The last suicide mission of the Japanese navy was yet to come. 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. VE Day is close, but the Japanese are unimpressed and are still a powerful force in Burma, though increasingly poorly supplied. 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. Quartered Safe Out Here (1992) is that memoir. 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. 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. 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.
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