The 17th Indian Infantry Division arrived at the Sittang having already given everything it had. Days earlier, these soldiers had fought the Battle of Bilin River, an exhausting engagement that left them weakened and short of supplies. On 19 February they received permission to withdraw westward to the bridge -- a 30-mile retreat along a single track through jungle and rubber plantations. But the Japanese 214th and 215th Regiments were advancing on a parallel course with a single objective: reach the bridge first and cut the British forces off. What followed was a race that the retreating division, burdened with wounded and low on water, was poorly positioned to win.

February 21st dawned bright and hot. The division was short of water and strung out along the road when Japanese aircraft found them, strafing and bombing the column, forcing soldiers to abandon vehicles and scatter into the Bogyagi Rubber Estate for cover. At 05:00, the divisional headquarters at Kyaikto came under direct attack, though the Japanese were beaten back. A small mixed force, including detachments from the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, held the bridge itself. Meanwhile, the Malerkotla Sappers and Miners, led by Richard Orgill, wired the bridge with demolition charges -- preparing to destroy the only escape route for the men still fighting their way toward it from the east.

By 22 February, the situation had become a commander's nightmare. The 16th and 46th Indian Infantry Brigades were still east of the river, cut off and fighting. Smyth deployed the 1/4th Gurkhas to the western end of the bridge to guard against attacks from the rear, but the Japanese 33rd Division struck hard from the east, nearly overrunning the bridge's far end and capturing a British field hospital in the process. The 3rd and 5th Gurkha battalions, approaching from the east, counterattacked in what survivors described as "a furious battle" and drove the Japanese back. But the fundamental dilemma remained: the bridge was wired for demolition, the Japanese were closing in from multiple directions, and two brigades were on the wrong side of the river. The charges were blown. Thousands of soldiers were stranded.

What happened next defied expectation. The Japanese, focused on speed rather than annihilation, chose not to destroy the trapped brigades. Taking Rangoon was the prize, and a prolonged mopping-up operation would cost precious time. They disengaged and headed north to find another crossing point. Later on 22 February, survivors of the 17th Division began swimming and ferrying themselves across the Sittang in broad daylight -- an exposed, desperate crossing that somehow succeeded. After smaller engagements at the Battle of Pegu and the Taukkyan Roadblock, the Japanese took Rangoon unopposed on 9 March. The survivors of the 17th Division, battered but intact, slipped northward. They would remain in almost constant contact with the Japanese from December 1941 through July 1944, when the division was finally pulled from the front line at the end of the Battle of Imphal.

Historian Louis Allen put it plainly: "The blowing of the Sittang Bridge with two brigades still on the wrong side of the river was the turning point in the first Burma campaign. Once the Sittang Bridge had gone and the 17th Division rendered powerless, the road to Rangoon was open, and the fate of Burma sealed." Today, the Sittang River flows quietly through the lowlands of eastern Myanmar, and the bridge site bears little visible trace of the chaos that unfolded there in February 1942. But the decision made at this crossing -- to destroy the bridge and save what could be saved, at the cost of abandoning thousands -- remains one of the most agonizing command choices of the Second World War's Pacific and Asian theatres.