Quartered Safe Out Here: A powerful wartime autobiography and historical account

by George MacDonald Fraser

‘There is no doubt that [Quartered Safe Out Here] is one of the great personal memoirs of the Second World War’ John Keegan

Life and death in Nine Section, a small group of hard-bitten and (to modern eyes) possibly eccentric Cumbrian borderers with whom the author, then nineteen, served in the last great land campaign of World War II, when the 17th Black Cat Division captured a vital strongpoint deep in Japanese territory, held it against counter-attack and spearheaded the final assault in which the Japanese armies were, to quote General Slim, “torn apart”.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Memoir, World War II, Military Fiction, Military History

321 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 1992

About the author

George MacDonald Fraser is best known for his Flashman series of historical novels, purportedly written by Harry Flashman, a fictional coward and bully originally created by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown's School Days. The novels are presented as "packets" of memoirs written by the nonagenarian Flashman, who looks back on his days as a hero of the British Army during the 19th century. The series begins with Flashman, and is notable for the accuracy of the historical settings and praise from critics. P.G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, “If ever there was a time when I felt that ‘watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet’ stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman.”

Reviews

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out here,
An' you're sent to penny fights an' Aldershot it,
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.”
- Rudyard Kipling, ‘Gunga Din’ 1890

“With all military histories it is necessary to remember that war is not a matter of maps with red and blue arrows and oblongs, but of weary, thirsty men with sore feet and aching shoulders wondering where they are. And when the historian writes ‘The 17th Division closed in on Pyawbwe from all directions’ that this involved the advance of long green lines of bush hatted men, ducking but not breaking stride as the low angle shells burst among them, and Sergeant Hutton muttering: "Ah knew we'd git the shit - if we'd been lead platoon, or at back, we'd ha' bin reet, but we 'ad to be in't bloody middle! Keep spread oot!"

“The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry river bed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila. I can no more describe the smell than I could describe a colour, but it was heavy and pungent and compounded of stale cooked rice, sweat, human waste and ... Jap.”

“There is the consolation that once the shooting starts the higher thought takes a back seat. Putting a grenade into a bunker had the satisfaction of doing grievous bodily harm to an enemy for whom I felt real hatred and still do. Seeing Lt. Gale killed shocked me as our first casualties had done and I think enraged me. I wanted a Jap then, mostly for my own animal pride no doubt, but seeing Gale go down sparked something which I felt in the instant when I hung my aim at the Jap with the sword, because I wanted to be sure. The joy of hitting him was the strongest emotion I felt that day.”

“Ye stupid sods! Look at the fookin' state of ye! Ye wadn't listen - an' yer all fookin' deid! Ye dumb bastards! Ye coulda bin suppin' chah an' screwin' geeshas in yer fookin' lal paper 'ooses - an' look at ye! Ah doan't knaw." He shook his head. “All the way frae fookin' Japan!" - An observation by one of Fraser’s fellow combatants surveying a field of dead Japanese soldiers

“The celebrated British stiff upper lip, the resolve to conceal emotion which is not only embarrassing and useless but harmful, is just plain common sense. That was half a century ago. Things are different now and the media seem to feel that they have a duty to dwell on emotion and encourage indulgence. The cameras on stricken families at funerals, as interviewers probe relentlessly to uncover grief, pain, fear, and shock, know no reticence or even decency. The bereaved feel obliged to weep and lament for the cameras, flattered by the importance of their attention. Young soldiers on eve of action in the Gulf confessed under a nauseating inquisition to being frightened - of course they were frightened as we were. No interviewer in our time was so shameless, cruel, or unpatriotic to badger us into admitting our weakness for public consumption.”

“I didn't believe it, although from the talk at company H.Q. it was fairly clear that something big had happened. And even when it was confirmed, and unheard of expressions like the atomic bomb and Hiroshima were bandied about, it all seemed very distant and unlikely. On the day that the second bomb fell on Nagasaki, one of the battalion's companies was fighting with a Jap force on the Sittang bank. That was the war, not what was happening hundreds of miles away. It took a week for the Japanese government to call it a day, but even after the surrender of August 14 there was no ceasefire along the Rangoon road; it was almost a fortnight before the Japs in the field started to come in.”

“Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!
Come you back to Mandalay, Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay ?
On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin' fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!”
- Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mandalay’ 1890

************
George MacDonald Fraser, author of the famed Flashman series about an officer in 19th century British imperial wars, wrote this memoir forty five years after his 1945 WWII stint in Burma. The battles of Imphal and Kohima during Japan’s invasion of India had already been won when he arrived, and the army pushed to recapture Burma and drive the Japanese from the colony. It isn’t only an account of a major battle but short skirmishes with an enemy, mostly unseen and always present. It tells the story of one infantry unit and the nine or ten men’s daily life, the heat, boredom, occasional terror, daytime patrols and nighttime watch duty. It also looks into the author’s thoughts on the difference between military histories and the experiences of men who fought, and how attitudes towards war have changed from the ordinary foot soldier of the time.

The dialogue of his comrades, and there’s a lot, is rendered in a thick northern English dialect which sounds authentic once you are accustomed to it. The details of the uniform, weapons, diet and operations of the unit are spelled out clearly so it is easy to imagine scenes in the memoir. Fraser was nineteen when he went into service during the last year of the war and fought in the last major battle at Pyawbwe, where 1,110 Japanese died. He makes a point that when the war was over Japanese units and even individuals refused to surrender, some fighting with bamboo spears when their ammunition ran out. As far as Fraser is concerned it would have been unthinkable to not use the a-bomb and pursue a victory with conventional weapons at the cost of Allied lives. After the war he debates armchair philosophers who didn’t fight and condemned its use.

