Word: moulmein
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...Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Allied Southeast Asia commander, was now able to consider: 1) a move to cut off the Malay peninsula by a thrust through Moulmein to Bangkok; 2) a drive at southern Malaya and Singapore by way of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean...
Pilots Kenneth Jernstedt and William Reed popped out of a cloud into the hot blue sky over Burma. Below them, on the Jap-held airdrome at Moulmein, 25 or more enemy planes were lined up in tempting rows. The two "Flying Tigers" clawed the field with incendiary bullets, and Jernstedt dropped small fire bombs which he had packed into his flare release. The field was a junk heap of burning, exploding Jap planes when Jernstedt and Reed gunned their P-405 away, over the Salween River...
Certainly Japanese land and air 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...
...Moulmein fell. Sweat-wet, bare-backed British artillerymen fired point-blank into the advancing Japanese, piled them in shredded heaps. U.S. volunteer pilots strafed them. British bayonets stabbed them. Riflemen and machine-gunners tore their advancing ranks on the open flats before the city. But the Japs came on. From Moulmein they drove the outnumbered, outgunned British across the broad Salween River. There, behind the river barrier, the British took their stand between the Japanese and the prize they were fighting for: mastery of strategic Rangoon, of the Burma Road to China, of the invasion road to India...
...drove decisively through the mountains, and by week's end the head of his thrust lay close to the flat land extending east from Moulmein. The defenders' withdrawal had been orderly. Now they hoped to slice up the Jap in terrain that was more to their liking. Meanwhile, 150 miles south on Burma's slender panhandle, the Jap had grabbed Tavoy. In that position he held a secondary block against any British push to the south, which at the moment was unlikely...