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Beaufighters—big, tough, twin-engined aircraft which weighed ten tons and carried a two-man crew—flew long “intruder missions” of up to seven hours, usually against Japanese rear areas. They tried to time their attacks for dawn or dusk, racing in at fifty to a hundred feet, weaving to confuse the ground gunners. They carried a formidable armament—aimed by a reflector sight on the canopy, a red ring with a blade to direct rockets, a dot for the guns. The whole aircraft shook violently when the 20mm nose battery fired. Exploding cannon shells raised a dust cloud around a target, or sometimes prompted more dramatic effects when they hit river sampans loaded with fuel. “For an instant180,” twenty-one-year-old Anthony Montague Browne of 211 Squadron wrote lyrically of such a moment, “the flight of shells caught the sunlight, shimmering like a swarm of silver bees.” His unit’s “Beaus” usually attacked in flights of three or four, preferring to do so without their squadron commander, a devout Catholic who could be seen crossing himself before making a dive. Other pilots begged him to desist from this practice: “It looked doom-laden181 and distinctly disconcerting.” Once, over the Irrawaddy, Montague Brown saw a string of boats carrying a brilliantly clad wedding party. Hapless guests sprang into the water as soon as they glimpsed the Beaufighter.

On the ground, at their airstrip, there were few comforts or diversions. Food was poor, the chief consolations a monthly ration of one bottle of whisky and four cans of Australian beer. When these were exhausted the pilots—a typical RAF mix of British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand—had recourse to a local palm toddy arak, known as Rum, Bum and Broken Glass. Between operations every two or three days, they played a lot of poker. One squadron commander, with an implausible past as a ballet instructor, sought to raise the cultural tone by playing Les Sylphides on the mess gramophone before take-off. Beyond the airstrip, there was nowhere even to go for walks, amid unbroken swamps and jungle. The fliers had no contact with local people, except once when some aviation spirit was stolen. The British drove around the area in jeeps, pleading with rice farmers not to use the high-octane fuel as a substitute for paraffin in their lamps. The Burmans took no heed. “That night, the sky was red182 with flames from burning huts, and pathetic little queues formed outside the medical units for treatment,” wrote Montague Brown.

The area was notorious for extremes of weather. Once, a tornado blew down all their huts. In the air, they met violent thermal currents and thunderstorms. A hailstorm could strip the camouflage paint from wing leading edges, leaving the aluminium shining like silver. When a crew was lost, the squadron usually had no notion of its fate. An aircraft literally went missing. It was an unglamorous existence, detached from the rest of mankind and the war, though by a quirk of communications they received airmail editions of the London Times only five days after publication. Montague Brown—who became Winston Churchill’s private secretary a decade afterwards—wondered if the campaign would ever end. “Our progress to the liberation of Burma was extraordinarily lengthy,” he wrote. “We had superiority in every arm183, and after the early toe-to-toe slogging at Imphal…the terrain progressively improved for armour and transport…Why were we so dilatory?…Surely, we could have moved faster. I was later intrigued to find that Churchill shared this view.” Hall Romney, a British POW on Japan’s infamous Burma railway, wrote in his diary on 19 November 1944: “When one considers what the Americans184 have done in the Pacific, one cannot help thinking people have moved slowly in Western Asia.”

This was a widely held view, even among those with less cause than Romney to yearn for haste. The Japanese army in Burma was crippled at Imphal and Kohima before Slim’s army even left Assam. From that point onwards, the British invaders were overwhelmingly superior to their