By the end of 1943 the Japanese had occupied most of South-East Asia. On 6 March 1944, the first units of the Japanese 15 Army crossed the inhospitable border of what was then Burma, and invaded India. At the township of Kohima they were met by a small, hastily assembled force of Indian and British troops, later reinforced by 2 Division of Slim's 14 Army, who fought valiantly and forced the Japanese to retreat. Described by Mountbatten as 'the British/Indian Thermopylae', Kohima was a turning point in Japanese fortunes, heralding their continued defeat in battle until their formal surrender on 2 September 1945. Using extensive research in primary sources and many previously unpublished first-hand accounts, Leslie Edwards presents a definitive analysis of this pivotal battle.

Kohima was the turning point in the Japanese invasion of India, witnessing the end of their attempt to overthrow the British Raj. It was a bitter battle fought in three stages, spanning three months and ending with the siege of Imphal. Losses on both sides were heavy, with the Japanese suffering their greatest land defeat thus far in the war. Against the odds and an enemy who nearly refused to give in, the British Army resisted the Japanese and their victory paved the way for the reconquest of Burma. Battle Story: Kohima explores the historical context of this critical point in the war in Asia, the personalities of the opposing armies and offers a blow-by-blow account of the battle.

The Japanese advance through Thailand, Malaya and Burma appeared unstoppable and the fate of India looked utterly precarious.The garrison of the Kohima outpost numbering some 1500 British and Indian Army soldiers faced over 13,000 fanatical and previously victorious Japanese troops. The following sixteen days marked the turning point of the war in the Far East thanks to men like Raymond Street who fought with legendary courage and tireless persistence.Raymond was a member of the 4th Battalion The Queen's West Kent and as a company runner he was uniquely placed to witness the dreadful and dramatic events as they unfolded. Not only did he miraculously survive but he made a superb record of the battle as fortunes ebbed and flowed. His memories have been transcribed into this first-hand account of one of the most decisive and hardest fought battles of the Second World War. We Fought at Kohima will surely be judged as a fighting man's memoir of the highest quality to rank alongside such legendary works as Men at Arnhem and Quartered Safe Out Here.

This book focuses on varied forms of self-referential storytelling or life writing and its emergence as a democratic and inclusive genre, both globally and in India, and its intersections with history, fiction, memory, truth and identity. The book examines the practice of life writing and its scope for accommodating diverse voices, distinct identities, collaborations and non-hierarchical connections as it gives voice to oral, silenced and marginalized communities. It explores forms like auto/biographical fiction, digital storytelling, graphic memoirs, and testimonies of migration and exile, among others. The eclectic collection of essays in this volume draws attention towards the transformative possibilities of life writing as it engages with issues of resistance, recuperation, re-inscribing individual and collective memories, histories, and promotes an understanding of multicultural others. Focusing on the multiple ways in which the production, circulation, and consumption of life writing has helped to reimagine and redefine individual and collective identities in different cultural and geopolitical contexts, the collection breaks new ground by initiating a cross-cultural perspective in life writing studies. The book aims to encourage critical engagement with a vastly growing body of literature that has seen a publishing and translation boom in contemporary times, both globally and in India. With life writing emerging as a robust area of research, this edited collection provides a much-needed impetus to critically engage with issues of self-representation, memory and identity in recent times. This volume will serve as a significant and rich resource for university students, researchers, and academics of literature, comparative studies, cultural studies, history, indigenous studies and digital and media studies.

In the spring of 1944, on the eastern front of India near the Burmese border, the seemingly unstoppable Imperial Japanese Army suffered the worst defeat in its history at the hands of Lieutenant General William Slim's British XIV Army, most of whose units were drawn from the little-esteemed Indian Army. Triumph at Imphal-Kohima tells the largely unknown story of how an army that Winston Churchill had once dismissed as “a welter of lassitude and inefficiency” came to achieve such an unlikely, unprecedented, and critical victory for the Allied forces in World War II. Long the British Empire's strategic reserve, the Indian Army had been comprehensively defeated in Malaya and Burma in 1941–1943. Military historian Raymond Callahan chronicles the remarkable exercise in institutional transformation that remade the British Indian forces to reverse those losses. With the invaluable help of the American DC-3 on the Burma front, Slim overhauled the British XIV Army with the Imperial Japanese Army's strategic weaknesses in mind; namely, an utter disregard for logistics and an unrelenting addiction to the attack. Callahan shows how, on an enormous battlefield—over five hundred miles from north to south—the XIV Army surmounted the challenges of terrain, disease, wretched communication, and climate to draw the Imperial forces under Lieutenant General Mutaguchi Renya ever deeper into ever stronger British defensive arrays until the Japanese Army's vaunted offensive aggression finally exhausted itself. Following this epic battle from build-up to aftermath, this book brings overdue detailed attention to Lieutenant General William Slim's handling of perhaps the most complex battle any Allied commander fought during World War II—and to the long-belittled British Indian Army that became the magnificent fighting force that triumphed at Imphal-Kohima and went on to reconquer Burma.

Having driven the British and Indian Forces out of Burma in 1942, General Mutaguchi, Commanding the 15th Japanese Army, was obsessed by the conquest of India. In 1944 the British 14th Army, under its commander General Slim, drew back to the Imphal Plain, before Mutaguchis impending offensive. To the north, however, the entire Japanese 31 Division had crossed the Chindwin and, on April 5, arrived at the hill-station and road junction of Kohima, cutting off Imphal except by air, from the supply point at Dimpapur.Kohima was initially manned by only 266 men of the Assam Regiment and a few hundred convalescents and administrative troops. They were joined, on April 5, by 440 men of the Fourth Battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment, straight from the Battle of Arakan.In pouring rain, under continual bombardment, this tiny garrison held the assaults of thirteen thousand Japanese troops in hand-to-hand combat for sixteen days, an action described by Mountbatten as probably one of the greatest battles in history ... in effect the Battle of Burma, naked, unparalleled heroism, the British/Indian Thermopylae.

During the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) suffered one of its greatest defeats in Burma. Both in Malaya and Burma, the bulk of the British Commonwealth forces comprised Indian units. Few people know that by 1944, about 70 percent of the Allied ground personnel in Burma was composed of soldiers of the Indian Army. The Indian Army comprised British-led Indian units, British officered units of the Indian princely states and the British units attached to the Government of India. Based on the archival materials collected from India and the United Kingdom, Sepoys against the Rising Sun assesses the combat/military/battlefield effectiveness of the Indian Army against the IJA during World War II. The volume is focussed on the tactical innovations and organizational adaptations which enabled the sepoys to overcome the Japanese in the trying terrain of Burma.