VE Day-75 passed last May to little fanfare in both the United States and the United Kingdom, muffled by pandemic panic and a general cultural aversion to the idea—let alone the public celebration—of victory. VJ Day-75 faces additional obstacles.

First is the well-worn nuclear debate: was America justified in using atomic weapons in a bid to end the war quickly and save American lives, even at the cost of allegedly innocent Japanese ones? The literature on this is vast, and I offer only a slight addendum below. The second problem is, alas, racial. We used the bomb on, as was then said, “Asiatics,” although our “racism” on this count was not systemic, since we were steadfast allies of the Chinese, against whom the Japanese committed unspeakable atrocities. Would we, revisionists ask, as readily have used the bomb on the Germans, who were white? It is a hostile and unhelpful question. The Nazis quit before the bomb was ready, and we shall never know. 

The third problem involves where we stood at the time, and thus how history reports back to us now. The war against Japan was a jungle war if ever there was one. For ANZACS and Americans, the jungle was an island one, from the big island of New Guinea up the long chain en route to Japan. It was also therefore, the American Navy’s war. Victory at Sea, the documentary from 1952 with Richard Rogers’s stirring score, captures the epic story. For the British too, the war against Japan was a jungle war, but it was a mainland, not an island one. It yielded one of the finest battle memoirs written from the ranks, which yields its own answer to problem number one, above.

Private J. George of the South Wales Borderers, 36th Infantry Division,
after a week on patrol in the Pinwe area, Burma, November 1944.
Photo:  Austin, W. (Lieutenant), No 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit

The British lost Burma in 1942, and did not return until after defeating the Japanese at Imphal in 1944. Then began the long slog back to Mandalay and Rangoon in 1945. Among Field Marshal William Slim’s “forgotten” Fourteenth Army was a nineteen-year-old private from Scotland, George Macdonald Fraser. Fraser was later known as the creator of the fictional Sir Harry FlashmanVC, KCB, KCIE—the Victorian rogue plucked from the pages of Tom Brown’s School Days and made by Fraser into one of the stand-out satirical characters in literature. Flashman made Fraser famous, but he saved the best for his non-fictional, though not infrequently hilarious, combat masterpiece, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma (1992), the title of which he took from Kipling.

Fraser was the son of a doctor and nurse, and was fresh out of Glasgow Academy when, in 1943, he enlisted in the Border Regiment. Though the tide of the war was beginning to turn toward the Allies, there were still bad cards to draw for a foot soldier in the British Army, and Burma was the worst. Fraser’s account of life and death there, ending in August 1945, told from the perspective of his nine-man infantry section, has few equals in war literature, and none as a record of the war’s closing months in the East Asian theater.

All of their mates, Fraser wrote, could be found “in the bills of warden courts four centuries ago, opposite charges of slaughter, spoil, ambush and arson.” To all of which must be added “the virtues of endurance, courage and deep tribal loyalty . . . martial kind of men.” Of Corporal Little, his first “mucker,” or section leader: “Cumbrian by birth, race . . . descendent of one of the hardest breeds of men in Britain”; in war, England’s vanguard, in peace, “her most unruly and bloody nuisance.” Then there was Nixon (“Nick”), small and wicked, with a gunfighter moustache and “his own line of cheerful pessimism: his parrot cry of ‘You’ll all get killed’ was rendered in the wail of a mueddin at prayer, and one thing no one doubted: whoever got killed, it wouldn't be Nick.” Then Grandarse, “as the name implies, was of Falstaffian proportions . . . red and hearty and given to rich oaths.” Then Parker, the Cockney Londoner, an old man in his forties, professional soldier of fortune, veteran of China, Spain, and who knew where else, who had reenlisted in ’39 and “came out at Dunkirk.”