Some may balk at this realistic picture of British troops in the trenches. Fraser rarely goes beyond the slur of ‘Jap’ and an abiding contempt of the enemy by infantry soldiers. I suspect that when armies are trying to annihilate each other a certain hatred evolves. He argues that those who weren’t there and look back later can’t understand how war was waged in the sky, ocean and land. I’m thankful I wasn’t faced with it. After the ‘good war’ was won there would be many more bad wars to fight, in Korea, Vietnam and later follies in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the West became the policeman of the world. Fraser belabors greatest generation stereotypes a bit too much, and at times seems like the old man you might meet drinking at the Burma Star Association. Regardless his writing skills are up to usual snuff, which is nothing short of excellent.

[Numidica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, hands down, the best first person account of war in the China-Burma-India Theater in WW2. Written by the author of the Flashman historical novels, it benefits greatly from Mr. Fraser's talents as a fiction writer, but it's all true. Fraser described his service in General Slim's Army in Burma as the "last echo of Kipling's world", and that is not so far off the mark. Having served in infantry units myself, I felt the truth of this account in my bones. The strange decisions the soldiers had to make, like whether to shoot Japanese soldiers while sleeping, or to wake them up first, are the reality of the grunt's world (they decided it didn't matter much, one way or the other). Fraser is brutally honest, as when he describes being in the last battle of the war, in which, finally, the invisible enemy became visible. His battalion had spent months being shot at and losing men in the jungle, by Japanese who melted away in the forest, and finally they were fighting in the open; he tells of his happiness in being able to finally see and shoot the enemy. And yet, Fraser and his comrades were not blood-thirsty; few soldiers are, and those that are, are usually poor soldiers. They were there to do a job and get out alive, and that's how most soldiers feel. Not for the faint of heart, but so truthful in its description of the combat infantryman's world.

If you have not encountered Mr. Fraser in the Flashman series, you should do so. Flashman, Royal Flash, and etc, etc. Some very funny stuff there, but his memoir of the war in Burma is another thing altogether; funny, but tragic, and true.

[Manray9 · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a few personal accounts of war and its impact on a man that stand out in the sea of such literature -- works such as Goodbye to All That, Homage to Catalonia, and The Men I Killed. Quartered Safe Out Here has now joined that short list. MacDonald Fraser is the acclaimed author of the Flashman series of historical fiction, but here he reveals his own experience as an infantryman in merciless combat against the Japanese in Burma. Here is an all-too-vivid recollection of the fear, pain, discomfort and -- yes -- the pleasure of comradeship among the common soldiers who win or lose ALL wars. MacDonald Fraser reminds us that wars are not just "politics by other means," wars are about young men -- their lives, their deaths, and their friendships. As one reviewer said, MacDonald Fraser "has raised a memorial" with this book.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

These days, if I watch historical drama on TV, I’m often left with the feeling that the programme makers have imposed modern social attitudes on the period featured. Maybe it was ever thus, and it’s a theme that features quite prominently in George MacDonald Fraser’s memoir, written in the late 80s. In his introduction, the author comments that later generations:

“…have a tendency to envisage themselves in the 1940s, and imagine their own reactions, and make the fatal mistake of thinking that the outlook was the same then. They cannot see that they have been conditioned by the past forty years into a new philosophic condition, … they fail to realise there is a veil between them and the 1940s.”

The reader certainly gets a feeling of authenticity from this memoir. Although the author considered himself a Scotsman, he grew up in the town of Carlisle, about 12 miles south of the Scottish border, where his father had a doctor’s practice. As a result he joined the Border Regiment, which recruited from that part of England. In both nationality and class he was something of an outsider, although it seemed that it was the class differences that stood out more. On one occasion, a newcomer to his section complained about stomach pains the night before an attack:

“He’ll have to go sick’, I said.
‘Aye’, said Forster. ‘Sick wid nerves’. I said it might be appendicitis…and Forster spat and said, ‘Ah doot it’. Peel said nothing, and we moved off to the Assembly point.”

The author continued by observing of his comrades-in-arms:

“They belonged to a culture in which “windy” is the ultimate insult, and in which the synonym for brave is “mad”, and that is all there is to be said about it.”

As the above exchange illustrates, much of the book’s dialogue is rendered in North of England dialect, easy enough for a British reader to follow, maybe harder for others.

The descriptions of actual fighting are both vivid and visceral, and the author is not one to express any feelings of regret or guilt. On the contrary he exults in killing Japanese soldiers, whom he regarded as murderers and as rapists of civilian women. He retained these feelings for the rest of his life. He concedes in the book that he found it difficult to reconcile the Japanese soldier of the forties with the young men he encountered at airports in subsequent decades, but added that old habits died hard and he preferred not to sit next to them. In general, it’s probably fair to say that MacDonald Fraser’s social and political attitudes got stuck sometime around 1947. For all that, this is an exceptionally powerful read, especially for anyone interested in WWII. The book ends with a wonderful epilogue, where MacDonald Fraser attends a remembrance service on the 50th anniversary of VJ Day.

[A.K. Kulshreshth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Putting a grenade into a bunker had the satisfaction of doing grievous bodily harm to an enemy for whom I felt real hatred, and still do. Seeing Gale killed shocked me as out first casualties had done, and I think enraged me… Perhaps I’m too self-analytical, but I’m trying to be honest. [Emphasis mine]
Fraser succeeds completely in being honest. He has written in a direct, straight-talking, and accurate way. It helps that he is also apparently a great fiction writer (apparently because I haven’t read his fiction). The story arch in this work is very well-designed, from the beginning (a tense moment during a march) to the epilogue (a fifty-year celebration of VJ Day). This is an unapologetic view from the trenches (not literally, because WWII Burma was more about jungle and mobility), from a writer who was reading in between battle action and a soldier who faced death many times over. I couldn’t disagree more with some of Fraser’s viewpoints, and I recoiled from some of them, but I respect him for not mincing words and for unadulterated honesty. You know where he is coming from. He isn’t coming from what might be called the anti-war tradition of Stephen Crane, Erich Maria Remarque, James Jones, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and Bao Ninh (my favourite) and many others.

