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Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma

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Fraser's is one of the finest war memoirs I've ever read, and for so many reasons. He has a gift for illustrating the life of the combat soldier in ways that are at once terrifying, hilarious, and sometimes just plain bizarre. His discovery in the field that he had a gift for brewing tea is unforgettable, as is his account of falling down a well in the middle of a battle, his comrades cracking jokes about it as the chaos and noise of battle rages all around them. Among the most remarkable things about Fraser's book are his comparisons between the official histories of what happened with what he actually experienced; the official history of one engagement, for example, records only that a tank was destroyed and so many men killed or wounded on each side, but Fraser describes what that burning tank SMELLED like and how it attracted the attention of Japanese soldiers throughout the night. These are the things we rarely get from ordinary histories of battles and wars. His book does not reduce the soldiers to a list of statistics. One learns to care about them or loathe them almost as much as Fraser did.

The final few chapters are particularly sobering. We owe so much to the men and women who fought and served in this war. Fraser's book has many important and enduring lessons for all of us, but particularly for those of us born in the postwar boom. Highly, highly recommended!

As a young man, George MacDonald Fraser was a "ranker" (enlisted man) assigned to the 17th (Black Cat) Division of the British 14th Indian Army as it pursued the Japanese south through Burma after the latter's resounding defeat at the gates of India, at Imphal. Fraser's narrative history of his personal contribution to this campaign is QUARTERED SAFE OUT HERE.

Written decades after the fact, this book does not pretend to be a comprehensive history of the Burma Theater in the last months of World War II. Rather, it's the war from the perspective of Nine Section in which Fraser fought, first as a Private, then Lance Corporal. (A "section" is the smallest operating unit of an infantry platoon, i.e. 8-10 men.) Besides being a vivid retelling of the author's recollections to the extent that he remembers, it's also an intimate portrait of the organization, weapons, tactics and camaraderie of the British Army at section level at that time, place, and conflict. It's a story told with the humor, intelligence and introspection that comes with maturity and hindsight. And, though some of Fraser's bitterness towards his old foe occasionally shows, age does dull the sharp edges.

"I remember watching, a year or two ago, televised interviews with old Japanese soldiers who had fought in the war ... sitting in their gardens in their sports shirts, blinking cheerfully in the sunlight, reminiscing in throat-clearing croaks about battles long ago. It crossed my mind: were any of you on the Pyawbwe slope, and lived to tell the tale? Well, if they did, at this time of day I don't mind."

Fraser is a truly gifted writer. After VJ Day, he applied for, and was awarded, a commission as a subaltern (2nd Lieutenant) in a Scottish Highland division posted to the Middle East. In this capacity, his experiences served as the basis for his quite wonderful and comedic McAuslan series of fictional stories (collected and available from Amazon.co.uk in THE COMPLETE MCAUSLAN). I unreservedly recommend both of these two books to anyone who has ever served in any branch of the armed forces, no matter what country. I myself was in the U.S. Navy, and Fraser's works are in the "can't put down" category.

This is Fraser's memoir, written decades later, of his experiences as a teenaged infantryman fighting the Japanese in Burma with General Slim's army in World War II. He doesn't exaggerate those experiences or attempt to twist them into a novelish coming-of-age story or a Flashman-style comic adventure. There is a strong element of the old-style "dialect story" in the recreated dialogue between Fraser and his comrades, most of whom are from Cumberland in the North of England, but these are both convincing and fun, and when the group comes under fire you share Fraser's feelings of comradeship with them in part because of that dialogue.

What surprised and pleased me most about this book is the imprint of Fraser's own personality and strong opinions --- Flashman he is not. He's an old man now, and has grown more conservative and just a little cranky, but he's no less sharp an observer, resulting in a voice that's perfect (for my tastes) for first-person narration of and commentary on witnessed historical events. He indulges in some sentimentality that his famous character Flashman would have mocked --- about the characteristics of "Englishmen," for instance --- but knowing what he experienced in Burma you feel that he's more than earned the right to sentimentalize. Toward the end he leaves his narrative to defend the use of the atom bomb against Japan; he says that to protect his grandchildren he'd "gladly throw the switch on the entire Japanese nation," and that if you can't say the same you've got no business being a parent. I was shocked and delighted with the honesty of that sentence, and of this book as a whole.

