The forgotten flank of the forgotten corps of the Forgotten Army

The British who fought in Burma became known as the ‘Forgotten Army’ because this was a neglected theatre of the second world war. Barnaby Phillips’s tale is about the African forces fighting across this green hell — ‘the forgotten flank of the forgotten corps of the Forgotten Army’.

At the age of 16 Isaac Fadoyebo left his village in colonial Nigeria and joined Britain’s call for recruits in the war. Hitler did regard black people as ‘semi-apes’, but Britain enrolled 500,000 Africans to fight for a cause they barely understood against enemies on the other side of the world. Isaac was sent not to battle the Nazis in Europe, as many other Africans were, but to Burma, whose inhabitants were also caught up in a conflict that wasn’t theirs.

Some British generals assumed the Africans were suited to jungle warfare — even if they hailed from arid savannahs. African troops enjoyed promoting the idea that they ate human flesh to terrify their enemies, when most were devoutly religious.