Word: toungoo
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North of Rangoon the advance was two-pronged. Moving along the rail line to Mandalay and the Burma Road's stump, one army approached the black ruins of Toungoo. Another went forward along a rail spur and highway toward Prome (home of one of Kipling's famed Ladies), an unhealthy town of 30,000 in a bowl of pagoda-topped hills. Beyond Prome were the oil fields of Yenahgyaung. The British were tired. The somber phrase, "delaying actions," popped up in dispatches day after day. One day there was action near Nyaunglebin, south of Toungoo; next...
Chinese forces, described in London dispatches as "shock troops" armed with American lend-lease equipment, were moving into southeast Burma, where a major battle was expected in the region of Toungoo, on the Rangoon-Mandalay communications line...
...Correspondent Leland Stowe watched a bombed village burn, and wrote "When you looked again at the sagging skeletons of these wooden structures, somehow you thought immediately of Japan-Japanese buildings are made of the same tinderlike material as these Burmese dwellings. That seemed to be what the flames in Toungoo were saying...
...they would further brace themselves for a sea-and-air drive across the Bay of Bengal at India. The Allies, with all Burma gone, would find it harder than ever to defend uncertain India, harder still to place bombers, tanks and artillery in China to answer the flames of Toungoo...