isolated graves and carrying the remains back to concentration cemeteries is a major task. Often crude markers have been swallowed up by jungle undergrowth and there have been cases in south Burma where they have been carried off by vandals and used as firewood. When found the bodies are placed in waterproof pouches with zipper sides. These are slung from long poles carried out of the jungle by G.I.'s except in rare cases where native porters can be persuaded to perform the grisly task. Even elephants and horses balk in carrying the dead." |
Pfc. Claude P. Lamkins, Beedeville, Ark., and Pfc. John P. Lane, Haverhill, Mass., sit on the shattered wreckage of a C-47 airplane that crashed deep in the Burma jungles and write out a report. A native guide is also shown. |