His humour shines. There is an incident about a man in the section boasting about his sexual exploits, when, in fact, Fraser and another man were seated behind him as he watched a Laurel and Hardy film during aforesaid period of debauchery. There is also this gem: General Slim deceived the Japanese by a fake crossing of the Irrawady. He confused Nine Section too… It is worth noting that he expresses the highest respect for General Slim.

Fraser kept reading through the campaign, and there's an interesting anecdote about the effect Shakespeare produced on a colleague who wasn't much into books. The camraderie of soldiers is captured very well; so is the liberal use of expletives (some readers might find too many of them, but I thought Fraser might have slightly moderated the actual dialogue).

Here's proof of prizing straight talk over political correctness:
The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry-river bed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila. I can no more describe the smell than I could describe a colour, but it was heavy and pungent and compounded of stale cooked rice and sweat and human waste and… Jap.

Repeatedly, there is contempt for some modern attitudes to the fall-outs of war:
The damage that fashionable attitudes, reflected (and created) by television, have done ot he public spirit, is incalculable. It has been weakened to the point where it is taken for granted that anyone who has suffered loss and hardship must be in need of “counselling”; that soldiers will suffer from “post-battle traumatic stress” and need psychiatric help. One wonders how Londoners survived the Blitz without the interference of unqualified, jargon-mumbling “counsellors”, or how an overwhelming number of 1940s servicemen returned successfully to civilian life without he benefit of brain-washing. .

Fraser writes that at one time he had knowledge of a war crime, but he was trapped in a system where reporting it would have been ridiculous (an additional complicating factor here was, of course, the sheer savagery of Japanese army). Interestingly, I discussed this with a retired officer who told me some things don’t change.

I would tend to believe it when he states that he and his men were above some behaviours:
Maybe sex is more important now than it used to be. Or maybe we were a more restrained, inhibited, pious, and timid generation. But I was interested to note that Nine Section, who for months had been deprived of female society, and had remarked on the fact from time to time, showed no tendency to behave like Casanova gone berserk… Another discouragement, I should add, was that the average Indian and Eurasian prostitute was not notable for her charm or beauty.
I should add, though, that Yasmin Khan, in India at War, produced an eye-opening, researched account of the horrors of WWII as they impacted common folk. One of these was that Calcutta had one of the highest rates of venereal disease anywhere in the world, and sexual violence was a big problem.

In short, this is a book that I liked for the quality of voice and some passages. I had to agree to just disagree with some of the views – which was easier because they were not sugar-coated.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a delightful book this was! Fraser is better known for his Flashman novels but this true account of his teenage experiences with the 17th Black Cat Division in Burma is nothing short of outstanding.

Many of the soldiers with whom Fraser served were from Cumberland, and when he writes dialogue for these chaps he uses the Cumbrian dialect, which is nearly incomprehensible, especially if, like me, you have trouble with a regular Brit accent. Fraser provides us with translation where necessary, but I'm glad he went this route. The band of brigands he fought with were a colourful bunch, and I found the verbal exchanges laugh-out-loud hilarious. That he loved these guys is quite obvious in the way he portrays them, and you almost feel like you know them personally, to the point of feeling a genuine sense of loss when one of them gets hit.

Fraser establishes the point that most histories sanitize the circumstances of military encounters. This is most likely because history deals with the overall picture and does not concentrate on the blood and sweat shed by squad-sized units trying to achieve an objective. Fraser corrects that in this book, and you get to follow his squad through the campaign, sharing their combat, their victories, their losses, and, yes...their atrocities as well.

I heartily recommend this to any military history buff. My one bitch is that there is not a single photograph in the entire book. Surely these guys must have stood in front of a Kodak at one point or another!

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was looking for some sailing stories of the Napoleonic era, I came across the Flashman books. I noted the author, George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008), had written his memoir about World War II. I decided to get the book.

The book deals with his time in Burma. He served with a platoon of British Soldiers from Cumberland. He used their accent in the book. The Cumberland Dialect is unlike modern English but Fraser provided a translation and glossary to help the reader.
The book is well written. Fraser covers what it was like to be a British soldier in Burma from the boredom of waiting to the horrors of the close quarter jungle fighting. He also provided a brief history of the war in Burma. He was a young man and this was before he became a writer, but his talent comes through as does his superb storytelling ability. After reading this book the reader has a good idea what it was like to fight in the jungle.

I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is eight hours long. David Case (1932-2005) did an excellent job narrating the book. He did great with the Cumberland accent and gently interpreting for the reader. Case was an English actor and multi-award-winning audiobook narrator. Case was the narrator of the Flashman Series. He was one of the pioneering narrators of audiobooks and had a great British accent and voice.

[Jonny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite simply, the best personal history of World War Two I've read... yes, the only one, but still..
The moving, totally honest story of nine section in the closing days of the war, through the final battles of the Burma campaign. You'll laugh (quite a bit), you'll be moved (a lot more than you thought) and you'll ask yourself "What?" more than a few times (the dialogue is in the Cumbrian dialect, more or less Anglicised).
Highly recommended to anyone interested in the British Army, or looking for an unsanitized view of the end of the war "at the sharp end". Beautifully written, hopefully you'll come back again and again.

[Steve]

I'm reading George MacDonald Fraser's (1925 – 2008) Flashman series with a curious mixture of pleasure and distaste - the pleasure arising from the excellent adventures of the ne'er-do-well Flashman, the wonderfully reconstructed historical settings and the satire of (as I see it) British upper classes, patriotism and hero worship of military heroes (not of military heroism itself, mind); the distaste sweeping out of the many signs of racism and acts of rape and violence towards women. Of course, the latter are to be expected in a novel set in the early 19th century, but in the first volume of the Flashman series the protagonist is the primary implementer of said outrages.

