Siam, Thailand

   As visibility increased, we looked down upon a vast level plain patterned with rice fields and village-bordered canals.

   Soon other spires rearing above expanses of multiple overlapping blue- and gold-tiled rooftops shone white or sparkled with spangled incandescence as they slipped beneath the winging plane. On a wide serpentine river rode scores of tiny boats.

   In 57 hours of eastward flight, plus short pauses at landing fields in Bermuda, the Azores, North Africa, Iran, and India, the big plane had left Washington, D. C., half the world behind. Below us lay Siam.

   As we glided down for a landing at Bangkok (Krung Thep), I recognized familiar landmarks. Years ago I had known the country well. For seven years this oriental land in the lower corner of Southeast Asia had been my home.

   But I had not been back for 15 year. What was it like now?

   In those 15 years Siam, I knew, had undergone several political changes. Absolute monarchical rule, benevolent though it was, had fallen by coup; a constitutional government was established. King Prajadhipok had abdicated; the ill-fated boy prince Ananda Mahidol, studying in Switzerland, had been elevated to the throne.

   To the world Siam had also announced its change of name to Thailand (Freeland).

   Thai, or "free," the Siamese have always called themselves.

   Ironically, after the country assumed the name Thailand the people probably enjoyed less freedom than they had known for generations past.

   Here, as in several other places in the world, totalitarian rule found transient rooting. For nearly five years, too, Japanese forces occupied the country, using it as a base for their conquest of Malaya and their thrust through Burma.

   At Japanese insistence Thailand also issued a declaration of war against Britain and the United States. It was a declaration, however, which found little favor among the Siamese people, and one which the United States chose to ignore.

   Before long the Japanese came to learn they were not the welcome guests they had wished to be, and in Siam they gained little but strategic position and supply.

   The country has since repudiated its wartime leaders. Peace has been re-established with Britain; the documents were signed on January 1, 1946, in Singapore.

   On maps again will reappear the long-established name of Siam.

   At present the nation is faced with postwar problems perhaps as acute as any it has known since the Burmese sacked and burned the early capital of Ayutthaya in 1767. On June 9, 1946, it was further saddened by the tragic and, mysterious shooting of King Ananda Mahidol.

   Normally, Siam is the world's second largest rice-exporting nation. Rice, together with teak, tin, and rubber, furnished a solid financial structure for the country's prosperity.

   For years, however, Siam was isolated from world markets, except Japan, and its economy was badly disrupted. Loans to Japan obviously became worthless paper. Siam's currency, the baht or tical, dropped to only about one-fourth its prewar value.

   In such topsy-turvy conditions, the man who pedaled a samloh (literally "three wheels"), one of those combination bicycle-ricksha vehicles which carry persons about town, might earn as much in a week as a responsible government official received in salary in a month.

   Because of war-created scarcities, many commodity prices rose to fantastic levels. When I went to buy an ordinary tropical suit of white drill which only a few years ago cost 15 to 20 ticals, I found it more than 600 ticals!

   Frequent bombing raids over the country caused extensive damage to railways and rolling stock. Many vital bridges were blown up. As a result, trains long were unable to make continuous trips from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, chief city in the north, or down the peninsula to Malaya.

   To make such a journey one had to travel by local trains operating on tediously slow daytime schedules and walk or be ferried…”