Burma The Forgotten War 2007 Thistle Publishing 2007 Jon Latimer by Jon Latimer instant download after payment.

‘In a little-known corner of Asia there was once a land as fair as any that a traveller could hope to discover’, wrote Stephen Brookes of the land of his birth. ‘It is still there, though you would have difficulty in relating what you see to the splendour of how things used to be before the armies of Japan, Britain and China fought over it for four years and left it broken and brutalised.’1 This is the story of a war that was to have a profound, lasting and deleterious effect on its unwilling host. While what is presented here is fundamentally a military history, the war in Burma does not lend itself well to a single treatment. Nevertheless, a single theme runs through it: the struggle of the Burmese people for independence after sixty years of occupation.2

For the British it represented a colossal expenditure in treasure and blood (most of which, it must be said, was Indian) for a colony that within three years and largely as a result of the war gained independence. But it is wrong to belittle the efforts of the men that fought it, whose achievement nothing can diminish. Some time after the war a memorial was unveiled near Rangoon dedicated to the ‘27,000 men of the Commonwealth forces who died in Assam and Burma in the defence of freedom to whom the fortunes of war denied the ordinary rites accorded to their comrades in death’.

Given the terrible regime in Burma for most the time since, one might question whether the war fought between 1941 and 1945 was for ‘freedom’. Looking back now, sixty years since the war’s end, its purpose