To deal with my ambivalence I had to learn more about the author, so when I found that he had written a memoir of the Burmese corner of World War II which had been called "one of the great memoirs of the Second World War" by John Keegan, a well known military historian, I obtained a copy and dived right in.

Quartered Safe Out Here (1992) is that memoir. As a fresh 19 year old recruit, MacDonald Fraser is inserted into a veteran unit engaged in pushing the Japanese out of Burma in 1945. VE Day is close, but the Japanese are unimpressed and are still a powerful force in Burma, though increasingly poorly supplied. By that time the American submarine fleet had swept the sea of Japanese cargo ships, and they and the air fleet kept the Japanese warships in harbor. The last suicide mission of the Japanese navy was yet to come.

I've read at least a dozen WW II memoirs written by ordinary soldiers (American, British, German and Japanese), and I have found them all gripping, really. But this book (and William Manchester's memoirs) has the advantage of being written by an experienced author, and it shows.

MacDonald Fraser's evocation of the soldiers, landscape and atmosphere of that campaign is wonderful, as is his presentation of a novice soldier's experience of firefights - the compression and extension of time like an accordion, the random choice of friends who fall, the absence of conscious thought as training and instinct take over. The (real) adventures and humor are plentiful; even in the attack on Pyawbwe, which broke the back of the Japanese 33rd Army, MacDonald Fraser managed to get dropped down a well!

MacDonald Fraser's unit was composed primarily of men from Cumberland, and he lets them speak in Cumbrian in the book. It sounds a bit like Scots to me, which is reasonable enough, since the dialects are spoken in contiguous regions. Some hilarious passages in the book are carried out entirely in that dialect. An example: the division had worked out a complicated password scheme which was beyond the mental capacity of a few of the soldiers. One of those few was trying to get back into the lines and screwed up the password. The entire exchange was carried out in Cumbrian (what are the chances that the Japanese even knew about the dialect, much less could reproduce it), and the men knew exactly with whom they were speaking, but the farce had to be played out to the end, increasingly salted with colorful invective. I was propped up in bed with tears rolling down my face.

Here's a taste of the Cumbrian when they were slogging through the Burmese dry belt: "Wahm? Ah's aboot boogered! By hell, Ah could do wi' some fookin' joongle, Ah tell tha!" Maybe I'm alone here, but I think this is priceless.

MacDonald Fraser still hated the Japanese in 1992, quoting approbatively an officer who called them "a shower of sub-human apes." And I couldn't say that his view of other races (indeed, anyone except Brits, Americans and Gurkhas) is any more advanced than that of Flashman. In at least this respect, Flashman is made in the image of his creator.

Returning to my original ambivalence, what is evident from this memoir and other sources on the web (e.g.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/35...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obi... )

is that MacDonald Fraser was a strange mixture of rigid conservative and rambunctious rebel who retreated to a tax haven, the Isle of Man, and inveighed against the poofs and pinkos running the country. The only analogy for the man I can draw from my own life are the folks Americans call rednecks - socially and politically arch-conservative, basically contemptuous and distrustful of anybody who is not "a good old boy" (racism is a natural corollary), but nonetheless ready to shoot any "revenooer" who stumbles across their still, marijuana field or crystal meth lab and to complain bitterly about the federal government's intrusion into their rights. Strangely enough, their beat up pickup trucks are usually plastered with "patriotic" bumper stickers...

But still I don't understand what MacDonald Fraser's intent is by making the protagonist of the Flashman series a complete coward who always comes up roses, for he deeply admires and knows from personal experience those who bravely do their duty in warfare. Those latter types are usually killed off in the Flashman series to assure that there are no living witnesses of Flashman's cowardice. So the mystery is deepened. At least Flashman commits no further rapes after the first volume, since, in MacDonald Fraser's words, "he no longer needed to." I'll then continue freely to interpret Flashman's abysmal behavior as it pleases me - a satire, even if the satire is not of the kind MacDonald Fraser would approve.

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/729...

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 5 out of 5]

George MacDonald Fraser is most well known for the "Flashman" novels which i'm pretty sure i read years ago but don't remember very well except for one line about "an aristocratic harlot waggling her arse" or something.
This is his memoir of serving in the famous "Black Cat" division of the British army during the Second World War in Burma.
It is, in my personal opinion, the best war memoir i've ever read.
Fraser shows us the war from the perspective of Nine Section, a group of Cumberland men, rough as guts but full of heart and able to endure the misery and dangers of war in a way that i fear the young men of today could not.
These men come fully alive on these pages and you would swear you know them personally after reading this so vivid is the picture he paints with words.
If you want to feel totally immersed in the Burma campaign and get a sense of what it was really like look no further than this book.

[A.L. Sowards · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written, warts-and-all memoir about the author’s time in Burma during the last year of WWII. The narrative was sometimes sad and sometimes funny, but it always felt realistic. Originally published in 2001, so the author included his thoughts on the changes he’s seen in society since the war ended. I enjoyed those parts. I did have trouble with the thick Cumberland dialect. I’m not suggesting he should have done it any differently than he did, but sometimes it was hard for me to follow. On the other hand, the dialectic spelling had a softening effect on the soldiers’ language, and that was fine with me. (I realize foul language is typical and accurate, but I don’t need to be bombarded with it.) Probably 4.5 stars, rounded up for Goodreads.

[Gregg · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the time I got to this conversation, near the end of the war (and the book), I could really start to understand what they were saying. We Yanks need to think Scottish brogue: " 'Ey, Grandarse, 'ear w'at they're saying on't wireless? The Yanks 'ave dropped a bomb the size of a pencil on Tokyo an' it's blown the whole fookin' place tae bits!"

"Oh, aye, W'at were they aimin' at - 'Ong Kong?"

"Ah'm tellin' ye! Joost one lal bomb, an' they reckon 'alf Japan's in fookin' flames. That's w'at they're sayin'!"

"W'ee's sayin?"

