The forgotten war

Even Churchill neglected to give sufficient weight to the fighting in the Far East in his magisterial account of the Second World War. Not fair, writes ROBERT LYMAN

- Rob Lyman is author of A War of Empires and Slim, Master of War

THE WAR in Burma has been dismissed by some as a strategic sideshow, in the sense that winning or losing was not decisive in ending the conflict.

This began with the 'Germany First' policy agreed between Roosevelt and Churchill at the Arcadia Conference in Washington at the end of 1941.

Thereafter it was to prove the orphan child of Allied strategy, the product of humiliation in 1942, never fully to obtain a pre-eminent status in Allied planning or in the minds of historians subsequently.

Churchill gave it a cursory reference in his history of the Second World War, confining the "forgotten" status soldiers grumbled about (and later wore as a badge of honour) during fighting. In the volume entitled Closing the Ring, Churchill gave the 1944 campaign at Kohima and Imphal, which saw the dramatic curtailing of Japanese plans to invade India, less than a page.

The "sepoy general" (the phrase was originally Napoleon's, about Wellington) who commanded the army that secured remarkable victories in 1944 and 1945 - Lieutenant General 'Uncle Bill' Slim - wasn't even mentioned. Nor was the name of his Army, the 14th.

Remarkable given the Burma Campaign was the longest fought by Allied armies and, in 1945, provided the largest army group ever assembled by the Commonwealth and its friends. In April 1945, the number of Allied service personnel in South East Asia Command totalled 1,304,126, including nearly 300,000 Americans.