Rangoon--End & Beginning

Somewhere in Burma, one day last week, Wing Commander A. E. Saunders' Royal Air Force squadron sadly posted him as missing; he had been gone too many hours on his reconnaissance mission. In their wildest imaginings his men could not have pictured what had happened: all by himself, Saunders had occupied Rangoon, the great prize of the year-long battles from India's frontier.

The Commander had tooled his airplane over Rangoon, and had seen no enemy activity. Warily, he peeped at the big Japanese airfield at Mingaladon. It was empty. So he landed. By foot and by cart, he made his way the twelve miles into Rangoon, there found a Union Jack flying over a jail where 1,400 British, U.S. and Indian war prisoners were quartered. The Japanese, who had occupied the big Burmese port since the fourth month of the Pacific war, had fled.

Then Airman-Infantryman Saunders became Seaman Saunders. He scrounged a sampan and sailed the Rangoon River southward. Soon he met British soldiers and passed the word. Then Rangoon was more fully and formally captured.

Big Show. To take Burma's capital Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten had mounted his biggest combined operation of the Pacific war. To the north of the city Lieut. General Sir William J. Slim's land forces awaited the go signal. British East Indies Fleet units, standing in to the Gulf of Martaban, shelled the flatlands south of Rangoon. Paratroops floated down south of Rangoon to smooth the way for amphibious forces. Far to the southwest, in the Bay of Bengal, aircraft carriers and battleships carried out strikes on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to prevent interference with the big show.

When the curtain was lifted on Rangoon there were surprisingly few Japs around. Some 30,000 of the enemy remained in Burma, but many of them were cut off by the sea to the west, their escape routes to Thailand sealed. If the almost bloodless taking of Rangoon was an anticlimax to the bloody battles that had been fought for Mandalay and the roads southward, the strategic results were even more satisfactory than had been hoped for.

Big Future. The badly beaten Japs had left Rangoon's fine port unblocked and virtually undamaged. Soon Allied seaborne supplies for China could be transferred there to the rails that run to Lashio, as they were before the Japs took Burma. The slow, arduous truck haul over the Stilwell Road from India to Lashio might soon be merely a secondary supply service.

Rangoon--in Burmese its name means "the end of the war"*--represented the virtual end of the Burma campaign and a good beginning toward greater victories.

* Rangoon is a corruption of Yan Kon; it was so named by a conquering Burmese king in 1753.

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