Nations in the Balance: The India-Burma Campaigns, December 1943–August 1944

By Christopher L Kolakowski

The battles in India and Burma in 1944 not only decided World War II in Asia but influenced the next 75 years of Asian history.

From December 1943 to August 1944, Allied and Japanese forces fought the decisive battles of World War II in Southeast Asia. Fighting centered around North Burma, Imphal, Kohima and the Arakan, involving troops from all over the world along a battlefront the combined size of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The campaigns brought nations into collision for the highest stakes: British and Indian troops fighting for Empire, the Indo-Japanese forces seeking a prestige victory with an invasion of India and the Americans and Chinese focused on helping China and reopening the Burma Road. Events turned on the decisions of the principal commanders—Admiral Louis Mountbatten and Generals Joseph Stilwell, William Slim, Orde Wingate, Mutaguchi Renya, among many others. The impact of the fighting was felt in London, Tokyo and Washington, among other places far away from the battlefront, with effects that presaged postwar political relationships. This was also the first U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, and Stilwell's operations in some ways foreshadowed battles in Vietnam two decades later.

The Burma and India battles of 1944 offer dramatic and compelling stories of people fighting in difficult conditions against high odds, with far-reaching results. They also proved important to the postwar future of the participant nations and Asia as a whole, with effects that still reverberate decades after the war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casemate
• Release date: Mar 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781636240978

Christopher L Kolakowski

Christopher L. Kolakowski received his BA in History and Mass Communications from Emory & Henry College, and his MA in Public History from the State University of New York at Albany. Chris has spent his career interpreting and preserving American military history with the National Park Service, New York State government, the Rensselaer County (NY) Historical Society, the Civil War Preservation Trust, Kentucky State Parks, the U.S. Army, and the City of Norfolk. He has written and spoken on various aspects of military history from 1775 to the present. He has written three books on the American Civil War and one on the defense of the Philippines in World War II. He a contributor to the Emerging Civil War Blog and is a reviewer and contributor for the Air Force Journal of Indo-Pacific Studies. Chris currently works as a historian in Madison, Wisconsin.