“At the time they called themselves ‘The Forgotten Army’ because the British public was focused on Hitler and the war in Europe and the war in the Far East was geographically a long way away and happening for reasons that were harder to grasp,” says historian Alex Bescoby, speaking at the world premiere of his latest film The Last Burma Star in London’s National Army Museum.
The film sees Bescoby and celebrated explorer and veteran Major Levison Wood, whose grandfather (also called Levison Wood) also fought in Burma, revisit the battlefields in eastern India where the Japanese were repulsed in 1942. Following this they then meet the centenarian corporal Con Herh, one of the last surviving veterans of that war, giving him his Burma Star medal along with a signed letter from King Charles III.
The forgotten 14th
Con’s own story epitomises the British 14th Army that fought that campaign. 85% of their soldiers were not British, being drafted from all over the Commonwealth, most notably Africa, Burma and India. While their commanding officer, General Bill Slim, perhaps does not rank even today in the public consciousness alongside Montgomery or Eisenhower, yet the latter credited him as “one of the greatest commanders of the war”.
Following the initial retreat from Burma, Slim was tasked with retraining the 14th army for jungle warfare and bringing together a tapestry of cultures and nationalities to fight under one common cause. “You can argue General Slim is the best general the British Army has ever had,” says Bescoby. “He turned around a catastrophic defeat via long-term planning and logistics – It’s the boring stuff [such as] feeding an army of over a million men with 40 different ration scales because you had Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Muslims, Jews, West Africans, East Africans. It was a logistical nightmare and the genius of Bill Slim was in the detail.”
General, later Field Marshal, Bill Slim
Use of local knowledge was also critical, enabling the diverse and pioneering tactics Slim employed – such as endorsing the Chindits special forces and V-Force intelligence units in Operation Longcloth to disrupt and monitor the Japanese in Burma before the counter-strike came in 1944. When it did, the success of the 14th Army was rooted in how quickly they had adapted to jungle warfare, learning to combat malaria, and employing logistics over mountain ranges and using the air force to drop equipment. “All of this was super nascent,” explains Bescoby. “We can see today that a lot of the special forces origin stories happen in the Far East because it was such difficult terrain against such a fearsome enemy.”
On the ground though it was soldiers such as Con Herh and the legacy the film tells of another veteran, Lian Norn, who won – though never received – both a Burma Star and a Military Cross, that were winning the war.
Van Cung Lian, Trustee of charity Help 4 Forgotten Allies, emphasises the impact of conflict on different cultures, explaining how many Burmese joined the British Army as a way to get a new education. Bescoby also mentions the approximately 3,000 Chin soldiers who fought in Belgium during the First World War, an experience he attributes to fundamentally shifting their cosmology as their world “no longer ended after the last mountain to the east”.
Despite now finally fading from living memory, the Japanese invasion and the following liberation of Burma remains formative. Van describes the requests he still gets from families of veterans in Burma, asking to be connected with the families of the Burma campaign officers in the UK – “they can always remember the officer’s name. When I research our history and our grandfathers we know that a lot of veterans from back home are so proud of their service – this part of their history is very special.”
History echoes
Japan formally surrendered on September 2 1945, ending its imperial ambitions in Asia. Britain’s own imperial project ended more subtly but its past was no less prevalent in the difficult dawn for the new Burma as the reckoning of the colonial legacy began. Now Myanmar, ethnic civil conflicts have continued in the country since the Second World War, where a military junta continues to hold power.
Perhaps it is this context today that gives the history and deeds of Con Herh such gravity. “We don’t often think that this was a clash between two empires on Burma. The many many different peoples of Burma had to choose a side and people like Con Herh chose, and chose the right side of history,” argues Bescoby. “The message of this film is that there is an exact equivalence between Levison’s grandfather, and any British veteran of World War Two, and men like Con Herth – who is now having to live in the middle an active war zone.
“People like Con Herh made the same decision as Levison Wood [snr] made – though Con didn’t have to.”
The Last Burma Star airs 9pm on Sky History & History Play on
Sunday November 9
Beyond Burma: Forgotten Armies exhibition is at the National Army Museum until April 13 2026
Image top: Corporal Con Herh, who served alongside the Allied force as part of both the Chin levies and the 1st Chin Rifles. Grammar / Blackmane
