Rating: 
Summary: The Black Cat tracks its prey through Burma
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: One Man's War
Review: 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.
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Summary: The Greatest Burma War Memoir
Review: George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the Flashman series takes on not 19th Century history, but rather himself this time out. Here, in just over 200 pages, he paints a highly evocative picture of the British Tommy slugging his way through Burma and to victory in 1945. His memory he admits, has its gaps. He recalls meeting General Slim, the famed commander of the 14th Army, but cannot recall the day. He can't remember what he was doing on V-J day. But he recalls details, but not the dates of them; a 15 inch centipede in his tent, when his canoe floundered on the Sittang, when Nine section captured its first Japanese POW, he definitely remembers a section member taking the man's watch.
These are probably fallible memories, but it's their honesty that makes Fraser human, and it's what makes this memoir worth reading. Fraser has captured the enlisted man's war in Burma for all time. It would be nice to see an 8th Army veteran recall the Desert War. Fraser also like Audie Murphy's "To Hell and Back" uses a great deal of dialogue in catching the eccentrities of the Cumbrian borderers of his section. He changes their names (Murphy did too) something common in war memoirs. However, American readers might stumble over what the men are saying, but while GMF admits that it's not an exact reconstruction of what was spoken, "most of it {the dialogue) obviously is not...it is entirely faithful in gist, subject and style." This is of course, true, but one feels that GMF caught the higher truth of what life was like and as it was lived in the British Army in Burma. The eminent historian John Keegan rates "Quartered Safe Out Here" better than Manchester's "Goodbye Darkness" and E.B. Sledge's "With the Old Breed," an opinion I do not necessarily share, but I do admire this book tremendously. This is a great introduction to the war in Burma and a wonderful glimpse into life in the British Army in World War II.
Rating:
Summary: Fraser's Finest
Review: I first read this book several years ago, and at that time it impressed me as the author's best work yet (having read just about his entire ouevre thus far). Re-reading it in 2002, several passages are quite trenchant in light of last September's terrorist attacks: Fraser's views on the psychology of a barbaric enemy, what goes through his mind when under attack in battle, etc. This book deserves the widest possible readership, even if one weren't a Fraser fan already.
Rating:
Summary: Fraser's Finest
Review: I first read this book several years ago, and at that time it impressed me as the author's best work yet (having read just about his entire ouevre thus far). Re-reading it in 2002, several passages are quite trenchant in light of last September's terrorist attacks: Fraser's views on the psychology of a barbaric enemy, what goes through his mind when under attack in battle, etc. This book deserves the widest possible readership, even if one weren't a Fraser fan already.
Rating:
Summary: Classic military memoir
Review: If you wish to understand the common British soldier in World War II, his virtues and his vices, this book is essential. In spare prose the author, a celebrated novelist, recalls his service in Burma as an enlisted man in the British Army. As he conjures up his long ago comrades, their marches, the food they ate, their fights with the enemy and each other, the reader gains much needed insight into a world that is rapidly slipping from living memory. A fitting tribute to the tough British "Tommies" who did more than their share in rescuing the world from the evil of the Axis in World War II. Funny, exciting, moving, this is a book that I predict will join the ranks of other classic military memoirs such as Graves' Good-bye To All That. For an added treat read this book in tandem with Field Marshal Slim's memoir Defeat Into Victory.
Rating:
Summary: Classic military memoir
Review: If you wish to understand the common British soldier in World War II, his virtues and his vices, this book is essential. In spare prose the author, a celebrated novelist, recalls his service in Burma as an enlisted man in the British Army. As he conjures up his long ago comrades, their marches, the food they ate, their fights with the enemy and each other, the reader gains much needed insight into a world that is rapidly slipping from living memory. A fitting tribute to the tough British "Tommies" who did more than their share in rescuing the world from the evil of the Axis in World War II. Funny, exciting, moving, this is a book that I predict will join the ranks of other classic military memoirs such as Graves' Good-bye To All That. For an added treat read this book in tandem with Field Marshal Slim's memoir Defeat Into Victory.
Rating:
Summary: GMF is one of a kind...bless him!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Miss It
Review: Like all MacDonald Fraser's books its written with rare intelligence and wit. Thoroughly entertaining read
Rating:
Summary: Superbly written, totally honest
Review: The author of the Flashman series gives his account, from the ground level, of the campaign in Burma with his beloved Nine Section. This war memoir is fascinating for several reasons. First, Fraser is, for all intents and purposes, Flashman himself: the broad racial delineations, the bald admiration for famous generals, the unabashed Imperialist fervor mixed with rational analysis of battle, even the fear of waiting before battle and the mad adrenaline rush afterwards. It strikes me that Flashy isn't a character at all, just Fraser himself, made a bit more cowardly, and set in the Victorian era. For Fraser is one of the last of the old unreconstructed crotchety men of the empire: the book is vehemently non-PC. Fraser admits that he still feels hatred for the Japs (as he calls the enemy), even preferring not to sit by them in public places today. The '40s propaganda image of the Jap as "an evil, misshapen, buck-toothed barbarian who looked and behaved like something sub-Stone Age" is Fraser's image of them to a T. (Which might say something about his abilities to assess things rationally, since by his own admission civilized lights mustn't shine much in war, or you'll lose; and his section committed what would be called war crimes today; obviously, both sides harbored the same kind of racist illusions, but Fraser can't see that). He bemoans many other facets of modern mores as well (like "counseling" and "war guilt"), but the main thrust of the book is the sometimes funny, sometimes appalling, obviously soul- changing experience that was war. It's a superb war memoir, peppered with odd characters and vivid battle scenes, and a very important record of what the average foot-soldier felt at the time.
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