Lucy Betteridge-Dyson's Reading List

"This book is a real page-turner and brings the visceral human cost of the war in the Far East to the fore. As I said, the way I got into the history was by reading memoirs and personal stories. I saw an interview with Alistair on TV, years and years ago and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, what an incredible man.’ Urquhart survived the sinking of the ship he was on, worked on the Thai-Burma Railway , and ended up as a prisoner of war near Nagasaki. All these key events in the war against Japan—and this man was there. His descriptions are very harrowing in parts, but not in a gratuitous way. It’s just an honest man talking about what he experienced. For me, it really clarified that the war in Southeast Asia was not a sideshow. It covered a vast area. In my opinion, it was the most brutal theatre of the war Britain fought in because of the Japanese ideology. For the Japanese, to be taken prisoner of war was a fate worse than death, so they treated any prisoners that they took with contempt. Alistair’s writing and his recollections really underline that. It helps me to understand why the Japanese army fought the way it did. And the title, The Forgotten Highlander, links back to what we were discussing, about the men of the 14th Army feeling completely overshadowed by the troops who fought in Europe. It’s amazing. It’s a survival story. One thing that sticks in my mind from the book is when he talks about coming home to Scotland . He found sitting down and having meals with his family incredibly difficult. He was so pleased to be home but had this feeling of, ‘I can’t possibly explain what I’ve seen, what I’ve been through. We’re sitting here having a Sunday dinner and talking about the weather, but I’m still living with these horrors.’ That’s something that is true of all warfare—whether it’s Burma or Afghanistan . So the human story is the reason I picked this as one of the books that people should read if they want to understand more about the war in Asia."

"This is really a big picture, strategic book. It’s a great explanation of the political background and drivers of all of the nations that were involved in the war in British India—the Japanese, the British, the Indians and all the factions. It really helps to unpick it, because I think that’s something that really puts a lot of people off about understanding the war in Burma, that the social and political backdrop is so complicated. Rob does an incredible job at taking you through it all, because we’re not just talking about the British Army, the Indian Army and the Japanese army. We’re talking about the hill tribes. We’re talking about the Indian National Army. We’re talking about the different parts of Burmese society and where their loyalties lie, the Chinese, the US. It covers a huge area. If you’re coming to this fresh, it can feel overwhelming. A War of Empires is the book to read to really give you the context of the experiences of people like Alastair. It’s about all of them and understanding what each nation’s motivations were for being in Burma. The book does a lot of mythbusting as well. There’s this old idea that Japan wanted to invade Burma for the resources—rubber and things like that. That’s not really true. They invaded Burma because they wanted to cut off the American supply to China, because the Japanese had been fighting China for a long time. It’s about understanding why the Americans were so invested in China. China was very, very important to America. It wasn’t actually that important to the British, but because it was important to the Americans, it became important to the British and so therefore it became important to British India. The book is about the geopolitics of it all, and that’s what makes it a fascinating read. It all links to the Burma campaign and what the Burma campaign meant for imperialism and for British India after the war. There is quite a lot in the book about the Indian nationalist cause and whether this affected the conflict as much as some say or not. It’s also about the American idea of imperialism. They wanted to support China because they thought China would be good for America. People forget that China was an ally in the Second World War. So it’s really giving that context. It’s a must-read if you want to understand why the men and the women who were part of this vast 14th Army were there in the first place."

"Something that, as a historian, you need to understand and check yourself on is your bias when you’re writing. My granddad and many veterans say that the Japanese were cruel soldiers and did things that were against the unwritten rules of warfare. The reason why I like this book is because it forces you out of the Allied perspective. It’s primary testimony from the mouths of Japanese soldiers themselves, talking about their experience in the war. They weren’t the jungle robot super-soldiers that they were often made out to be, with no heart and no empathy. They also had families. They also felt lost. They also wept when their comrades died. This book humanizes them, and it makes you remember that there was a reason behind the atrocities that the Japanese carried out. It might not be a reason that we would comprehend now or even then, because it’s not our culture. But they believed in it for reasons linked to their own history. For me, as a historian, the book is also quite interesting in how it’s been written, because—if I remember rightly—all the testimony is from oral interviews with soldiers, including from later years as well. So it’s the view of men who’ve had time to reflect. So that was interesting, also because Japan, still today, is not great at talking about its role in the Second World War. It’s quite rare to get books about it using first-person testimony from the soldiers who were there. In Jungle Commandos , I did manage to weave quite a lot of Japanese testimony in. I got my hands on a copy of the 154 Regiment’s official history. I found it online in a bookshop in Japan, and had to use Google Translate to buy it and get it sent over. It is largely a lot of personal accounts of the men who fought against my granddad. I absolutely loved diving into that, and I wish my granddad had been alive so I could have shown him and spoken about him with those accounts. I’d have loved to have known his view on some of the things that they were saying. Yes, she tells him to get up. Again, it humanises the Japanese soldiers. They missed their mums too. It was Tales by Japanese Soldiers that inspired me to bring the Japanese perspective into my book. I hadn’t intended to, but after reading it, I realized it was the natural thing to do."

