Word: salween
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
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...
...solid week defending British Imperial troops systematically cut down a succession of small Japanese detachments venturing across the Salween. One large-scale crossing attempt was a dismal and costly failure: R.A.F. fighters and bombers pounced on invasion barges in midstream, left hundreds of the invaders dead, dying or scrambling in the swift water. The battered Japanese waited for fresh reinforcements from Thailand before risking another crossing attempt. Burma's commander Lieut. General Thomas Jacomb Hutton spoke confidently: "We are in a far sounder position to call a halt to the Japanese than before...
...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...
...only unblockaded supply route for U.S. goods is the Burma Road. Since the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China last January the Road has been within 350 miles of Japanese airfields. The Road is peculiarly vulnerable: it passes over two bridges slung precariously in gorges of the Mekong and Salween Rivers, and as it winds around the shoulders of huge hills it is as easy to see as a yellow ribbon binding a pile of green bundles. That it has not been permanently cut has been due to the halfheartedness and poor aim of Japanese bombers, and to the amazing...