World Battlefronts: Bitter Blow

• Tweet
• Digg

The Burma Road was cut. Japanese dominance in the Bay of Bengal left India's naked eastern coast exposed to attack from the sea. Rangoon was on fire. Reinforcements now would be too late.

On the muddy Sittang River flats, east of the Burma Road and a scant 60 miles north of Rangoon, the outnumbered defenders fought on bravely under General Sir Alan Fleming Hartley. A north-south British Imperial line west of the Sittang held under repeated Japanese assaults. Fresh divisions of tough Chinese troops were reported on the way down the Burma Road.

Toward Rangoon. The Jap had not reached Burma first, but he did have the mostest men. When the fiercely fighting, outnumbered defenders succeeded at times in stopping his slow push toward Rangoon, he simply slackened his fire, tightened his lines and waited for reinforcements from occupied Siam. When Allied fighter planes, notably those manned by American Volunteer Group pilots, scored heavily against him aloft, he prudently lessened his aerial activity. His lightly clad, lightly armed soldiers advanced through dense jungles and across three rivers. Additional reinforcements had been released by Singapore's fall for the thrust at Rangoon.

An American pilot, after visiting four large Burma towns, told U.P. Correspondent Karl Eskelund that many Burmese had sold out to the invader. His report: "Natives in many districts have rebelled and are killing unarmed Britishers. The Burmese are assisting the advancing Japanese in every possible way. . . . Rangoon is a horrible place. Foreigners risk their lives when they walk in the city, which is completely in the hands of looters and killers who are running amok."

Death of a City. Rangoon presented a sorry picture. Evacuation of the city continued, thousands of refugees streaming out along two roads to northern India. Authorities dealt summarily with looters and "incendiarists." but the situation appeared well out of hand. This time the scorched-earth policy was really being applied: wharves, mills, storage tanks, vast supplies of rice, a wealth of U.S. material destined for China were in flames. Because there was no time to assemble them. 100 General Motors trucks, which had been destined for service with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, were destroyed. The conquerors of once-beautiful Rangoon would find a looted, smoking city.

And it was not likely that the Japanese would do much, at first, about rehabilitating and repairing Rangoon. Their task was to consolidate their gains in southern Burma, to control the Indian Ocean, to see to it that China's supply lines were neither reopened nor revised. Two bombing attacks on Port Blair, capital city of the Andaman Islands, famed Indian penal colony and weather observatory sites in the Bay of Bengal, served notice as to which job the Japanese will tackle first.

With these islands as aerial and naval bases, they would be within bombing dis tance of Calcutta and Chittagong, Indian ports for the new highway linking Assam Province in India to Sikang in China.