Tales By Japanese Soldiers

The entire book is about the war in Burma from the viewpoint of Japanese soldiers who fought there. The book notes that 305,000 Japanese were involved in that part of the war and around 180,000 of them died.

The book notes that many of those deaths were due to starvation and disease.

It seems that at least some of the Japanese military people had realized that they needed to treat the Burmese people in a totally different manner than they did the Chinese and at times it worked. Some Burmese would help feed the Japanese.

"Gift rations from Mr. Churchill" refers to when the Japanese would overrun camps that had been run by the British and then help themselves to things left behind, particularly food.

One of the reasons Burmese helped the Japanese was that they were looking to break away from the colonial powers that originally controlled much of Asia.

The death rate of the Japanese was around 62%. They had a terrible time surviving once the flow of war changed against them and some of the material in the book is fairly explicit. Overall it's an interesting book about a specific area that the Japanese military was involved with.

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