We Gave Our Today by William Fowler
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20
IN 1942 Adolf Hitler’s Japanese allies were rampaging across south-east Asia. Hong Kong had been captured, Malaya overrun and the surrender of Singapore was a humiliation without parallel in the modern history of the British Army. The battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales had been sunk by enemy aircraft and the shadow of the rising sun was spreading across land and sea to threaten Australia.
When Burma fell, soldiers and civilians were forced into a long and harrowing trek to the border with India. There British and Commonwealth troops turned to face the Japanese. Soldiers joked bitterly that they were the “Forgotten Army” because they were at the end of the queue for reinforcements and equipment; priority always being given to the European theatre of war.
The tide turned slowly after the epic frontier battles of Imphal and Kohima where, in bloody circumstances, the Japanese were halted. The man in charge of the 14th Army, General “Uncle Bill” Slim, was later described by Mountbatten as the finest general of the Second World War. He and his army achieved success by sheer guts in terrain thick with jungles, rivers wide and deep and the ever present danger of malaria.
The Burma campaign was the war’s longest – longer than North Africa, Italy and the struggle to free Europe from the Nazi yoke. After VE Day some units and key personnel were transferred from Europe to the Far East and this reviewer recalls the goodbyes to a major who had led his squadron of tanks across the continent to Bremen.
Everyone who donned a uniform when fascism was in its pomp has difficulty erasing memories of that period. Numbers dwindle as veterans are called to join their comrades who fell in battle. But the recollections of comradeship intensify rather than fade at a time when the mantra of “greed before need” is finally heading for the bin.
Reading William Fowler’s carefully researched history of the Burma campaign prompts a few questions. Where are the survivors now? And under what circumstances, when recognition of their valour is so poorly recompensed? Has society developed in the ways recognised then as being for the common good?
The driver of the tank in which I served came from the Rhondda. His name was Jones and, when there was a lull and time to devour tins of meat and veg and jam pudding, he would exclaim: “An elegant sufficiency!” He wanted to go down the mines when he got back to civvie street and become one of Margaret Thatcher’s “enemy within” – what an outrageous slur on men who served their nation so faithfully. The dimming of our moral lights gathers pace; what happened in Burma – and other theatres of conflict – should wake those dormant consciences.
Tony Heath