This is Fraser's memoir, written decades later, of his experiences as a teenaged infantryman fighting the Japanese in Burma with General Slim's army in World War II. He doesn't exaggerate those experiences or attempt to twist them into a novelish coming-of-age story or a Flashman-style comic adventure. There is a strong element of the old-style "dialect story" in the recreated dialogue between Fraser and his comrades, most of whom are from Cumberland in the North of England, but these are both convincing and fun, and when the group comes under fire you share Fraser's feelings of comradeship with them in part because of that dialogue.

What surprised and pleased me most about this book is the imprint of Fraser's own personality and strong opinions --- Flashman he is not. He's an old man now, and has grown more conservative and just a little cranky, but he's no less sharp an observer, resulting in a voice that's perfect (for my tastes) for first-person narration of and commentary on witnessed historical events. He indulges in some sentimentality that his famous character Flashman would have mocked --- about the characteristics of "Englishmen," for instance --- but knowing what he experienced in Burma you feel that he's more than earned the right to sentimentalize. Toward the end he leaves his narrative to defend the use of the atom bomb against Japan; he says that to protect his grandchildren he'd "gladly throw the switch on the entire Japanese nation," and that if you can't say the same you've got no business being a parent. I was shocked and delighted with the honesty of that sentence, and of this book as a whole.

This wonderful autobiography of Frazer's wartime experiences with British forces in Burma should be compulsory reading in military training schools. The book contains all of the hallmarks of fluid writing, natural dialogue and a fine storytelling sense that readers of Frazer's Flashman books know well. But here too is a compassion for the ordinary soldier and a realistic accounting of how Frazer's companions thought, felt and fought their way through one of the harshest battlegrounds of the Second World War.

Some of Frazer's views -- about the Japanese, about the treatment of prisoners of war, about how soldiers regarded war dead from their own numbers -- may make contemporary readers uncomfortable. But the book is all the more valuable because of Frazer's willingness to recount what he remembers from the time rather than to sugar-coat or glamorise some difficult truths.

I would have liked to read 'Quartered Safe Out Here' some years earlier when my father, a Second World War veteran, was still alive. The books gives an insight into the thinking and experiences of a remarkable generation of people. I could not recommend it more strongly for those interested in the psychology of conflict or in the experiences of the Second World War generation.

George MacDonald Fraser, best known for his Flashman novels, and, in my opinion, one of our best writers, gives us here his nearly fifty-year-old memories of his service in Burma in 1945.

There is so much to like about this book that it's difficult to know where to begin. There is Fraser's absolute honesty about his fears, his mistakes, his attitude toward the Japanese, and the virtues and vices of his comrades. There is his ability to place his unit's activities within the context of larger campaigns and yet give a vivid impression of what fighting with his unit must have been like. There is his brief but compelling portrait of General William Slim, for whom he has an unabashed admiration. There are moments of low humor, of heroism, and of tragic loss of life, and there is an unapologetic pride in what he, his comrades, and the rest of the British and Allied forces accomplished.

This is one of the best books that I have ever read, and I recommend that you make it one of yours.

Before Fraser became well known for his "Flashman" series of comic historical novels, he was an enlisted man in the 17th Division of the 14th Indian Army during WWII. Almost 50 years later, he recounts his wartime experience in Burma from the perspective of his section of about eight or so men, all from Cumbria in NW England. With his many writerly gifts, he gives a mostly unvarnished account of what he did and saw, capturing battle actions and anecdotes with sharp and often witty prose.

