He describes his comrades as being non-professional but expert soldiers. They were certainly tough. Most were Cumbrian; Fraser was was Scottish (so addressed as Jock) but he had grown up in Carlisle and was completely at home in Cumbrian culture and customs. A good deal of the book is in the form of dialogue, using Cumbrian dialect rendered phonetically.
There are vivid descriptions of close-quarter fighting and two episodes of advancing across open country under fire. Several deaths occurred, including one by friendly fire at night. The Cumbrians showed little outward reaction to fatalities, which doesn't mean they didn't feel them.
Fraser makes no concessions to modern sensibilities. He states frankly that he hated the Japanese and still does, citing their cruelty and barbaric behaviour to prisoners, including forced labour and starvation as well as stringing them up by their feet and using them for bayonet practice. When he discovered that some wounded Japanese prisoners had been murdered by their guards he recognised that this was a war crime, but neither he nor any of his comrades even considered reporting it and he thinks he might well have done the same in their place. A recurrent theme in the book is his disagreement with various post-war changes in British attitudes to soldiering and other things.
Life in the jungle affected some people in strange ways. One man started slashing with his kukri at invisible hordes of midget Japanese who were led by his local MP. Once they were all dead he slept peacefully and woke next morning entirely normal. Shortly before Fraser left the section to go before an officer selection board he was seconded to a platoon commanded by an officer who appears to have been quite mad, yet he conducted a successful night ambush, during which he saved the lives of Fraser and several other members of the platoon by spotting, at the very last moment, that someone was inserting a bomb into a mortar upside-down.
Anyone who has enjoyed Fraser's novels will want to read this memoir.
07-08-2021