Word: salween
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...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...
Rangoon was in dire danger. Some 40,000 Japanese in the front lines, 30,000 more in reserve pressed toward the last of three rivers which barred their advance. They had crossed the Salween. They put bicycle scouts in Burmese dress, sent them worming ahead to find weak spots. Small parties of soldiers followed the scouts, stabbed here & there, and called in stronger forces when a foothold was seized. Thus they crossed the Bilin, and moved slowly on toward Rangoon's last important river barrier, the Sittang. The same advance carried them nearer & nearer to the one railway which...
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...
...hundreds of trucks moving supplies northward into China and returning with crack, seasoned Chinese troops, drawn from Chiang Kai-shek's elite divisions and equipped with rifles, bayonets, hand grenades, light & heavy machine guns, trench mortars and automatic pistols. Many of them were already in action on the Salween front. New arrivals strung out protectively along the Burma Road north of Lashio or skirmished with the Jap along the Thai border...
...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...