Stung into stupidity – or heroism

I know lots of second world war veterans who rather enjoyed their war against the Germans. But I’ve never met one who enjoyed his war against the Japanese. As the Eastern Front was to the Western Front, so the Far Eastern front was to the European/North African front: the fighting was more implacably brutal, the conditions more ferociously grim, the chances of coming out in one piece notably slimmer.

That’s why, in dark times like these, I find it of such great comfort to read a novel like Harold James’s The Scorpion Trap (Janus). It’s a brilliant fictionalised account by a former Gurkha officer of those hideous and terrifying early stages of the war when implacable Japanese overran our colonies. On the Burma retreat alone, our forces lost around 13,000 killed, wounded or missing. But 30,000 of them made it, after a three-and-a-half-month, 1,000-mile retreat to the Indian border — still carrying their arms, still keeping their ranks, still with their dignity intact.