22.0°N 96.0°E Southeast Asia Burma Campaign
Briefing
Fought across some of the worst terrain on earth, the war in Burma ran from Japan's 1942 conquest — the longest retreat in British history — to Slim's Fourteenth Army destroying two Japanese armies at Imphal, Kohima, and the Irrawaddy. It remains the Forgotten War: monsoon, jungle, disease, and a multinational army of British, Indian, African, American, and Chinese troops.
Books Covering This Event (6)
Memoir
The commander of the Fourteenth Army tells how a beaten force was rebuilt to destroy the Japanese in Burma.
The Flashman author's memoir of fighting in Burma as a nineteen-year-old private in the Border Regiment.
A Gordon Highlander survives Singapore, the Death Railway, a torpedoed hell ship, and the Nagasaki blast — and stays silent for sixty years.
Historical Fiction
British POWs are forced to build a railway bridge for their Japanese captors — and their colonel builds it too well.
An American corporal thrives by trading in Changi POW camp, where officers starve and rank means nothing.
This Event on Screen
Screen adaptations of books on this page, each linked to the book it came from: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).
The War in Books: The Burma Campaign
The Forgotten War, and the two great memoirs that keep it from being lost.
The Burma campaign has given the war two memoirs that may be among its best, from opposite ends of the chain of command. William Slim’s Defeat Into Victory is the commander’s account, and it is unusually modest for its kind: an honest description of how a beaten army was rebuilt and turned on its enemy. George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here looks at the same army from the ranks. Written decades later by the author of the Flashman novels, it is funny and sharply observed, and it defends the men he served with against later assumptions about what they must have thought.
The theatre’s other story is captivity. Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge over the River Kwai and the film made from it made the Death Railway famous, although the novel is a fable and should not be read as history. James Clavell’s King Rat draws on his own time as a prisoner at Changi. James Hornfischer’s Ship of Ghosts follows the crew of the USS Houston into slave labour on the railway, and Alistair Urquhart’s The Forgotten Highlander is one man’s account of an extraordinary run of survivals. Start with Slim and Fraser for the campaign, then turn to the prisoners, whose ordeal ran alongside it.