Jack's Return to Burma

However, they left Burma in a pretty ramshackle state, the only country in the Far East that had been occupied by the Japanese that still had to be fought over on the return journey, as it were, if one excludes the Philippines and the Pacific islands reconquered by the Americans. All the other British former colonies such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong simply fell when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while Burma remained a desert land over which the 14th Army (the Forgotten 14th as it is often known) was left to battle over and clean up at the very end of the war in the Far East. By the time the British handed it over it was fairly impoverished. There was nothing left with which to rebuild what had once been the most prosperous British colony in the Far East. Father said how discouraging it was to have to go out and put what had been a model British colony back to rights as an impecunious Third World state. At the end of the day he left his jeep on the waterfront where it was promptly stolen, went on board the ship with the few things he had been able to buy up since he was out there, namely some very pretty Burmese watercolours  and some items of jewellery – all that remained of the 25 years or so that he had spent in Burma.