Word: thailand
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Long before the attack there had been political stupidities. In September, Thai land, air and sea officers were given a thorough and amiable tour of inspection of Singapore's defenses; Thailand was now a Jap pawn. Well before the attack Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had offered Chinese troops to help defend British territory; the British had turned down the offer. At this late hour something was finally being done about mobilizing Malaya's 2,200,000 Japanophobe Chinese as air wardens, propagandists, guerrillas...
...Japanese heavily bombed Kunming, Chinese terminus of the Burma Road, to prevent, they said, a Chinese drive into Indo-China or later through Burma into Thailand...
After these first landings, far greater forces (estimated at 15,000 men) landed unopposed on the neck of Thailand, at Cape Patani and Singora. From there they hurried hellbent, by rail and road, with artillery, tanks and dive-bombers, due south toward Alor Star on the west coast. The British admitted falling back in the face of this heavier assault...
...Road to Mandalay. The capitulation of Thailand, probably long arranged, paved the way for an attack on Burma. A Japanese force cut up-country as fast as it could go. Perhaps as a pretext for invading Burma, the Japanese announced that the British, with some Chinese help, had pushed 30 miles into Thailand to Chieng Rai. This the British denied. The Japanese bombed Burmese airports to try to get air superiority...
With wisps of Axis battle smoke all but drifting across India's borders from Russia and Thailand, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and his recently released companions in civil disobedience began to waken from their prison apathy and make concessions to the logic of events. Effective as Mahatma Gandhi's passive-resistance technique may have been against the relatively civilized British, its potential worth against enemy tanks and bombers appeared questionable...