About the Book

The Lost War: America’s World War II Battle for Burma uncovers the neglected story of the Allied campaign fought in one of the most unforgiving landscapes of the Second World War. In the choking heat of the Burmese jungle, American, British, Indian, and Chinese soldiers battled monsoon rains, disease, and an implacable Japanese enemy for control of a narrow lifeline of road and rail that linked India to China. This was a theater where strategy was inseparable from mud and malaria, and where every mile gained along the Burma Road carried immense consequences for the wider war in Asia.

Drawing on diaries, dispatches, declassified intelligence, and fresh archival research, The Lost War recreates a campaign waged in shadows and supply lines. It follows American GIs hacking airstrips out of jungle clearings, Merrill’s Marauders and Chinese divisions pushing through trackless hills, and commanders wrestling with clashing agendas in Washington, London, and Chongqing. At stake was not only the fate of China and the reopening of the Burma Road, but also the shape of the postwar order in Southeast Asia. This is a story of courage and exhaustion, of grand strategy and bitter wilderness, and of a front that shaped the outcome of the Pacific War while almost vanishing from popular memory.