Chapter 6 Air Victory Over Burma; D Day at Dedaye; Lifeline to China; Cloak & Dagger

AIR VICTORY OVER BURMA

BURMA Victory was a victory for air power. That does not belittle the exploits of the Fourteenth Army, pressing forward in the jungles and paddy-fields below. But without air support the army would have been bogged down by the terrain over which it fought, a terrain in which the traditional methods of transport were the bullock cart and the sampan.

Air power gave the Fourteenth Army a punch it could never have had otherwise. In country where guns were impracticable, the air forces provided mobile artillery, crushing enemy pockets of resistance with bombs, rockets, cannon and machine guns. They smashed Japanese lines of communication, dumps and troop concentrations and so prevented the enemy from reinforcing his forward elements. They carried supplies from bases in India and dropped them alongside the most forward troops. They flew wounded from rough strips, literally within yards of the front line, to hospitals in the rear.

The Burma campaign lacked the spectacle of the swift, island-hopping advances in the Pacific, but it inflicted a smashing defeat on the Japanese.

More than 100,000 Japanese were killed, and new techniques of air warfare, of air support and air supply were applied and perfected.

Things were very different in 1942. We were caught unprepared, and command of the sea and command of the air swept the Japanese forward until they reached Rangoon. In vain R.A.F. pilots at Mingaladon and Toungoo, in company with a valiant handful of the American Volunteer Group, strove against overwhelming numbers to stem the tide. Finally they had to straggle back into India.

There was no way of striking back immediately. The European theatre had first priority. There were few aircraft; there were no roads through the mountains dividing India and Burma; there were not enough ships for a seaborne invasion.

Through 1942-3 we held our own. Then, as British and American reinforcements arrived, the tide began to turn. The influx of more and better aircraft began to point the way of the future. Conceptions of air supply were changing.

In 1943 several lonely garrisons in the Naga Hills were being supplied and reinforced entirely by air. Another indication of the new way of warfare could be seen in the supplying of the long-range penetration columns of Wingate's Chindits from the air, and in the evacuation of casualties from a hastily improvised strip in the heart of the jungle.

The turning point came in the Arakan campaign of the winter of 1943. The enemy used their old infiltration tactics to cut the communications: of several brigades on the western side of the Mayu Range. In 1942 these brigades would have been forced to fall back; in 1943 they held their positions because they were supplied from the air.

The Jap was foiled. He sent his Oscars to sweep the Dakotas from the skies, but instead he found waiting Spitfires.

Air supremacy had been gained, and with it came security of supply. It was a new kind of supply, fast and fluid, in place of the old method of surface transport which for centuries had bogged down armies.

At the end of 1943 the R.A.F. and the U.S.A.A.F. in the Benoal-Burma area were integrated under Eastern Air Command, with Major-General George E. Stratemeyer as air commander. In every R.A.F. squadron under him were Australian aircrews. He told his men their mission:

"A resourceful, able and wily enemy must be blasted from the jungles of Burma and driven from its skies in days to come. His lines of communication must be obliterated, his shipping destroyed, his will to resist crushed. ... Our lifeline to China must be strengthened and protected."

The Japanese read the writing in the sky a few months later, when they outreached themselves at Imphal. For eighty days during the siege the enemy watched the shape of things to come.

They saw men who were entirely cut off from their bases by land receive nearly 30,000 tons of supplies; they saw the garrison reinforced by more than 60,000 fully equipped men. And while they watched they were hungry, because other arms of Allied air power were cutting their land and sea lines of communication. For once a besieged army had plenty and the besieger had to do without.

Then the Fourteenth Army started to push the enemy back along the long road to Rangoon.

The strategists said it couldn't be done. The great mountain barrier in the north-west, the mighty Irrawaddy and the complete lack of communications made a land campaign impossible, they said. But air power achieved the impossible.

The advance was slow at first, as the Japanese stubbornly clung to strongpoints along the road to their base at Tiddim. They fought with their shovels, digging themselves into positions which were practically unassailable from the ground, but they learned that few strongpoints can stand up to bombs and cannon-shells.

After crossing the Chindwin the army reached the Irrawaddy, and as it moved forward tactical airfields were built close behind the front line.

While the army was crossing the Irrawaddy and moving toward Mandalay, a mechanized column was driving toward the vitally important group of Japanese airfields at Meiktila.

But scarcely were the Meiktila fields in our hands before American, British, Canadian and Australian aircrews of Combat Cargo Task Force were landing transports with food, ammunition, medicines and reinforcements.

