Our Bases Are Missing
TIME, Monday, Nov. 20, 1944
"One of these days," said wisecracking young Captain Gerald McAllister of the Fourteenth Air Force, "some correspondent is going to write about the ships sunk and the troops killed by the Fourteenth, and it's going to wind up like this: 'From all of these missions, eight of our air bases are missing.' "
That day, McAllister had flown over Kweilin as the last fighter strip was blown up by U.S. demolition men. The once great base was checked off as the seventh of the missing. The Japs were only three minutes away as the Mustang flew when the job was finally done.
The dreary process began all over again at Liuchow, 100 miles to the southwest. Colonel Richard Wise, commanding the Third Sector, China Air Service Command, worked around the clock to get out all the men, equipment and supplies which he had worked the year around to get in—up to 3,000 planeloads flown over the costly Hump route; a million gallons of aviation fuel, torturously accumulated and stored, now impossible to save. With the Japs only 30 miles away, a U.S.O. troupe dropped in and gave a show.* Said Sergeant William Gould: "This is the most cheerful crisis any air base has had yet."
Jungle Retrievers. Last week the enemy's armor-tipped columns speared into Kweilin through the tired 35 divisions of China's "Old Ironsides," General Chang Fa-kwei. They closed in on Liuchow, and the eighth of our air bases was missing. Simultaneously the enemy drove for Nanning. The gap between the Japs' north and south China forces already had been closed; now, if the drive for Nanning succeeded, the enemy would have through lines from Manchuria to Indo-China and thence to Singapore. The Fourteenth Air Force would be pushed back hundreds of miles from the South China Sea and the Japs would have brought off one of the great victories of the war in Asia.
"Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's successor as commander of U.S. forces in China, Major General Albert C. Wedemeyer, could say nothing more hopeful than that the situation was unfavorable, "but not irretrievable."
If any retrieving were to be done in China, it would have to be done with arms and supplies shipped in along a reopened Burma Road and an expanded airline over the Hump. While ill-supplied Chinese were dying hopelessly at Kweilin, well-supplied Chinese were fighting hopefully and successfully in the jungles of Burma, closing in on Bhamo, terminus of the northern (alternate) branch of the Burma Road.
*Its members: Pat O'Brien, Jimmy Dodd, Ruth Carrell, Harry Brown, Betty Yeaton, Jinx Falkenburg. They also played the B-29 bases around Chengtu, won G.I. praise for taking it.
Sources: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,796780,00.html
