Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 FROM THE PUBLISHER
More than a military history, this account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay, as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.
FROM THE CRITICS
Benjamin Schwarz - The New York Times
In Forgotten Armies Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, two Cambridge historians, explore these events and their intricate and often terrible repercussions from the perspectives of both the British and the Asian peoples of the region. A work at once scholarly and panoramic, it is as precise in dissecting, say, the logistical problems the Japanese Army confronted during the 1944 campaign in northern Burma (''the worst defeat in Japan's military history'') as it is arresting in examining such sweeping events as the 1942 trek of some 600,000 Indian, Burmese and Anglo-Indian refugees from Burma through the high passes of Assam into India, fleeing the advancing Japanese.
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