More than 350 sorties were flown in three and a half days, against the planned seven days, by transports which averaged over twelve hours' flying a day. Not one aircraft was lost, not a soldier injured.

Japanese troops fought with courage and ferocity in an attempt to retake Meiktila, but they fought alone. The remnants of their air force could not get through the Allied fighter ring.

At one stage their ground forces closed so tightly on the strip that landings had to be suspended, but Dakotas still came over to drop supplies, and finally the Fourteenth Army, thrusting south from Mandalay, linked up with the Meiktila garrison.

Then the last stages of the drive to Rangoon began. It had to be reached before the rains, so that we would have a port to relieve the strain on air supply during the bad weather. "Rangoon before the monsoon" became the popular catchword.

We could not have made it without air power to back up the army. Strongpoints were softened, transport was wrecked, supply dumps were blown up.

A naval landing was made from the south, but for the first time in a full-scale invasion there was no naval bombardment, as the shallow waters near the coast kept warships out of range. Instead, the air forces provided mobile artillery, and troops went ashore virtually unopposed.

To reach their targets our aircraft had to fly through heavy cloud and rain-storms heralding the beginning of the monsoon-but the objective had been achieved in time.

FLIGHT-LIEUTENANT S. HUTCHINSON

D-DAY AT DEDAYE

THE monsoon isn't due for a fortnight, the met. men say, but as we taxi out the rain pours down and the long line of Dakotas glistens wetly.

The twenty Gurkha paratroopers crack quiet jokes among themselves. Maybe their humour is a trifle forced, because it is the first operation by an Indian paratroop regiment. But it's hard to tell what a Gurkha is thinking.

These nuggety little fellows with their close-cropped hair seem too small to be soldiers; back home they would have been tossed out of a secondary school football team as undersized. As they climbed aboard they were dwarfed by their huge bundles of weapons and equipment.

After the take-off the havildar in charge of the stick lights a cigarette, and a few of the others follow him. They look out at the long line of red and green navigation lights straggling in the black storm-clouds behind us. Those coloured lights give the thunderous sky the appearance of a carnival evening rather than H-3 hour of D-1 day.

Then one by one most of the troops go off to sleep. Two hours later, as the dawn breaks, they wake and put on their rubberized horsehair jumping helmets. Peter Pye, the fresh-faced 20-year-old English Jumpmaster, is moving among them, fitting their parachute harness and tying on their equipment.

Peter is the only R.A.F. man in the crew. With other jumpmasters of a Canadian transport squadron he has been loaned for this operation to the American Air Commandos of Combat Cargo Task Force.

In the aircraft ahead are three Australians. Flight-Sergeant Ivor Evans, of Camden (N.S.W.), is the colonel's jumpmaster in the lead aircraft of the pathfinder force, which is to drop men to mark out the dropping zone and establish initial radio contact. The two others are Warrant-Officer Harry Tobin, of Redfern (N.S.W.), and Flight-Sergeant Jack Mayo, of New Lambton (N.S.W.).

The Dakota drops down low over the wet paddy-fields of the Irrawaddy delta. There is no sign of the Jap below. Water-buffalo and goats stampede at the roar of aircraft, an occasional Burman looks up as he paddles his sampan across a chaung, but around the villages not a man or woman is to be seen.

Every few miles we pass a pagoda, and near the D.Z. (dropping zone) an enormous Buddha squats impassively in a walled compound.

Over to port is the little Burmese village of Dedaye, unconscious of the fact that it has created a fantastic military pun, D-day at Dedaye.

Above us the Mustang escort circles, then suddenly, right down on the deck, a Mosquito flashes past. "English! " grins Peter to the nearest Johnny Gurkha, and Johnny grins back. But now his grin is merely a muscular movement. It's easy to see that Johnny doesn't feel like grinning.

One glance at the faces of the twenty little men proves that the novelists' worn line about "impassive Orientals" is so much bunk. Johnny knows that in a few minutes he will be plummeting down with his kukri, carbine and grenades to meet the enemy. His face shows that his mind and his body are tense.

The crew chief (flight engineer in our parlance), who is to be assistant jumpmaster, comes back to the door looking like a man from Mars in his new-style American flak helmet, with great steel flaps over the ears.

He helps Peter hook the static lines to the steel cable running the length of the fuselage. ig The radio operator opens the door of the office" and holds up one hand with the fingers extended-five minutes to D.Z.

