Word: assam
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last year, at a jungle base of the Air Transport Command far up in Assam province on the Burma border, a group of soldiers whipped together a vaudeville show. It was named from a form of war neurosis peculiar to the region where the hazards of flying the Hump are in every man's mind-Hump-Happy. Last week Hump-Happy was on tour. From its purely local start, it had humped through hundreds of performances on the jungle circuit. From Burma's border to the African Gold Coast it is the Army's No. 1 entertainment...
Their leave over, the Americans returned to the humdrum routine of highballing supplies up the Assam-Bengal railroad. Presumably they were refreshed...
Their major offensive against India's Manipur state had been dangerous, and it had failed. They had been unable to capture the supply depots of Imphal and Kohima, they had been unable to cut the Bengal-Assam railway. Their offensive had fallen back before strong British counterattacks, would probably be washed out completely by the coming rains...
...Japanese, said he, had twin aims: political propaganda in India; the capture of favorable positions for attack on the Assam-Bengal railway - chief supply line for China as well as the India and Burma battlefronts. The Allied countermove is first to locate and pin down the Japs, prevent them from gaining full use of roads, squeeze their supplies. Secondly, the British would attack and destroy the enemy - an operation which would take several weeks...
...Stilwell's supplies also flowed up the Bengal-Assam railway, along with the gasoline and parts that still give the tightly knit Allied Air Force control of the air and the power to lay down what the Burma fighters needed on the Allied "dropping grounds" in the jungles. If the railway fell, Joe Stilwell's venture would fail. The Jap had made a neat estimate of the situation...