They come to us in the earthy Cumbrian speech of the Borders. Fraser’s dialect-writing has the quality of Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus Plantation stories (these days reviled as “cultural appropriation”). It is how Fraser (who did not sound like this himself) heard these men then, and it is how we do now. When Steele, a combative Carlisle boy, calls Fraser a “Scotch bastard” and gets a fist in return, Cpl. Little slams the two together “with a savagery that took us aback”: “Noo shek ’ands! Shek ’ands! By Christ ye will! Barmy boogers, ye'll ’ev enoof fightin’ wid Jap, nivver mind each other! Ga on—shek ’ands!”

 “Jap,” not “Japs” or “the Japs,” and certainly not “the Japanese,” was how they called their enemy, in the parlance and reality of that time. As Fraser and the rest of Slim’s army fought south toward Rangoon, they found no shortage of Japanese, whom it was their job to kill, up to and even past the war’s end. It was a war, Fraser recalled, “of a particularly vicious, close-quarter kind, against an enemy who wouldn’t have known the Geneva Convention if it fell on him.” Nine Section was the sharp end of the stick, and when news came from afar that the Yanks had dropped some sort of super bomb that took out a Japanese city, well that was all very nice, but three days later Slim’s lads were “duffying with a Jap force on the Sittang bank and killing 21 of them—that was the war, not what was happening hundreds of miles away.” And who knew for how much longer—1946 or ’47, or even ’48 maybe? And whether or not, in Nick’s cheery refrain, they’d “still all get killed.” Rumors were that the Fourteenth Army would keep right on campaigning through Siam, down the Malay Peninsula, all the way to Singapore. “God knaws ’oo many division Jap’s still got doon theer—joongle a’ the way tae Singapore, be Christ! They say we’ll be gittin’ mules again. Wrap opp an’ roll on!”

A twenty-one-year-old George MacDonald Fraser (standing),
then a lieutenant in the Gordon Highlanders, in Tripoli, 1946.

Near the end, Nine Section’s American counterparts experienced Okinawa and resigned themselves to the invasion of Japan. It was our equivalent of “mules down Malaya,” and it was all the same; for the men on the sharp end of the stick it could not possibly have been anything else. Fraser had small patience for critics who, decades removed, held that dropping atomic bombs on Japan was unnecessary because the Japanese were ready to give in: “I wish those who hold that view had been present to explain the position to the little bastard who came howling out of a thicket near the Sittang, full of spite and fury, in that first week of August. He was half-starved and near naked, and his only weapon was a bamboo stake, but he was in no mood to surrender.”

Twenty-five years ago, Fraser attended VJ Day-50 at Carlisle Cathedral. It was the last parade ever of the old Border Regiment, doomed to “amalgamation.” He pinned on his Burma Star and other decorations (“gongs” in the argot of the day) one last time, and took a seat in the choir. He didn’t much like the preacher, “bit of a reconciler and forgiver; the hell with that.” And he defiantly sang the old words to the national anthem, not the “unutterable, sanctimonious, politically correct pap of the new third verse.”

Fraser died at eighty-two in 2008, which from 2020 already seems ages ago, to say nothing of 1995 or 1945. The reality of what happened in Burma in those last months of the war still rang true, Fraser believed, even after half a century: “The British were happy that night of VJ-50, with a sense of something well done, not just in 1945, but for centuries before.” It is that phrase—“for centuries before”—that today, to many in both the United Kingdom and the United States, is tragically impossible to grasp. As Fraser might repeat, were he still around: the hell with that. Victory over Japan, understood not in isolation but as that generation’s tribute to a treasured heritage, made sense then to Americans, too. It still does now, to those whose fathers, but for those bombs, might not have come home to become fathers and grandfathers at all.

Fraser had a granddaughter, whose other grandfather had been a prisoner of the Japanese, and who was six at VJ-50. He closed Quartered Safe Out Here with little Genny’s toast that night as her family watched fireworks on the Thames. She “raised her paper cup of lemonade and cried: ‘A toast—to victory!’ And the people laughed and cheered.” It is something to think about at VJ-75.

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