Na Nien, Thailand. 19 March 1945. A Japanese train transporting oil has been hit in the middle of ...

Na Nien, Thailand. 19 March 1945. A Japanese train transporting oil has been hit in the middle of the sidings, and great clouds of blacksmoke billow skywards. To disrupt Japanese supplies reaching the Burma front, over eighty heavy bombers of Strategic Air Force, Eastern Air Command, flew across the Indian Ocean in the longest raid they have yet accomplished. When the crew returned from their mission, some of them had been in the air for seventeen and a half hours and had flown 2,500 miles. While US Army Air Force B-24 bomber aircraft attacked a series of targets south of Chumphon in the Gulf of Siam, RAF Liberator aircraft attacked the heavily used railway sidings, eight miles west of Chumphon. Some of the aircraft, which went into attack from as low as 400 feet, saw prisoners of war (POWs) waving to them as they passed over the Kra Isthmus. The whole sidings were covered by the attack and many railway buildings were left burning while one part of the sidings was completely burnt out. Trains were set on fire, and a large oil fire started. Not content with this devastating attack some of the crews flew another fifty miles further south and strafed locomotives on the Singapore rail route.