Burma: Fleeing Rangoon Before the Japanese Tide
An Indian refugee from is one of the hundreds of thousands of Indians settled in British : dock workers, traders, stevedores, clerks, come from Bengal and southern to work in the great port city. For weeks, Japanese bombing has struck , the administration is crumbling, and rumours of an imminent fall spread through the Indian quarters.
In late February 1942, Japanese troops push toward after crossing the Sittang; the city will be occupied on 8 March. The British authorities organise their own withdrawal and that of the Europeans, but the mass of Indian civilians is left to fend for itself. To the north and west, jungle tracks lead toward through the and — hundreds of kilometres of forest, passes and swamp, where the monsoon, malaria and hunger lie in wait.
The refugee must choose quickly for his family: set out at once northward along the tracks of the and , at the mercy of the jungle; stay put in the hope that the occupation will spare civilians and let them work; or try to board one of the last ships leaving before the port closes.
Rangoon, February 1942, an Indian refugee from Burma: by which route to try to save his family from the Japanese advance?
From February 1942, more than 500,000 civilians, the great majority of them Indian, took to the road to on foot — an exodus remembered as "the Trek". On the tracks of the , the Hukawng Valley and , tens of thousands died of starvation, exhaustion, malaria, dysentery and cholera; the monsoon turned the paths into quagmires strewn with bodies. Sea evacuations from saved only a fraction of the civilians before the port fell. The exact toll was never established, but estimates range from several tens of thousands to more than 80,000 dead on the roads to .
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