Fraser's account is very much a personal one, and throughout the book he rails against contemporary mores and broader political correctness concerning the war. He is quite open about how the British forces believed themselves to be superior beings compared to the Japanese they fought-and points to Japanese POW camps as a vindication of this. Similarly, he reports the campfire discussions after his unit saw newsreels from liberated concentration camps, in which all agreed that Germany needed to be razed to the ground. Fraser himself provides an emphatic defense of the use of nuclear bombs on Japan. And in his defense, it is true that the latest scholarship on the subject is in agreement that Japan was not on the brink of surrender at the time.

Beyond these larger issues, the memoir is perhaps at its best when telling the smaller stories. The character of his Cumbrian comrades, the descriptions of various "native" units such as the Gurkhas, Pathans, Sikhs, and especially a hilarious description of the Army's East African drivers. There's a great bit where he falls down a well in the middle of an attack, and another great part where an uneducated Sergeant borrows his copy of Shakespeare's Henry V and definitively concludes that Shakespeare had been a soldier. My favorite bit though, was when he is sent to teach the PIAT (British version of the bazooka) to a guerilla unit led by a character straight out of Monty Python. Cpt. "Grief" was one of those crazy commando-type officers who spoke in a running "rah rah" style, thought that war was great fun, and was totally deadly.

Although at times Fraser's conservative crankiness gets old, and at times his slips into over-sentimentality, its kind of hard to begrudge him those faults-having done his service, he's earned the right to grumble. Overall, the memoir is a great taste of "the forgotten war" in Asia and an excellent example of the infantryman-level view of the war.

It's been years since I first read "Quartered Safe Out Here" by the creator of Harry Paget Flashman, VC. (And I won't rehash everything the previous reviewers have written.) Having read and reread all of the Flashman novels before picking it up, and being a card carrying Flashmaniac myself, I was very anxious to know more about GMF. This book certainly didn't disappoint me. After I had finished it, though, I wanted to find out more. I didn't realize I'd have to wait until December 2002 to finally read the next chapter in the life of GMF in "The Light's On At Signpost" (which I found at amazon.com.uk for 20.13GBP). The two books are quite different, except for Fraser's Anti-PC rants, the one tells the story of a young GMF serving in WWII and the other an older, but still funny, GMF telling tales of his years writing movie scripts in Hollywood and the famous and not-so-famous people he worked with during those years. At the end of "The Light's On At Signpost," he briefly writes more about his family, his schooling in Scotland, and how he became a writer. GMF is almost 78 now (He was born on April 2, 1925.) and I only hope he will live long and write more wonderfully funny books.

This is a wonderful evocation of a period I'm glad not to have known first hand. Fraser has created a marvelous memoir of his time as an enlisted man in the British 14th Indian Army during World War II.

Fraser strikes a nice balance between what might be called the "patriotic" and "revisionist" schools of military memoir. He neither praises the war and his part in it as a great adventure nor completely damns it as an unnecessary, unthinking, descent into utter brutality. Which leads me to beleive that it's a better reflection of what it was really like than many works out there. Of particular interest on this score are two sections: First, Fraser takes scornful issue with some of the ideas Paul Fussel puts forth in "Wartime." Then he discusses the use of atomic weapons to end the war, with a conclusion that is rather unexpected.

But these are sidelights to the meat of the book -- a description of his time with the 17th; the campaigns as seen from a foot-soldiers point of view; his descriptions of his officers and fellow soldiers; what it felt like, in action, on patrol, and in camp. It is all written in Fraser's usual readable, conversational, and engaging style.

This book is indispensable.

This book had been brought to my attention by the author John McKinna ("The Sen-Toku Raid" and others) when it was learned we both had been combat infantry. And a great recommendation it was. The name of the book was taken from a Rudyard Kipling phrase in "Gunga Din", and outlines the infantryman's life during the final days of WWII as the Black Cat Division pushed down the Burma road towards Rangoon.

His book is unique in that it recounts the perspective of the war-fighter on the ground, who's entire knowledge of a world conflict is about 300 yards. At one point, he described every piece of equipment on his person, a bit of historical information I found of great interest.

Interspersed with this narrative however, was Fraser's meticulous research of after action reports of the units involved to weave a mosaic for the reader that helped round out the full picture of the campaign itself.

Overall, a great read.