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. Among the 26,380 Allied forces who died in Burma, many were Africans. They won General Slim’s admiration, yet Isaac and his comrades never even received campaign medals. ‘No one has sung their praise in this campaign,’ wrote a British officer with Orde Wingate’s Chindits, several thousand of whom were black Africans. ‘But their unwearied, unselfish and Christ-like service will not be forgotten by the men who came to rely on them.’
In March 1944 Isaac’s medical unit, the 29th Casualty Clearing Station, part of the 81st Division of the Royal West African Frontier Force advancing through the Arakan, was on the Kaladan river when it was caught in a Japanese ambush.
The Japanese found Isaac alive, surrounded by the bodies of men who had been machine-gunned.
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