Word: sittang
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Burma is a land of three rivers: the 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...
...rivers are cool and even the wide rice paddies gape with cracks in the baking earth. It is a time when prudent men, fools, even Englishmen stay out of the midday sun. But the Japs fought in the sun, and drove the British steadily up the Irrawaddy and Sittang valleys. Then the Chinese came down from the north...
...British and Indians concentrated on the Irrawaddy front. The Chinese took over the Sittang-and, later, when the Japs opened a flanking drive along the Salween in the east, that front as well...
...Chinese had no choice but to abandon the town. Across brushlands and rice paddies, they rushed from the sheltering trees and houses of Toungoo. Jap artillery fired pointblank. The Chinese scattered, broke through to the Sittang River, waded and swam it, under constant fire. They took their losses, but they won through to the main Chinese forces in the north. For every dead Chinese on the fields and hills around Toungoo, they left four dead Japs...
...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 connects Rangoon with Lashio, at the foot of the Burma Road...
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