eBook Return Via Rangoon ePub

This book was amazing to read. My grandfather was one of the people held by the Japanese in the Rangoon Jail. He was called 'Major Lutz' back then. This is an amazing story that shows how human beings can be reduced to nothing and still lend a hand to each other. The prisoners of Rangoon where force marched from Rangoon as the end of the war approached. These men had no shoes and wore loin cloths. They helped carry each other and walked 100 miles to Pegu. At Pegu, my grandfather snuck behind the British lines and told them where the other POWs where. 426 men where rescued. I wish I had known my grandfather, but he died in 1949. I bought copies of this book for my mother and uncle.

These days, people have to fabricate sensational personal accounts to satisfy publisher's demand for this genre (i.e. James Frey). In World War II, the truth was far greater.

Return via Rangoon is a modest but beautifully evoked account of one young 'Chindit', Philip Stibbe. An educated man of his generation who found himself as part of an audacious band of troops operating behind enemy lines in Burma, the brainchld of Orde Wingate. These were no elite fighting soldiers but ordinary young men thrust into remarkable circumstances. In precise, bone dry prose, Stibbe describes his training regime and his initial forays into India in Burma. Wingate was determined that his army could achieve the impossible - fight through the monsoon. He aimed to master the complexities of the jungle and turn it to the advantage of the Allies against the Japanese. The stories and men involved in this campaign are remarkable.

Wingate is depicted as a maverick commander, iconoclastic and strict in his oders - 'Only shorts would be worn when it was raining. Swearing must stop. Thursday was to be Sunday.' He was also quasi-fanatical in his Christian purpose, comparing the River Chindwin to Jordan.

Stibbe also had a remarkable adventure. During the campaign he was so badly wounded that he had to be left behind. A loyal Burmese rifleman loyally volunteered to stay and look after him. Foraging for food with Stibbe too sick to move, the rifleman was captured by the Japanese who tortured him to reveal Stibbe's whereabouts. He would not, and was shot. The rifleman, Maung Tun of the Burma Rifles is the dedicatee of this remarkable book.

Many months in a Japanese prisoner of war camp followed in which Stibbe and his fellow prisoners were forced to rely on their most innate human courage in the face of great hardship, disease, malnutrition and uncertainty.

Stibbe's story is so remarkable that he could hardly fail to create a compelling literary account of it. He does it full justice. Some of his opinions of the Japanese seem somewhat old fashioned and culturally supremacist, but he can obviously excused this. 'Return via Rangoon' is a well recounted tale of one of the less well documented areas of World War II conflict.

The author's account of his work in Orde Wingate's legendary Chindits (WWII British guerilla unit in the Far East) and his subsequent imprisonment and enslavement by the Japanese is fast-paced, inspiring and surprisingly big-hearted. The picture given of Wingate himself captures much of the enigma of this great man-- a Christian fundamentalist wholly given to a conflict-at-arms. The narration is classic British understatement and self-deprecation. Thus, it is HIGHLY readable.
RECOMMENDED! AL