Four minutes-three minutes-two minutes.

Peter motions the havildar up to the open door.

A light flashes, and above the roar of the engines and the wind rushing through the door comes the jumpmaster's shout: "Stick! Prepare for action!"

A bell starts clanging. Peter is shouting:

"Action stations! Number one-GO! Two, three, four . . ."

And they jump out with never a moment's hesitation, like boxes falling from the end of a roller conveyor.

eight, nine, ten. Arms container, container, container! "

The crew chief is throwing the switches to release the arms containers slung in bomb racks beneath the fuselage. Immediately the rest of the paratroopers move into the doorway.

"GO, eleven, twelve, thirteen ... nineteen, twenty."

Then the parachutes from the aircraft ahead drift back beneath us, not white, like the newsreels, but a drab colour that blends with the Burma fields. Below each one swings a paratrooper, and below him hangs a line with his equipment. Among them are the vivid hues of the arms 'chutes.

Peter is hoarse with shouting orders, but he is fairly dancing with excitement.

We turn on a reciprocal track, and as we pass the D.Z. the last parachutes are floating down. The others are collapsed on the ground, tightly bunched, all within the dropping area.

"Bang on! They were bang on!" Young Peter can scarcely contain his glee. "Wasn't it wizard the way they went out? There should be a medal for every one of them."

We head back to base before we can see how the troops are going, but on the following day we go out again, this time in a R.A.F. Dakota with two Aussies in the crew, to drop supplies to the paratroops.

The weather is worse than yesterday, so the big formation of Dakotas goes right down to the deck to weave through a break in the clouds.

Then we are over Elephant Point, the paratroops' objective at the mouth of the Rangoon River. It's easy to pick up the D.Z., for right alongside are the smoking remains of a burned out village, and in the river nearby an L.C.I. is nosing in to shore. The area is pock-marked from the bombing of the past two days, and here and there are shattered gun emplacements.

Sweating aircrews heave out the bundles of food and ammunition. The parachutes float down into a wet paddy-field and out come the paratroops with commandeered bullock carts to pick up their supplies.

Elephant Point is secure, and the sea road to Rangoon is open.

FLIGHT-LIEUTENANT S. HUTCHINSON

LIFELINE TO CHINA

FLYING China's aerial lifeline, over the Hump from India to Kunming, are a handful of Australians, members of a R.A.F. squadron flying alongside the Americans.

The R.A.F.'s one Dakota a day is a mere token effort. compared to the great stream of American air transport, with more than fifty trips a day and a take-off from India or China every minute and a quarter around the clock.

"World's worst terrain" is the description usually applied to the Hump routes, and crews usually add, "And the world's stinkin'est weather."

Take, for instance, a winter flight to Kunming by Flying-Officer Lionel Thrift, of Manly (N.S.W.), and his navigator, Pilot Officer D. L. Kuschert, of Bronte (N.S.W.).

When passing over the first ridge they ran into cloud at 8,000 feet. Then they met rime ice, snow, and finally a belt of clear ice at 11,700 feet.

"Ice began to form on the leading edges, but the de-icer boots threw most of that off," said Thrift. "But then it formed around the base of the cylinders, and one motor started to pack up, so we headed back south for Myitkyina. Then we were tossed about in some of the worst turbulence I have ever experienced. We were thrown about so much that twice we were on the point of stalling and finally we stalled completely.

"Electrical disturbances blew a relay in the main radio set, filling the radio compartment with sparks. We were still in cloud and losing height, so I ordered the crew to put on their parachute harness and sent Kusch and the wireless operator back to throw out the cargo, mainly medical stores.

"Over Myltkyina the bad motor picked up, so we climbed to 13,000 feet, still in rime ice and cloud, and went back to our base in Northern Assam. We had been in ice and cloud for four hours."

Turbulence is one of the worst bogies of Hump flying. As there is often a strong down draught at the entrance to mountain passes, pilots always approach passes at an angle, so that if they are caught in a draught they can turn away.

On calm days crews meet another type of freak weather, caused by high winds in the first three months of the year.

"We are sometimes flying straight and level, then there is suddenly a whistling noise outside the aircraft," said Kuschert. "The airspeed builds up and we rise at about 2,000 feet a minute for thirty seconds or so. Then the whistling stops, the airspeed falls off, and we go down as fast as we went up."

