<P> During April, Fourteenth Army advanced 300 miles (480 km) south towards Rangoon, the capital and principal port of Burma, but was delayed by Japanese rearguards 40 miles (64 km) north of Rangoon at the end of the month . Slim feared that the Japanese would defend Rangoon house - to - house during the monsoon, which would commit his army to prolonged action with disastrously inadequate supplies, and in March he had asked that a plan to capture Rangoon by an amphibious force, Operation Dracula, which had been abandoned earlier, be reinstated . Dracula was launched on 1 May, to find that the Japanese had already evacuated Rangoon . The troops that occupied Rangoon linked up with Fourteenth Army five days later, securing the Allies' lines of communication . </P> <P> The Japanese forces which had been bypassed by the Allied advances attempted to break out across the Sittaung River during June and July to rejoin the Burma Area Army which had regrouped in Tenasserim in southern Burma . They suffered 14,000 casualties, half their strength . Overall, the Japanese lost some 150,000 men in Burma . Only 1,700 prisoners were taken . </P> <P> The Allies were preparing to make amphibious landings in Malaya when word of the Japanese surrender arrived . </P> <P> The Borneo Campaign of 1945 was the last major campaign in the South West Pacific Area . In a series of amphibious assaults between 1 May and 21 July, the Australian I Corps, under General Leslie Morshead, attacked Japanese forces occupying the island . Allied naval and air forces, centered on the U.S. 7th Fleet under Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, the Australian First Tactical Air Force and the U.S. Thirteenth Air Force also played important roles in the campaign . </P>

Did the army fight in the pacific in ww2