Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Black Cat tracks its prey through Burma, June 20, 2001
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.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fraser's own story and own voice, February 23, 2001
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.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
No quarter asked or given, January 3, 2002
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.
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