WAR AND PEACE ON MELROSE HILL

A chance encounter on a train journey leads to an amazing discovery of a decades-old World War 2 connection

- Dr Yashwant Thorat

May I have a light?” I looked up to see a Japanese gentleman, about my age, standing next to me with an unlit cigarette in his hand. I reached for my lighter. We were on a train, travelling from Berne to Geneva in the autumn of 1980.

“Are you Indian?” he asked.

“Yes” I replied.

We began talking. He was an official at the United Nations, returning home and to his headquarters. I was scheduled to lecture at the university. He gave me some useful tips on what to see and where to eat in the city. Having exhausted our store of small talk, we fell silent. I retrieved my book, Defeat into Victory, an account of the second World War in Burma, by Field Marshal William Slim. He opened up a newspaper.

After a while, he asked, “Are you a professor of military history?”

“No,” I replied. “Just interested. My father was in Burma during the War”. “Mine too,” he said.

In December 1941, Japan invaded Burma and opened the longest land campaign of the entire war for Britain. There were two reasons for the Japanese advance: First, cutting off the overland supply route to China via the Burma Road would deprive Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Chinese armies of military equipment and pave the way for the conquest of China.