The Flames of Toungoo

Rangoon was a grave. The roads of southern Burma were alive with miserable Indian thousands, in flight both from the Japanese and from long-knived Burmese nationalists. To every white man they saw, the Indians lifted dark hands, dark faces, and cried "Sahib! Sahib!" They cried for water, for money, for safety from the lurking dacoits who knifed and stripped the stragglers.

They cried in vain. The white men also were in flight from southern Burma. Some stayed in Rangoon, to shoot Burmese looters and hold to the last, until the Japs finally entered this week, the remnants of that golden city. British and Indian troops fought, fell back, fought again. British crews arrived with a few U.S. tanks-too few. U.S. pilots in China's American Volunteer Group had to abandon Rangoon, after taking a heavy toll of Japanese planes with the few bullet-battered fighters left to them. 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."

Over the Mountains. Southern Burma was all but gone. General Sir Archibald Wavell, taking over the India-Burma command (see p. 19), had to assume that it was gone. He had then to decide what more to defend for the salvation of India.

The immediate answer was: northern Burma. Its formidable mountain masses along the India border would slow if not halt the penetrative Japanese. Mongols, invading India seven centuries ago, had shied off from those ranges and chosen to enter by easier routes from the northwest. But north Burma had one immense value which compelled its defense to the utmost. Through mountains to the north the Chinese were boring a new truck route to China, to replace the lost Burma Road. A regular air-freight route over the same mountains was also in prospect. Through a few high and difficult passes (see map), elephant trains had already borne some supplies to river and highway inlets into China.

It was almost certain that the Japanese would drive on northward, do their most to block these lifelines. With the same stroke, 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.

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