"Ivverybody, man! Ah'm tellin' ye, it's on't wireless! 'Ey, they reckon Jap'll pack it in. It'll be th' end o' the war!"

"Girraway? Do them yeller-skinned boogers oot theer knaw that?"

"Aw, bloody 'ell! 'Oo can they, ye daft booger! They 'evnt got the fookin' wireless, 'ev they?"

"Awreet, then. Ah's keepin' me 'eid doon until the Yanks'ev dropped a few more pencils on Tokyo. An' w'en them boogers oot theer 'ev packed in, Ah'll believe ye."

"Aw, Ah's wastin' me time talkin' tae you! 'Ey, Foshie, 'ear aboot the Yanks? They've dropped a secret weapon on Tokyo, an' the whole fookin' toon's wiped oot!"

" 'Igh bloody time. W'ee's smeukin', then? Awoy, Jock, gi's one o' yer H.Q. Coompany fags, ye mean booger!"

I can recommend this book highly, for a look into The British Army's war in Burma through one man's experience.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deeply affecting book--one of the passages that stays with me is McDonald Frasers confession that he cannot forgive his former foes. I've seen this time and again with British vets of the Burmese theater; a chilling testament to the savagery of the campaign...and just the kind of honesty I'd expect from a man as brave as Mr. Fraser.

Reading this book will definitely give you a much deeper appreciation of both the Flashman books and the WWII generation.

First, Flashman: Pretty obvious if you know the books, but it's clear Flashman is a meditation on courage, and the struggle against fear everyone faces when pressed up against the insanity of war. If you know Flashman, you know what he thinks of bravery and forthrightness. Reading this book, you realize that Fraser is brother of Heller, the bomber crewman. Both men eflecting back on their experience of war and saying "Jesus Christ--that was pure insanity...with no redeeming qualities of any kind" Both men had the courage to say so, and say so beautifully. It's a mystery to me why they aren't mentioned together more often.

Next, the WWII generation. Fraser has gone on to live a pretty excellent life after his time in Hell--he was in the Army for a while, then took off to become a journalist, screenwriter and author. His attiude towards virtue, which you also know if you know Flashman, seems driven by his experience with war. It's easy to imagine a whole generation of men walking out of the carnage of the WWII and saying, "let's party!" And who can blame them?

Yeah, you'll learn a lot about social history and courage if you read this book.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent memoir of a small British army unit in WWII, Nine Section, in the Burmese Theatre. Fraser, himself a Scot, was a member of this Cumberland unit. It is backed up by native Indian troops. He writes of the camaradarie of these men; how they lived and fought beside each other; and how they created bonds of loyalty and trust. They fight the Battles of Mekteila and Pyawbwe. We share their joys and sorrows. Many episodes are affecting. I loved the episode where Sgt. Hutton, who's not really all that educated, borrows a copy of Shakespeare's "Henry Vee" from Fraser. When he returns it, he expresses most unusual and trenchant insights into the play. Fraser describes R&R in Calcutta; at that time, India is still under the Raj. The war finally ends; the author writes of a reunion on VJ Day fifty years later.

The dialogue was written in Cumberland dialect [my impression: similar to a Robert Burns' Scots]. I read the first few chapters aloud until I felt confident in connecting the written word to the pronunciation to the meaning. Then I read silently. I'm glad the author included a short piece on the Cumberland dialect and also a glossary of Hindustani and other foreign words used by the soldiers.

The style was very descriptive and readable. Fraser is also known for his popular Flashman series. He certainly displays his flair for writing in this memoir. Recommended.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past few months I have been working my way through the five volumes of the official history of Britain’s War Against Japan. Together they're a magnificent read, one full of operational details that chronicle the failed efforts to defend Britain’s empire in Southeast Asia against a Japanese effort, followed by the grinding effort to reclaim what was lost. Wide-ranging in their scope and comprehensive in their coverage, they are an indispensable resource for anyone wanting to learn about the conflict in the region. If there is a criticism to be made of the series, though, it is the absence of any sense what the fighting was like for the soldiers who served in the theater. In this respect the volumes are monochromatic, the voices of the individual Tommies lost among the multitude.

Enter George MacDonald Fraser. Years before he enjoyed fame and fortune as a Hollywood scriptwriter and the author of the beloved Flashman series, Fraser served in The Border Regiment from its deployment in the Burma campaign in late 1944 up through the end of the war in August 1945. He chronicles his time in the regiment from the perspective of the infantry section of ten men in which he served. As he explains early in the text, these were the men who were his “military family,” the men with whom he marched, slept, ate, and fought his way across Burma. Their exploits form the core of Fraser’s narrative, as he describes their engagements with the Japanese from the Dry Belt to the Rangoon Road, and Fraser’s subsequent secondment to a group ambushing the fleeing enemy as they traveled down the Sittang River.

The account Fraser offers is a highly impressionistic one that is filtered through the distance of nearly half a century. Often what he provides is based on decades-old memories evidently unassisted by consultation either with any contemporary diaries or letters or with his former comrades. What he recounts is what he recalls most vividly, with gaps that are acknowledged openly. While it’s an approach that will ring true for most readers, given the line-by-line recollections of many a conversation, it is difficult not to wonder how much of it might have been embellished by a degree of authorial license, especially when Fraser’s gifts are taken into consideration. Perhaps it may not even have been intentional – might not his own imagination have invaded his memories in the intervening time?

