In The Fight – Australia and the Burma Campaign – Book Review

On 4 November this Big Sky Publishing in Australia is publishing In The Fight, a new book examining the various connections between Australia and the Burma Campaign between 1942 and 1945.

With contributions from a wide array of historical talent, the book has been edited by Andrew Kilsby and Daryl Moran. In addition to the editors the contributors are Karl James, Peter Holmes, Meghan Adams, Tom Lewis, Anthea Gunn, Alexandra Torrens, Ian Wilkinson, David Mitchelhill-Green, Jacqueline Dinan and Kama MacLean.

It’s a great book, and exposes for the first time, in a single volume, a wide array of Australian military experience in Burma, India and Sri Lanka thathas long been forgotten, if its been known at all. The fight against the Japanese in the Far East, often simply referred to as the Burma campaign, was a truly allied effort. Of the 1.3 million men and women in Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command by 1945, 58 per cent were from India, 21 percent America, eight per cent the United Kingdom, seven percent Africa and five per cent China. Lieutenant General Sir William Slim’s 14th Army comprised formations that were American, British, and Indian.

Despite what some newspapermen at the time supposed, seeing the ‘Australian’ slouch hat worn in India from 1943, no Australian units were committed to this theatre of war, with the honourable exception of several destroyers assigned to the British Eastern Fleet in early 1942 to support naval operations in the Bay of Bengal. There was enough for Australia to do at the time as part of the extended Pacific Theatre operations in New Guinea and elsewhere. But as this ground-breaking volume asserts, this doesn’t mean that Australians were absent from the fight in Burma. In fact, right across the spectrum of operations on land, at sea and in the air – together with a plethora of other activities – Australians were associated with the Burma campaign in a myriad of fascinating ways.

To read the full Review visit The War Room

Reviewed for The War Room by Dr. Robert Lyman MBE

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