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✪ 73 3 “ B A R N S T O R M I N G ” O V E R T H E H U M P MARCH TO DECEMBER 1942 By the beginning of April 1942 the situation in Asia and the Pacific was dire for the British and Americans. Japan had swallowed up a perimeter extending thousands of miles to both the east and south of the home islands and had begun to consolidate its gains by taking up a defensive posture that would secure territories extending in a wide arc from the western Aleutians, south through the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, west through the Solomons and bisecting New Guinea, encompassing the Dutch East Indies, and stopping in western Burma. Strategically the Allies had committed themselves to a “Europe-first” position as early as the Arcadia Conference, held just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, focusing on challenging Hitler’s advances on the Continent before bringing the weight of force against the Japanese. Logistically the Americans fixed overseas expenditures for the war in Europe over the war in Asia at a ratio of twelve to one, meaning operations like “Bolero,” the preparatory supply of Great Britain in advance of a cross-channel invasion, was preferred over the competing demand to resupply the Chinese by air across north Burma from India. Making matters worse was the problem of transatlantic shipping due to the impact of an intensified German U-boat campaign that succeeded in sinking U.S. cargo at an annual rate of ten million dead-weight tons during the first ten weeks of 1942; the U.S. Navy was determined to counter this threat by convoying ships, but the short supply of con- CHAPTER 3 74 voy escorts made scheduling problematic.1 Exacerbating the dilemma in the Eastern Hemisphere was the unhampered movement of the Imperial Japanese Navy astride both sides of India, in both the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, forcing the Americans to deliver supplies to Karachi in the west and haul them across the width of the subcontinent to Assam Province in the far northeast, a necessity forced by the fact that there was no Allied naval sea power present to protect the Port of Calcutta. It was under these conditions that the Army Air Forces would attempt to make good on Roosevelt’s promise of February 9 to give the generalissimo “definite assurances that even though there should be a further setback [with the fall of Burma] . . . the supply route to China via India can be maintained by air.”2 If movement abroad by sea was complicated by the threat of German submarines and Japanese surface ships, movement abroad by air in the spring of 1942 was relegated to a trickle, as the AAF did not take receipt of its first fourengine C-54 until that March and was forced to rely on the much smaller and shorter-range C-47 to do most of the work for the rest of 1942. The “Europe-first” priority was felt here as well with 43 percent of all transports sent to Europe; MacArthur’s Far East Air Force theater was the second priority of transports, receiving 18 percent, and the CBI ranked third, garnering only 15 percent of the AAF’s transport deployments for the year.3 Transports allocated for LendLease aid also went first to the European Theater, with Great Britain receiving 128 for the year versus the paltry 10 given to the Chinese.4 Competing priorities were very much a reality of the war’s first year in all theaters, but they took on a different face as far as China was concerned in 1942. While most Allied military efforts were geared toward operations like the possible invasion of western Europe in 1943, the looming Allied invasion of North Africa, or the “Cartwheel” operations in the southwest Pacific, the Japanese presence in China was viewed largely as an inert occupying force posing little threat to the Americans and British . In fact, the only “threat” stemming from China was the one posed by the generalissimo , with Chiang never missing an opportunity remind the Allies of how long he had been fighting the Japanese and how close he was to being forced to surrender if the requisite aid did not arrive. The Chinese would sustain only one major offensive during 1942, but the generalissimo never relented in the pressure he leveled against the Roosevelt administration, such that by the end of...

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