Such speculation is probably inevitable given Fraser’s background and the readability of his account. However much his stories might have been improved in the retelling, though, his book is worth reading both for the firsthand flavor it offers of a too-often overlooked campaign of the Second World War and for the reflections provided by one of its veterans from the vantage of hindsight. Just be prepared for a good deal of old-man complaints about the changing world larded with self-indulgent paeans to the toughness of his generation. Whatever the veracity of Fraser’s account, there is zero doubt about the cantankerousness of his temperament when he wrote it.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had marked this as previously read, but I hadn't. I'd read couple other of his memoirs of peacetime service in the postwar British Army in North Africa, and enjoyed them. This one is much grimmer. He served in the Burma War of 1944-45, when the British and Allies broke the hitherto-victorious Japanese armies. Fraser was a private soldier of age 19 in 1944, assigned to the 17th Black Cat Division, men from the English-Scottish Border. He was the only Scot in his platoon, among Cumbrians. It took this reader awhile to get used to their unfamiliar dialect; Fraser grew up nearby. They were true to their ancestry. And made good, tough soldiers. The accounts of the men going off to war, again and again, were sobering. There were Gurkhas among the Black Cats, and Baluchis, and other Indian Army hillmen. The Gurkhas stood out in Fraser's memories, and I wish I'd kept notes on his comments about them. He liked and respected them. And he spoke of many Brits genuine affection for India, in the days of the British Raj.

Fraser was the son of a country doctor, and had more education than all but one of his mates. There's a memorable section where he's just gotten a copy of Henry V, the Shakespeare play, which his sergeant spots and borrows. He liked it, and asks if old Will was in the Army. Had to have been, Sgt. Hutton says. He knew the Army! And a great episode where Fraser, a newly-promoted Lance Corporal, gives in to pleas from a couple of his men and lets them lower him by rope into a village well, to refill their canteens on a hot day. Then the Japanese open fire, the men drop him, and he spends the firefight treading water in the well. Sgt. Hutton is livid: "Jesus wept!" And a great account of a week's leave the platoon got in Calcutta ("Cal" to the soldiers), during a lull in the campaign. Their accommodations were in the cool, vaulted chambers of the Calcutta Museum, and Fraser was well-pleased with them, and the city, which in his telling sounds grand indeed. Certainly compared to the mud and the leeches of monsoonal Burma!

So. If you like old soldier's memoirs, and in particular if you like Fraser's other books, you won't want to miss this one. 4.5 stars, rounded up.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Fraser recounts his experiences as a infantryman in the 17th Indian Division, fighting the Japanese in Burma. Not surprisingly, this work is much more sober than Fraser's fiction, being an intense grunt's-eye view of a nasty conflict. In style and attitude, it's much closer to his McAuslan stories than Flashman. Still, fans will easily recognize his ear for dialect (indiscernible Cumbrian accents abound) and eye for the absurd (battling a foot-long centipede during a mortar barrage!). Its only demerit is Fraser's compulsion to defend his generation's political and racial attitudes; the occasional use of Jap would likely have passed without comment by most, given its context. Still a gripping read.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.2⭐
The book is the Second World War memoir of the novelist George MacDonald Frazer, author of the Flashman stories. It's well written, often funny, mostly honest ( I think) and very unapologetic. Frazer is clearly proud of his part in the brutal Burmese campaign and proud of those he served with.
He pledges the details are as honest as his 50 year old memories allow, when he can't remember he says so.

The war against the Japanese was vicious and for those who fought it intensely personal, to the point of hatred. That theme is clear throughout different accounts I've read including Robert Leckie's "Helmet For My Pillow " Eugene Sledge's "With The Old Breed" Alistair Urquhart's "The Forgotten Highlander". I would equally reccomend all of these to anyone interested in individual stories of that war.

There's much to admire about this book. First, Fraser's skill as a writer. Second, he acknowledges the crucial role played by Britain's colonial allies: Gurkhas; Africans; Indians; Sikhs and respects them in a way not always seen in contemporary accounts of the war.

He has the screenwriter's appreciation of "scene". One I liked is when he lends a copy of Henry V to a grizzled sergeant who instinctively understands it and asks him if Shakespeare ever served in the army. " 'E's bin there,"
observes the hard bitten veteran.

Frazer is a master of descriptive imagery, from the army camps, to the jungles, to the streets of Calcutta- he puts you there with plain, economical prose.

There were a few things that grated. Frazer is understandably a creature of his time and there's an undercurrent of British imperial grandeur and glory about the book that I, personally, didn't need.

He has no doubts at all about the righteousness of the cause up to and including justifying allied war crimes and the dropping of the atomic bomb ( most veteran chroniclers of that war I read share his view on the bombings, but not all).

He uses different ways of saying it but his argument comes down to "it was us or them." Maybe he's right. I myself wasn't there but... I always have doubts.

All that notwithstanding: it's a good book; I'm glad I bought/read it; I'll be thinking about it for some time to come.

[The Bauchler · Rating 5 out of 5]

The accounts of GMF’s time in the Border Regiment are still riveting, amusing and poignant after first reading it a dozen years ago.

The description of life in the ‘Forgotten Army’ are frank and fascinating.

However, I listened to the audio version this time and the reader struggles to reproduce the Cumberland dialect. I’m afraid his 'authentic' accents often sounded like so many Beatles talking about the war.

He struggled with inflection and slang words, too.

This is a shame as much of the joy of this book is the characters - what they say and, as importantly, how they say it.

GMF's opinions are of his time and will probably upset some folk, but every opinion has clearly been thought about, and many of the complaints he has about ‘modern’ life, you may have to concede, he gives some convincing arguments for the causes and the cure.

I recommend it wholeheartedly - but only the book version.

You have been warned.

[Bradley Brincka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my third reading of George Macdonald Fraser's classic memoir of his military service in Burma in the last year of WW2. I first encountered Fraser's famous Flashman series as a college student and read Quartered Safe Out Here as a young lieutenant in the Army.

Fraser's account of the final months of war against a doomed, retreating Japanese Army in Burma is equal parts harrowing and hilarious. His skill as a novelist shines through in his loving descriptions of his Cumbrian comrades whose dialect he transcribes faithfully and phonetically, giving the book's dialogue a colorful quality.

