Jim had been horribly airsick and was still feeling the effects of the extremely rough series of short flights from Toungoo to the Yomas as he and his brigade hunkered down in their sector of the thirty-mile-long line to wait for the Japs to emerge. Despite the teeming rain, swarms of mosquitoes, leeches and stinking heat, there was an almost tangible atmosphere of tense expectation for, if successful, this could prove to be the final battle of the Burma Campaign, and their ticket home.

Their machine guns covered every track out of the Yomas as well as the paths between the flooded fields. Infantry and barbed wire protected the machine guns which were dug in on the only ground above water. More field guns stood ready behind them, and waiting behind them were yet more infantry. All the boats had been removed from the Sittang River; tanks stood at road junctions and in the villages while others patrolled the road. Fighters and bombers waited on the few all-weather airfields, while patrols and scouts in the Yomas passed on information well in advance as to how many enemy were on their way, and by which route.

It was like a turkey shoot as they came screaming out of the Yomas brandishing what turned out to be empty guns, for the machine guns, Brens, rifles and tanks mowed them down. They drowned in their hundreds in the racing yellow waters of the Sittang River, their corpses floating in the fields and amongst the reeds. The brigades showed little mercy for what had proved to be a pitiless enemy, and by the time the guns fell silent, the 14th Army had killed and captured over eleven thousand Japanese.

The long, exhausting and bloody Burma Campaign was finally over.

Jim had now been on leave in Rangoon for two weeks, but most of that had been spent in the military hospital being treated for yet another bout of malaria, courtesy of the mosquitoes in the Yomas, and the suppurating jungle sores he’d gained from knocks and cuts whilst servicing the vehicles. He’d finally been passed fit enough to join his fellow officers at their comfortable billet in a seaside hotel, and was now sitting on a veranda, sipping tea and admiring the view of several pretty nurses who were playing ball on the sandy beach in their skimpy swimsuits.

‘That’s a glorious sight after all that jungle,’ he murmured to Jumbo who was making a ham-fisted effort to patch up the bullet holes in his bagpipes.

‘It is that,’ the big man agreed, glancing up from his work to give the girls an appreciative once-over. ‘It’s quiet too, thank God. Ye ken me ears are still ringing from all that gunfire.’