BURMA: THE FORGOTTEN WAR: The Complete History of the Fourteenth Army’s War 1941-1945

THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR’S MOST BRUTAL CAMPAIGN

‘ Completely authoritative ’ The Guardian
‘ Outstanding ’ The Spectator
‘ Magnificently comprehensive ’ Guardian Books of the Year

When Mountbatten arrived in Burma to raise morale, his message was blunt. You’re not the Forgotten Army, he told them. Nobody has even heard of you.

For four years, British, Indian, African, Chinese, American and Japanese forces fought over Burma in country that killed as efficiently as any enemy. It began in catastrophe — nine hundred miles of retreat, the longest in British military history, through flooded jungle and cholera camps as the monsoon broke over the column. It ended with the destruction of an entire Japanese army and one of the great feats of arms in British military history.

Jon Latimer’s acclaimed history covers the campaign in full: from Rangoon’s fall and the disaster on the Sittang, through the sieges of Kohima and Imphal and Wingate’s Chindit operations behind Japanese lines, to Slim’s crossing of the Irrawaddy and the victories at Meiktila, Mandalay and Rangoon. It sets the fighting against the strategy that shaped it — Churchill’s determination to recover Singapore, Roosevelt’s determination to end empires, Stilwell’s war with Chiang Kai-shek, and the road to China that dictated everything.

It also tells the story the military histories usually leave out. The Fourteenth Army was overwhelmingly Indian, and fought for a British Empire that would be gone within three years of victory. Burma itself was the war’s true casualty, and the independence struggle that ran beneath the campaign shaped the country that emerged from it — and the one that exists today.

Drawing on letters, diaries, memoirs and interviews from participants on every side, and on the full range of British, Indian, Japanese and American sources, Latimer moves from the war rooms of Washington and Delhi to the mud of the Chindwin, giving the campaign both its strategic shape and the voices of the soldiers, airmen, refugees and villagers whose lives it consumed.

Jon Latimer (1964–2009) served for sixteen years as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers (TA) and published widely in military journals. His books include Deception in War , Alamein , and 1812: War with America , which won a Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History.