Fraser's memoir is all the more engaging given the significant distance in time between the events depicted and the book's publication. Writing nearly 50 years after the war, he is curmudgeonly in his reminisces, drawing occasional comparisons between his experience as a teenage rifleman and the high-tech battlefield of the contemporary Gulf War. He anticipates the modern readers' squeamishness about his generation's attitudes but treats both friends and enemies in the book with depth of understanding.

The most interesting sections of the book are where Fraser waxes about how his generation processed their collective experience. On several occasions, he notes how men in combat were prone to behaving in ways they had seen portrayed in films; a case of "life imitating art." So too, he argues, people in the aggregate were prone to reacting to events in ways that they felt were expected of them, whether sporting a stiff upper lip in one era or ruminating on one's emotions in another:

"One wonders how Londoners survived the Blitz without the interference of unqualified, jargon-mumbling 'counsellors', or how an overwhelming number of 1940s servicemen returned successfully to civilian life without benefit of brain-washing...Tell people they should feel something, and they'll not only feel it, they'll regard themselves as entitled and obliged to feel it...Fortunately for the world, my generation didn't suffer from spiritual hypochondria--but then we couldn't afford it. By modern standards, I'm sure we, like the whole population who endured the war, were ripe for counselling, but we were lucky; there were no counsellors."

[Laura Leaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This war memoir is about the British men who fought in Burma against the Japanese in what the book jacket calls the "last great land campaign of World War II." George MacDonald Fraser was only nineteen when he fought in Nine Section, and then led it for a while as the sole Scotsman amongst a bunch of Cumbrians, whose linguistic gymnastics include fascinating similes like "E'll be at us like a rat up a fookin' drainpipe," and cinematic exclamations that Fraser swears are true: "They got me! The dirty rats, they got me!"

Fraser is clear to point out that "the trouble with eye-witness" is "it sees only part of the whole, and is incomplete." Indeed, much of the war strategy is omitted in this book, as it concentrates solely on the experiences of Fraser and his relationships with the men he fought with.

The writing is marvelous, and I loved the camaraderie between the men, which oscillated between coarse joking and advice and profound meditations on life and death. I have a tiny suspicion that Fraser's remembrances are dyed a bit with a romanticism for the time when Englishmen kept the "stiff upper lip" and did not suffer publicly from PTSD. Some of his comments about the difference in the ways men used to fight and the new ways are interesting. He writes: "Times have changed now, and it is common to hear front-line troops, subjected to the disgusting inquisition of war reporters, confess to being scared. Of course they're scared; everybody's scared. But it was not customary to confess it, then, or even hint at it. It was simply not done, partly out of pride, but far more from the certainty that nothing could be better calculated to sap confidence, in one's self, in one's comrades, and among those at home." Much of this book is about extolling the virtues of that silent dutiful ethic that seems so much the mist of the past.

There are some thrilling scenes that are obsolete details of the era - like the sounds of a dozen sets of metal gears after the order to fix bayonets, or the darkness of the night campaigns (no infra-red lenses back then). But, for me, so much of this was simply flat-out funny. I laughed so hard at some of the Cumbrian dialogue that I had to put down the book.

"Dubarry was a Lady. Lucille Ball was in it, and that Red Skelton feller."

"By God!" rasped Forster. "Loo-seel Ball! Ah could dae wi' that alangside us. Ah'd give 'er soom stick!"

"Lucky Miss Ball, to be in California," murmured the Duke.

"She's awreet. Ah fancy Susanna Foster meself," said Wedge, with dreamy reverence. "By, she's a loovly lass, that! Sings, an' a' - she can't 'alf twilt it!"

[Ensiform · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author of the Flashman series gives his account, from the ground level, of the campaign in Burma with his beloved Nine Section. This war memoir is fascinating for several reasons. First, Fraser is, for all intents and purposes, Flashman himself: the broad racial delineations, the bald admiration for famous generals, the unabashed Imperialist fervor mixed with rational analysis of battle, even the fear of waiting before battle and the mad adrenaline rush afterwards.

It strikes me that Flashy isn’t a character at all, just Fraser himself, made a bit more cowardly, and set in the Victorian era. For Fraser is one of the last of the old unreconstructed crotchety men of the empire: the book is vehemently non-PC. Fraser admits that he still feels hatred for the Japs (as he calls the enemy), even preferring not to sit by them in public places today. The ‘40s propaganda image of the Jap as “an evil, misshapen, buck-toothed barbarian who looked and behaved like something sub-Stone Age” is Fraser’s image of them to a T. (Which might say something about his abilities to assess things rationally, since by his own admission civilized lights mustn’t shine much in war, or you’ll lose; and his section committed what would be called war crimes today; obviously, both sides harbored the same kind of racist illusions, but Fraser can’t see that). He bemoans many other facets of modern mores as well (like “counseling” and “war guilt”), but the main thrust of the book is the sometimes funny, sometimes appalling, obviously soul-changing experience that was war. It’s a superb war memoir, peppered with odd characters and vivid battle scenes, and a very important record of what the average foot-soldier felt at the time.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a story of men at war, in a far-off land. There are hot, dusty marches and parched throats, monsoon rains that fall like hammer blows, and exhaustion to the limits of human endurance. Blood sucking vermin are everywhere, leeches and ticks and mosquitoes, clouds of mosquitoes, with malaria and dysentery so common they hardly rate mention. It is also a story of killing, in the brutal ways that infantrymen kill, and of seeing comrades die. But mostly it is the story of soldiers, the author’s squad mates. These are hard men, crude and blasphemous, but well trained and capable, men with dirty hands and clean weapons, the kind you want beside you when things get very very bad. Though each has a distinct personality, there is a timeless quality to them – the eternal infantrymen – and you could have found their like in Caesar’s legions or Napoleon’s Grande Armée. It is this timelessness that lifts the book out of its specific conflict and makes it a commentary on men at war in all times and all places.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

View from the foxhole of the retaking of Burma by Allied forces. Fraser tells it like it is from first hand experience as a ranker in the infantry, from the mundane routine of guard duty to blow by blow accounts of hairy firefights and clearing Jap bunkers. Mixed in with occasional philosophical reflections on the morality of war and killing from the perspective of an unapologetic and battle hardened veteran. Truly riveting, and a surprisingly good non fiction work from the creator of Flashman.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quartered Safe Out Here is one the of the quintessential infantry memoirs, a tale of six months with Nine Section in Burma in 1944 and 1945. Fraser, of course has won lasting popularity as the author of the Flashman series, and he brings all his literary weight to this memoir. It's really about the ten or so men of Nine Section, grousing Cumbrian bandits in the finest tradition of their Boarder Riever ancestors. The rolling Cumbrian dialect, the complaints and arguments, the stand-tos and patrols and attacks, all come through.