The de-briefing report of a R.A.F. pilot gives some idea of conditions which can be met. When about 1,500 feet from the top of a 3,000 foot gap in the mountains his airspeed dropped to 110 m.p.h.

"I realized I was in a down draught, expended maximum climbing power and began a steep turn to port," he said. "By this time we were below the level of the gap and the hills were very close on either side, but immediately I began to turn the control column was whipped out of my hand and the craft went into a steep dive.

"I thought the aileron control had gone as a result of the shock, but as I eased the stick back the aircraft came out of the dive and levelled out at 100 feet above the terrain ... and what terrain! I then felt for aileron control and to my relief it responded. The wireless operator had the entire key come away in his hand.

"Apart from severe turbulence and one snow-storm the rest of the trip was uneventful."

There is seldom a day when the Hump is free of cloud, especially during the monsoon season from April to September. During that period crews are flying on instruments about half the time. The monsoon is followed by a good period, when winds drop and there is less danger of icing.

From January to March pilots are aided by high west winds. By flying at about 18,000 feet they are able to take advantage of winds which often exceed 100 m.p.h., giving astounding ground speeds for Dakotas.

On the return journey, of course, they have to come back through the passes at about 11,000 feet, but even then there have been instances of Dakotas recording a ground speed of only 40 miles an hour.

But in spite of weather, the squadron had lost only one aircraft in a year's Hump flying. It disappeared between Dinjan, in Assam, and Kunming, and no trace of it was ever found.

The Hump is not one route, but several, carefully organized to suit weather and the dense air traffic. Air Transport Command, with characteristic American thoroughness, has developed Hump flying into a precise schedule, with every possible radio navigation aid.

At Kunming, for example, lying in a valley which is often filled with cloud down to within a few hundred feet of the deck, there is an elaborate radio control system to ensure that all pilots in the circuit are at different levels.

All R.A.F. crews on the Hump route are volunteers. They average a trip a week each. Among the Australians on the route are Flying-Officer Stewart ("Chota") Arnold, of Brisbane (Q.), and his wireless operator, Pilot-Officer Keith Caldwell, of Forbes (N.S.W.), Flying-Officer Mike King, of Stanmore (N.S.W.), Flying-Officer W. E. Walsh, of Perth (W.A.), Flying-Officer Dave Bardon, of Mackay (Q.), and Squadron-Leader W. G. Gaston, of Kalgoorlie (W.A.).

Crews usually stop overnight at the R.A.F. mess at Kunming. If they go into the city for a meal they meet something of the trials of life in currency-inflated China.

Mike King paid 2ooo dollars for a plate of steak and chips-at the official exchange rate, which works out at around ;E13 in Australian currency. Even a tube of toothpaste costs 8oo dollars.

"You can buy literally anything in Kunming - if you have the money," says Mike. "There are even nylon stockings, but in case anybody in Australia starts getting ideas and thinking IT be bringing some home, they should remember the price-17,000 dollars."

But Hump flyers generally see little of China. They don't see much glamour in the work. To them the job is just aerial truck-driving plus three-dimensional thrills.

FLIGHT-LIEUTENANT S. HUTCHINSON

FLYING ARTILLERY

THE guns of the Fourteenth Army in Burma were airborne. The conventional weapons of the Royal Artillery were supplemented by the Thunderbolts, Hurricanes and Spitfires of the Royal Air Force, more mobile and more effective than earth-bound guns.

Burma is tough country. Much of it is broken, jungle-covered mountains; most of the rest is one vast paddy-field, under water in the monsoon season. Movement of guns in any numbers under such conditions was slow, back-breaking work.

So the Air Force, whose transport squadrons had relieved the Army of its supply problems, took up the task of softening opposition immediately ahead of the troops.

Whenever the Jap burrowed into bunkers and strongpoints in an effort to hold up our advance the fighters were called in to ferret him out with bombs, rockets, cannons and machine guns.

The effect on the Jap was terrible. He knew nothing could stop the hall of death from the air; his diaries told the story of his declining morale in the face of daily strafing and bombing. It was the strafing he feared most, and when our troops over-ran his trenches they found the reason. The dead Japs in their fox-holes with machine-gun slugs through their heads or shoulders.

On our own troops the effect was just the opposite; there is nothing like constant air support to raise the morale of the infantry, just as there is nothing like the lack of it to depress them. Often pilots would see our men standing on their jeeps and tanks to watch our fighters lashing enemy positions only a few hundred yards away. The troops knew they were safe, for the enemy's heads were down.

