“The only test of generalship is success, and I had succeeded in nothing I had attempted.”
— The future Field Marshal Viscount Slim, then commanding British Empire forces in Burma, 1942
Every American strategist knows the famous warning: “Don’t fight a land war in Asia.” Unfortunately, sometimes they are unavoidable. Fortunately, on balance Western military powers have a very good record in winning land wars in Asia, if less so since 1945. One of the most interesting and successful ground campaigns of the twentieth century was the British-led effort to defend India from Japanese invasion via Southeast Asia from 1941 to 1945. A million Allied troops of the Fourteenth Army fought the Japanese for control of Burma over a 700-mile battlefront—the largest in any theater of World War II. During this campaign, special operations forces made their Asian debut, in the form of the famous Chindits. For much of the war, the fate of India, then still part of the British Empire, hung in the balance. While often referred to as the “forgotten war,” in fact, the British high command recognized that victory in Southeast Asia was critical to victory in World War II. It was also a crucial factor in the decline and fall of the British-led world order: the costs of defending India in a modern war were so unsustainable they made empire economically unattractive for the first time, and contributed to the formal end of the British Empire with Indian independence in 1947.
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