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Protect Goa's natural beauty
Support Goa's first Tiger Reserve
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Donovan Webster, 2003.
By March 7, 1941, Rangoon had fallen and British and Indian forces abandoned
the city. With streets emptied, roving bands of convicts and mental hospital
inmates looted and torched homes and stores. Dalhousie Street and the
commercial center, Phayre Street were in ruins.
Those Burmese remaining in the city exercised their long time hatred of
Indians by shooting any they encountered, then hacking them with two-foot long
'dahs.'
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Colonels Haynes and Scott flew from Assam to Gen. Stillwell's HQ in Schwebo
with orders to evacuate him and his officers - he declined the lift ! Staffers
were loaded on the plane and sent to India. He planned to walk and regroup with
the Nationalist Chinese. After five days of hard jungle marching, they arrived
in Homalin. Crossing the Chindwin, the general exchanged his Burmese porters
for the more knowledgeable Naga tribals. Stillwell immediately took to the
Naga's mix of easy manners and ferocious looks: many wore bearskin cloaks and
hair crests in the middle of shaven heads. The Naga's shared their rice beer
with outsiders and carried the heaviest of loads. The group humped three
thousand vertical feet into the Naga Hills beneath a monsoonal downpour.
Ethnologists have identified 133 different linguistic groups within Burma's
borders. The majority are placid Buddhistd, but a few of the most isolated
groups - particularly the Mons, Nagas, Karens and Kachens - are religious
animists, and have remained fiercely independent for centuries. The British
Crown regime left the tribes strictly alone.
In response to the tribal's brutal 'shadow war,' the Japanese had to halt
the invasion and northward advance in the country with two thirds of the land
in hand. The Kachins fought with spears, but over time they recieved supplies
of shotguns gifted by British colonial tea planters in Assam.
The U.S. was not formally at war with Japan, so Roosevelt commited
'volunteer' airmen to join the campaign. Equal part pilots and rakes, they
exuded energy - and a formidable lack of discipline. They flew in cowboy boots
and shorts, taking off one booze - soaked evening in an unauthorized bombing
run over distant Hanoi using a C-47 cargo plane and gasoline-filled whisky
bottles as incendiaries.
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Post script: Rangoon born Maj. Caesar Menezes, Sangolda roots, retired from
the Indian Army in 1970. He had kept a Jap cartridge that lodged in his
spine to the end of his life.
