Early in 1944, when the war between the Allies and Japan was three years old, twenty thousand special troops invaded enemy-held Burma. Three thousand were Americans and came to be known as Merrill’s Marauders. The rest were “Chindits,” mainly British soldiers together with Nigerians, Chinese, Gurkhas, and Burmese. Trained in guerrilla warfare, they penetrated Burma by secret routes or landed on remote airfields hacked out of the jungle. Their mission: to free the land route, blocked by the Japanese, along which aid from America could reach China. History has proven that the campaign was inspired by a serious miscalculation of the motives and reliability of the Chiang Kai-shek regime. But the indisputable heroism of the Allied officers and men in the face of some of the most arduous circumstances in military history made this one of the Second World War’s most controversial campaigns. Drawing on previously undisclosed papers, private testimonies, and official records, renowned military historian Brigadier Shelford Bidwell recounts the Burma campaign and provides shrewd, caustic portraits of the eccentric and pugnacious Generals Wingate and Stilwell, and acute assessments of men such as Michael Calvert; Wingate’s successor W.D.A. Lentaigne; and Colonel Charles Hunter, leader of the “Marauders.” Cool, fair, wry but objective, The Chindit War transcends the memoirs of individual participants and puts the story of the campaign in Burma into unforgettable focus.