Memory is a fickle thing, and tentpoles of fervent adrenaline in assaults on bunkers and desperate night actions and interspersed with long periods where nothing much happens, or nothing that could have stood out to be remembered 50 years later. And as with the Burma Campaign as a whole, it was the last brave show of the British Empire, where an army composed of Gurkhas and Sikhs and innumerable other Indian ethnicities, with madcap East African convoy drivers, and regiments from some tiny specific English county still half trapped in the Middle Ages, slugged it out with the cream of the Japanese army in the trackless jungle hills. There's glory, and humor, and jungle sores and malaria and dusty marches.

I could have done with fewer complaints about modern society having gone to the dogs, but Fraser is entitled to his pint and his grousing, because the story is incredible. Just a fantastic book.

[C. G. Telcontar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Little known in America, this is a raw look at the butt end of the war in the CBI. Published late in his life, Fraser's look back contains many a caustic remark about 'today's society, war guilt, fear in combat, the inane question 'did you kill anyone?' and many other aspects of modern life he finds idiotic in the light of what he experienced in his youth. Sarcastic, cynical, funny, he tells the stories with ease and natural talent, a doorway into a forgotten, virtually unknown to American audiences, theater of war in the dying light of the British Empire. His casual delight in the Raj may raise eyebrows in the youth of today when reading this, but he regards Empire to be as natural as sunrise and sunset and urges you, the shocked reader, to get over it. He may as well slap you in the face, he's so defiant about the rightness of the war and the rightness of using the atomic bombs to end it. Many, many memoirs are described as being 'brutally honest'. I'd say this one is the template for that kind of remark.

This man's experience would have made a fine war film in the '60's or '70's with an ensemble cast handling the humor and the horror as easily as a juggler. Today's screenwriters and directors just wouldn't get it.

Not to be missed.

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one caught my attention because Fraser is the author of the hugely entertaining Flashman series which is educational and alternatingly hilarious and offensive to modern (and postmodern) sensibilities.

Here Fraser recalls his experiences in the British army fighting in Burma during WW2. The particulars of battles and tactics aren’t really the point. What is fascinating is Frazer, writing in 2007, musing about how much his country has changed culturally and sociologically since the 1940s. Despite being considered the Greatest Generation, those who fought against the Nazis and Fascists held some beliefs that would today be regarded as controversial, or worse. Fraser discusses issues such as race, socialism, war crimes, PTSD, and the use of the atomic bomb.

He neither condemns nor defends, but insists that this is just the way things were. He contends that those who would like to pretend they would have believed and behaved differently in those circumstances at that time are simply deluding themselves. They would have been flowing down the same cultural stream as everyone else they knew. This is not to argue for moral relativism, but rather just to understand that the Spirit of the Age is ever changing, and we are each a product of our environments and each have our own moral blind spots. This is one of the reasons it’s so important to read widely from different eras — to prevent what CS Lewis termed “chronological snobbery.”

[Dale Renton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has had so many reviews in the past that it's difficult to add anything other than a personal response to avoid repeating what has already been said. Fraser writes fifty years after the events and openly admits his fears of incomplete and even incorrect recollection of some of his time in Burma (and India) late in World War 2. What he states in the strongest and most uncompromising terms are his views on the comradeship and character of the men he fought alongside, his lasting hatred of the Japanese who were such a formidable and terrible enemy and his dismay at the loss over the years of what it meant to his generation to be British. His wonderfully written accounts of various conversations, situations, actions and events inspire laughter, shock and sadness sometimes within the same page. His brilliant 'Flashman' books made me a fan of George MacDonald Fraser the writer. This chronicle of his wartime service and of his lasting respect for his fellow soldiers has made me an admirer of the man.

[J.P. Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Fraser served in the English forces toward the end of the Second World War, fighting in Burma with an infantry outfit. His recollections of battle, hardship, his mates and the Japanese enemy are vividly rendered, as you might expect from a lifelong journalist and author of the Flashman series. Fraser is delightfully non-P.C., holding no regrets for his service, seeking no self-pity, and believing in the justice of his cause.

And while this is a quick, insightful read on a little-known aspect of World War II, my only quarrel is with the author's ear. He accurately renders the words and phrases of his North Country comrades. But in this case, accuracy clashes with readability as the mangled vowels and consonants slow down the flow and occasionally jar you off the page.

That aside, an interesting non-fiction look at a forlorn corner of the war that was no less deadly for it's obscurity.

[TheIron Paw · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well done memoir from the perspective of pbi (poor bloody infantry) in Burma. Those who've enjoyed Sledge's "With the Old Breed" should also read this. The perspective is the same although this book displays less of the brutality of Sledge's. Fraser carries a more reflective style, that is particularly interesting in that he addresses the differing perspectives of now and then. Fraser also writes with considerable humour and affection for his squad mates, something that I didn't find in Sledge's book. I particularly enjoyed Fraser's rendering of the Cumbrian dialect. (As an aside I wish I'd read this before visiting the Lake District - it provides an interesting insight into the Cumbrian ethos.) Well worth reading for anyone interested in the reality and meaning of combat.