Fighter Pilots Over Burma (Images Of War - Rare Photographs From Wartime Archives)
Norman FranksThe war in Europe was already 2 years and 3 months old when Japan launched its long feared offensive against American, British, Netherlands and Commonwealth possessions throughout the Pacific and Indian Ocean over 1941-42. Burma was an obvious staging post for any assault against two of Japan's prime targets - India and Australia - and yet its defences much like Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore, had been woefully under prepared. Despite nearly constant and increasingly strident complaints and warnings from the newly elected Australian Prime Minister and his Government about the paucity of those defences, and the desperate need to withdraw their own forces out of North Africa in order to bolster them, the British Government ignored the problem in the hope it would go away. After the losses of 1941-42, and with the Australian mainland now under air and submarine attack, Allied forces in Burma and India rapidly found themselves realising that they would need to stabilise their own defensive front alone and with minimal support. The Japanese invaded Burma on 14 December 1941 and by mid 1942 had occupied the country in its entirety, almost immediately afterwards they started to make their move against India - in their way stood a mixed force of mainly British, Commonwealth and Indian soldiers with minimal RAF support and next to no Naval support.