Every single-engined squadron operating in Burma had its quota of Australians.

Backbone of the close support planes were the Hurricanes, the R.A.F.'s "old war-horses". They were used on every conceivable task; often, in the early days, because there was nothing else available.

As bombers and strafers they did a magnificent job, although they would have been at a great disadvantage if they had been attacked by modem Japanese fighters. There were narrow escapes, of course. Once when a Hurricane squadron was going out to bomb Tiddim twenty Jap fighters flew past, but luckily did not sight them.

The old war-horses were given a new kick - rockets which, because of their great blast effect, were ideal for knocking out Jap positions.

Flight-commander of the first Hurricanes to be d with rockets, Flight-Lieutenant Peter McMillan, of Inverleigh (V.), told how their first target was a group of bunkers hidden in trees. Next day the Army reported there were huge craters where the bunkers had been.

Another famous Hurricane squadron, whose Australian members included Flying-Officer Gordon Webb, of Roseville (N.S.W.), and Flying-Officer Alex McLean, of South Brisbane (Q.), flew 86 1 sorties in a month during the push south from Imphal, believed to be a record for single-engined squadrons. Some of the targets entrusted to it were so close to our lines that the bodies of Japanese were hurled among our own troops.

A few Australians served with Hurricane squadrons of the Royal Indian Air Force, among them Pilot-Officers Eric Evans, of Newcastle (N.S.W.) and W. H. ("Cobber") Pye, of Ultimo (N.S.W.). Their squadron was responsible for tactical reconnaissance and for the highly successful bombing of the Taungup-Prome Road, on the Arakan front. Japanese withdrawal along this road, winding along steep mountainsides, was hampered by landslides caused by constant Hurricane bombing.

Gradually the Hurricanes were retired in favour of faster, longer-ranged, more heavily armed Thunderbolts. Two of these Thunderbolt squadrons had Australian commanders, Squadron-Leaders D. K. ("Big Mac") McDonald, D.F.C., of Randwick (N.S.W.), and R. D. ("Gatty") May, of Condobolin (N.S.W.).

Fighter pilots developed dive-bombing technique to such an extent that they became phenomenally accurate. After attacking dug-in positions south of Mandalay, Flying-Officer F. T. Kelf, of Woollahra (N.S.W.), reported that only two bombs out of twenty were sufficiently off the target to be classified as near misses. The rest were direct hits.

Often heavily defended Japanese positions had to be pounded day after day. For instance, one small hillock in the Hunters' Bay region, south of Akyab, was attacked for five days in succession by more than a hundred Thunderbolts and Hurribombers. Some pilots, including Flying-Officer Jim Oliff, of Coogee (N.S.W.), made as many as seven attacks on the same target in the five days.

One of the most successful methods of employing close-support aircraft in the Burma theatre was the "cab-rank" system. Under this method, aircraft were directed by radio by a visual-control officer working with forward troops, on to targets where and when they were most needed.

These visual-control posts were usually manned by fighter pilots who had completed their operational tour. One of these, Squadron-Leader A. E. Guymer, of Hendra (Q.), was the first Australian to enter the bomb breached walls of Fort Dufferin after the fall of Mandalay. Several times Guyiner's post was under fire, and often it was established so close to bombing targets that pieces of shrapnel flew past him. When he started directing the air strikes on Mandalay he set up his section in the racecourse grandstand, then looked back to see our troops advancing behind him.

One fine example of a cab rank operation was provided when the Japanese brought up a concentration of twenty tanks to oppose the Irrawaddy bridgehead established by Lieutenant-General Sir Montague Stopford's Thirty-third Indian Corps at MyInmu, thirty miles west of Mandalay. Rocket-firing and 40-mm.-cannon Hurricanes were directed on to them by a visual-control post. The tanks were caught at a standstill, and 13 out of the 20 were destroyed.

Another Hurricane squadron, doing a cab rank patrol over the Nineteenth Division bridgehead at Singu, caught Japanese troops in the open. Pilots could see Japs running before their machine guns, and the squadron was officially credited with killing eighty.

Most cab-rank work is unspectacular for pilots. Except for burning bamboo huts they seldom see anything for their work, but time after time signals come back from the Army ("strawberries" in R.A.F. language) praising their missions and telling how troops advanced unopposed into villages to find Japs killed by strafing or so affected by bombing of bunkers that they offered no resistance.