"This is a really famous memoir. It’s not about Burma, it’s about the Pacific and told from the American perspective. If anybody has seen the HBO show The Pacific —which was the follow-up to Band of Brothers— it’s partly based on Eugene’s memoir. I chose this book to understand what island warfare in the Pacific was like. Burma is a vast country with many different types of environments. The war in the Pacific that the Americans fought was a completely different game in many ways. It’s a brilliant combat memoir and a real page-turner. It’s unflinching and quite morally serious at times, very big picture reflective, but it also covers a lot of the action on the ground, keeping you gripped by the story. Like T he Forgotten Highlander, it brings the personal horror of the war against the Japanese to the fore, but it’s a different flavor of it entirely. You’ve got these two memoirs covering the war in Asia, but it’s completely different experiences, both uniquely awful in their own way. Again, it brings home just what a vast, horrific war it was in Asia. Yes, they’re island hopping, landing on these Pacific islands. My grandfather was a Marine as well, though a different kind—he was a British Commando. Nevertheless, it’s amphibious landings onto areas where they don’t necessarily know the Japanese strength and what they’re going to be facing there. In some ways, it has similarities with the fighting on Hill 170 at Kangaw, where my grandfather was. It’s a slightly different environment, but they’re facing the same enemy. They’re fighting the same ideology."

"Bill Slim was, arguably, Britain’s greatest commander of forces in the Second World War. He was a soldier’s general, really in touch with his troops. I think in the past his name was overshadowed by the likes of Montgomery but nowadays—thanks to people like Rob Lyman—most people in military history will know his name, and hopefully a lot of the general public as well. I would say that Defeat into Victory is the finest military memoir written by a commander in the English language. It’s a fantastic book. He’s very honest about his failings and his failures, which is rare. He’s generous to his troops, and he’s analytical. Don’t mistake his generosity for a lack of skill or nous in terms of understanding the military situation. In the book, he discusses the campaign, what went wrong, things that he managed to fix, and things he wished he’d done better. If somebody only reads one book on leadership and what it takes to rebuild an army—which had broken down in terms of their morale and what they thought they could achieve—this is the book to do that. The title says it all: Defeat into Victory. That’s what he had to do. When the 14th Army was created, and he was given command, it was an army that had been beaten out of Burma. It was an army which had been involved in a terrible initial escapade into Burma, the first Arakan campaign, which went disastrously wrong, with huge numbers of casualties. They did not have the training to fight in the jungle. They did not have the tactics. They did not have the imagination to fight this enemy, the Japanese, who were fighting in a way that the British Army had not dreamt could be possible. Slim was the man who came in and said, ‘No, these guys are not unbeatable. We’ve just got to change what we’re doing and the way we’re looking at things. We’ve got to understand the landscape. We’ve got to respect it and use it to our advantage. The Japanese are not unbeatable, but the tactics we’re using, these big advances with a huge number of troops, are not going to work. The Japanese are very mobile; they move around us, they cut us off and then we’re stuffed. What we need to do is take a leaf out of their book. We need to work in smaller numbers. We need to not be afraid of being cut off .’ Slim famously developed the use of the ‘box’ tactic, which is that if British troops were cut off and surrounded—a tactic favoured by the Japanese—that rather than panicking, the British and Indian forces were to stand strong. They were to defend their perimeter and wait for help to arrive, which it would. They were not to panic about being surrounded. That’s what they did at the Battle of the Admin Box in early 1944, which was really a turning point for the troops’ morale. They waited out the Japanese who had surrounded them. The Japanese ran out of rations because they relied on these very quick manoeuvres and scaring the British and Indian troops to retreat. They waited them out, and the Japanese were starving and had to retreat themselves. Slim was really the architect of this. It’s not all down to him. There were many other people involved, but he was the commander who grabbed the bull by the horns and made it work. It just takes you through the campaign and this idea of what you do when you take command of a situation. For me, it’s a book that goes beyond military history, because it’s about being in a situation where the odds are against you, taking the time not to panic, and breaking it down and saying, ‘No, these are the ways that we can fix it’—and how he made that happen. We tend to forget that the British Army and the Indian Army won in Burma. It was a victory. It’s about the evolution that the Allies went through to get there. Yes, originally the book was just going to be about 3 Commando Brigade, which my granddad was in. Then, I quickly realized that what they did wouldn’t have been possible without the Indian and West African divisions. That’s the other big, important point to take away about the war in Burma. The 14th Army was one of the most culturally and racially diverse groups of men fighting together and alongside one another that has ever been. The Indians were the biggest group, but there were also British, West African, and Nepalese men in the 14th Army fighting alongside Chinese and Americans. People forget that. Again, the conversation comes back to imperialism and British India, and what was right and what was wrong, though I think the idea of Indian nationalism at the time and its impact in the Burma campaign has been overblown. The fact that the Indian Army which was mobilised to fight in Burma was the largest volunteer army in history says it all. These men weren’t corralled into it: they wanted to fight against the Japanese."