Word: martaban
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Burma's capital Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten had mounted his biggest combined operation of the Pacific war. To the north of the city Lieut. General Sir William J. Slim's land forces awaited the go signal. British East Indies Fleet units, standing in to the Gulf of Martaban, shelled the flatlands south of Rangoon. Paratroops floated down south of Rangoon to smooth the way for amphibious forces. Far to the southwest, in the Bay of Bengal, aircraft carriers and battleships carried out strikes on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to prevent interference with the big show...
Japanese strategy was first to seize the estuaries. The invaders drove from Siam into extreme Lower Burma, and then around the Gulf of Martaban to ruined, abandoned Rangoon...
...long, motherly Irrawaddy in the west ; the tired, gentle Sittang in the center; the wild Salween in the east. They rise in the northern hills, where God lives. They all run southward, through Upper Burma to the rice fields of the south, and then into the Gulf of Martaban and the Bay of Bengal...
...True, Martaban had fallen and Japanese troops had made a second crossing of the treacherous Salween River. But Martaban, choked with decades of the Salween's silt, has little or no strategic value as a port for water-borne assault against Rangoon, across the Martaban Gulf. The Martaban-Rangoon railway is a flimsy affair. And troops crossing the Salween near Paan, 90 aerial miles from Rangoon, were met last week by deadly accurate British Blenheims, sowing thousands of pounds of delayed-action fragmentation bombs that cut the invaders to shreds...
...forces did not fail for lack of effort. Ninety miles east of Rangoon they established a jumping-off spot at the smoking, Kipling-sung city of Moulmein, fanned northward along Burma's longest and swiftest river, the Salween, for a frontal assault against the curving coastal Martaban-Pegu railroad that leads into the Burma Road, feed line for seaborne supplies from the U.S. But there the advance slowed, then virtually halted...