For instance, when Pilot-Officer R. H. Cuthbertson, of Rockdale (N.S.W.), led a section of Thunderbolts against a village near Melktila, neither his section nor the pilots of another squadron which followed saw any substantial results, yet the Army reported that practically a whole Japanese machine-gun company was wiped out. More than a hundred bodies were found.

Spitfires, too, did their share as bombers and strafers, for with the decline in Japanese air strength over Burma there was not sufficient work to occupy them in their primary role as interceptors.

Of all the branches of the Air Force operating in Bunna, close support showed the most obvious dividends. They were dividends of lives saved. Because the Hurries, T-bolts and Spits crushed enemy strongpoints, many a mother's son in the Fourteenth Army will go back to Blighty. Without their aid thousands would have died storming almost impregnable bunkers.

FLIGHT-LIEUTENANT S. HUTCHINSON

CLOAK AND DAGGER

THEY called themselves the "Cloak and Dagger Boys", but nobody knew much about them.

They buttoned up their lips when they came down to Calcutta on leave, and when someone asked what sort of work they were doing, the reply was brief: "Just supply dropping." Then they quickly changed the subject by asking about prospects for Saturday's races at Tollygunge.

There was never a hint of what they were doing. Occasionally one of them would collect a gong, but the citations gave no clues. They merely made vague reference to "high standards of skill and determination", or sorties in the face of most difficult weather".

A lot of them were Aussies, and the first clue to what they had done came after the fall of Rangoon. Then it was announced that specially selected troops had been dropped far behind the Japanese lines to Burma to organize guerrilla warfare.

The "Cloak and Dagger Boys" took them there.

The secret army fighting inside the Japanese zone was organized and led by British officers, some of whom had operated with the Maquis in France. One colonel worked with the Maquis in September 1944, was married in October, went east for the first time in November, and was dropped in Burma in December.

Plans for the secret army were laid before the Japanese invasion, but it was not fully organized until early 1942, when the frontier hill tribes of Northern Burma-the Chins and Kachins-were recruited as guerrillas.

Their task was to wage a strategic campaign by disrupting the fighting potentialities of the Japanese armies in Burma. So successful were they that despite every enemy effort to destroy them their numbers grew and they contributed decisively to the shortening of the campaign.

Officers of the force, specially picked and trained, had possibly the most dangerous of 211 war jobs in Burma. Dropped into occupied territory, they sought out friendly natives,

organized air drops of arms and supplies, and conducted a campaign of attrition by ambushing convoys and blowing up bridges. They also sent out information which resulted in Japanese troop concentrations and supply dumps being attacked from the air.

Often they dropped "blind" into unknown areas. If they were lucky their descent was unnoticed. Sometimes they were unlucky....

One Kachin dropped through a tent which was a Japanese officers' mess. The officers apparently were amused and made him an orderly. Reports of his fate conflict, but it is believed his mind cracked under ill-treatment.

The special force provided intelligence for the Wingate Expedition. When Wingate withdrew, the Japanese began a reprisal campaign, torturing natives and burning villages, but the hill men were undaunted. Many of them walked out with the 1942 Burma Army and after training in India were parachuted back to continue the fight.

In India the secret was well kept. Even the "Cloak and Dagger Boys" did not know whom they were carrying. A few minutes before take-off a covered van would drive up to the aircraft and a perfect stranger emerged. No questions were asked.

Flying had its peculiar hazards. It often had to be carried out in the face of the most dangerous weather. It called for the utmost precision from navigators, for care had to be taken that men or supplies were not dropped in dense jungle or too near to Japanese camps. Drops had to be made deep in enemy territory, at low altitudes and low speeds with flaps down.

Finding of the D.Z. (dropping zone) was another difficulty, as often it was merely a small open space in practically unmapped country.

One pilot tells how crews often had to circle for long periods trying to pick up the D.Z., while the men to be dropped sat at the top of a chute in the back of the Liberator knowing that every circuit was drawing the attention of the Japanese to them.

The troops were sent out by jumpmasters, many of whom were Australians, and all of whom had made practice lumps themselves so that they could appreciate the feelings of the jumpers.

On occasions our aircraft even landed behind the enemy lines. Once a Sea Otter landed on a river within 5,000 yards of Jap troops, yet the enemy were unaware of the landing.

And so the "Cloak and Dagger Boys", unknown and unsung, played their part in speeding the Burma victory.

FLIGHT-LIEUTENANT S. HUTCHINSON