Product Description

Nearly a million strong by 1944, the British 14th Army fought and ultimately defeated the Japanese forces that invaded Burma and strove to breakthrough into India. It was a near run thing, as the title of its commander's famous memoir, DEFEAT INTO VICTORY suggests. The Japanese routed the British forces in Malaya and Burma in 1941-2. The surrender of Singapore is the greatest defeat ever suffered by the British Army. The fight back was long and difficult, not the least because our forces in Burma and India were last in the queue for men and equipment as priority went to defeating Germany. The soldiers joked about being 'The Forgotten Army', although General Bill Slim famously told them. 'what do you mean, forgotten? No-one's f---ing heard of you.' Slim, who rose from private soldier to field marshal, proved to be one of the greatest soldiers of the war. This is the story of his remarkable army, the largest army fielded by Britain and the Commonwealth during World War II. From the brink of total defeat in 1942, the British rallied and ultimately liberated Burma and Malaya in summer 1945. Their monument at Kohima reads: When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say, For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32334 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Review
"fascinating, a fitting tribute to the men who fought and died in this most unforgiving of theatres. If at the time they were considered the 'Forgotten Army' it is books like We Gave Our Today that ensure they will always be remembered." (Max Arthur )

"An admirably clear account interwoven throughout with vivid eyewitness testimonies. There are few more shapely campaigns than Burma which saw a British Indian Army transformed from exhausted, beaten refugees into a war-winning machine by one of the most attractive generals in British history." (Martin Windrow, author of The Last Valley )

'concise, readable blend of expert historical overview and riveting eyewitness testimony... What a tale!' (MAIL ON SUNDAY - 19.04.09 JAMES DELINGPOLE )

'an excellent job of describing the background, tactics and operations of jungle warfare... An interesting, well-researched read for those who have little or no knowledge of his hard-fought campaign.' (SOLDIER MAGAZINE:04.09 )

"carefully researched... what happened in Burma - and other theatres of conflict - should wake those dormant consciences." (TRIBUNE - 20.3.09 )

"I warmly applaud any attempt to bring the Forgotten Army in Burma and India during the Second World War to the attention of the modern reading public.... Fowler places effective focus on the stories and experiences of individual soldiers in an attempt to give life to the story... If you are entirely new to the Burma Campaign, this book wil help you understand its long miseries." (WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? 1.04.09 )

About the Author
Educated at Clifton College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, William Fowler was land forces editor of DEFENCE magazine and a contributing editor to JANE'S INFORMATION GROUP. A long term territorial soldier, he served with British forces in the Gulf War and graduated from the French Army Reserve Staff Officers course at the Ecole Militaire in Paris. He conducts regular battlefield tours and broadcasts on radio and television. He is married and lives in Hampshire.

Customer Reviews

Do we need another general history of the war in Burma?
The question is; Do we need another general history of the war in Burma?
Unfortunately this book answers a definite NO!
It seems largely based on recently published, and easily available, accounts, most of which offer far better value than their partial regurgitation here. The author offers no new insights or information, so all that he can add are his own errors. Some are straightforward errors of fact; geography seems to be a particularly weak spot - the Imphal plain is described as a 300' high plateau - and most Burmese place names are misspelled. He's not very good on the organization of either army - a field gun detachment of 33 Mountain Regiment, 21 Indian Division landing at Ramree, 151 Parachute Battalion at Sangshak, etc. etc. People, too, fare badly - JS Stilwell, Bill Tennant becomes George, Patrick Davis 3 Gurkha Rifles rather than 8 Gurkha Rifles, Souter becomes Souther and so on. You may consider these minor errors but they demonstrate the author's unfamiliarity with the subject. More worrying that he seems to think that China declared war on Japan the day after Pearl Harbor and - unforgivably, for a book on the Burma campaign - states that 14 Army recaptured Rangoon. It didn't.
You'll be better off reading some of the accounts that he relies so heavily upon - Randle's `Battle Tales From Burma' or Hudson's `Sunset in the East', for example, but, if you really must have a single volume account of the war in Burma, it's probably best to stick to the classic - Louis Allen's `Burma: The Longest War'.

Competent, though uninspiring
I warmly applaud any attempt to bring the Forgotten Army in Burma and India during the Second World War to the attention of the modern reading public. This campaign has long been the second cousin to the better known struggles in North Africa, the Mediterranean and Western Europe, and yet deserves to be told again and again because of its vast and untapped depths of experience and memory. It is full of rich veins of interest, in terms of personal history, battlefield experience, leadership, politics, strategy and much more. The experience of the individual fighting man is remarkably powerful, but relative to those of other theatres remains poorly told. There remain too few good books on this subject.

Unfortunately, Fowler does not add much to the sum of our knowledge of the campaign in what is a rushed account that is competent though uninspiring. I am disappointed with Fowler's attempt to bring this story alive. This is because he tries to do too much, and crams his thin volume full of every manner of subject matter, without any care for the story line or for the sanctity of any single theme. Seemingly on every page he races between reminiscences to grand strategy, from the dirty, hand-to-hand skirmishes of the jungle battlefield to the broad sweep of the action that traversed a land mass the size of Western Europe, and does so in a staccato prose that leaves the reader struggling to help his eye on the story line. We move rapidly from Malaya, to Singapore, to Arakan, Imphal, Kohima and the vast plains of central Burma in an exhausting pace that leaves little room for detail or satisfying comprehension, let alone any pause for breath.

Fowler gives us little here that is new, either from the memoirs of veterans (Indian, British and Japanese) or in terms of a new perspective on the war (such as that from a Naga, Chinese or Japanese viewpoint) which a new book on this subject demands. His library is startlingly deficient in breadth. Some stunning individual accounts of the fighting at various stages of the campaign have simply not been used (such as those, for example by Raymond Street, Gordon Graham, John Neild, John Hamilton, John Leyin and David Atkins amongst many others). It does not seem that Fowler was even aware of that vast repository of intelligence on this campaign: the Burma Campaign Memorial Library at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS) in London which holds every book on the campaign that has been published in English. The book is deficient as a result, and no match for the late Jon Latimer's magnificent Burma, The Forgotten War (John Murray, 2005) which retains its foremost position among general accounts of the war in the Far East.

We Gave Our Today

I bought this book for my husband as his father served in the war in Burma. However, he was disappointed as it was mainly all facts and figures and statistics. Not really telling the story of the Chindits in Burma.