Word: rangoon
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Japanese strategy was first to seize the estuaries. The invaders drove from Siam into extreme Lower Burma, and then around the Gulf of Martaban to ruined, abandoned Rangoon...
...conquers Burma must win the rivers and their valleys. With them go Burma's chief port, Rangoon; the oil of Yanangyaung, on the Irrawaddy ; the ruby and silver mines; 85% of all the precious tungsten in the British Empire; Burma's rubber plantations; the inland cities-Pegu, Prome, Mandalay-where Burmese kings once ruled their separate realms, and the British were never quite at home...
...After Rangoon, the battle for Burma was a struggle to keep the Japs in the south, at the river mouths. In the spring, the south is a grey, heat-beaten land, where only the rivers are cool and even the wide rice paddies gape with cracks in the baking earth. It is a time when prudent men, fools, even Englishmen stay out of the midday sun. But the Japs fought in the sun, and drove the British steadily up the Irrawaddy and Sittang valleys. Then the Chinese came down from the north...
Only British and U.S. flyers broke the quiet. R.A.F. bombers from India or Ceylon, raiding the Japs' Port Blair in the Andamans, wrecked a nest of Jap flying boats. From India, Major General Lewis Hyde Brereton sent U.S. Flying Fortresses 750 miles to Rangoon, where they bombed troopships arriving to reinforce the Japs in Burma (see p. 22). Evidently, the Japs did not control all the air all the time...
...Toungoo was one of the two points in central Burma where Allied troops had taken a stand against the Japs advancing from the conquered south. The other was Prome, where General H. R. L. G. Alexander had, to some extent, refitted his battered British Imperials after their retreat from Rangoon. Last week they had to retreat again. They abandoned Prome, but they were still between the Japs and the valuable oilfields of Burma's Irrawaddy Valley...