Out of hot water

During and after the second world war the Fourteenth Army in Burma became famous as the Forgotten Army, almost as famous for being forgotten as for its great victory. More truly forgotten, however, despite its great strategic achievement in keeping open the lifelines to the eastern empire, is the role of the Royal Navy in those warm and contested eastern waters.

Typically, the only events most of us hear of are the disastrous losses of Singapore and of the warships Prince of Wales and Repulse, the latter blamed on Winston Churchill. We read of ossified naval thinking in the 1930s, of inadequate preparation and procurement muddle, symptomatic of inevitable national decline and imperial overreach, and shake our heads and agree. It’s all the more cheering, therefore, to come across a book that not only challenges received opinion but convincingly refutes it.

Andrew Boyd, a former submariner and diplomat, now an academic, argues that historians have generally underestimated the importance of denying the vast Indian Ocean to the Axis powers. It was essential to the war effort not only for supplies to and from the Middle East, India and Australasia (and that forgotten Fourteenth Army), but in order to maintain the flow of Persian oil and to support Russia. The importance of the Persian supply route in keeping Russia in the war — once it had changed sides — is often underestimated and largely unacknowledged in histories of the second world war. For Britain, keeping open the Indian Ocean, and thereby denying the Axis the resources of the Middle East and safeguarding the war potential of India and Australasia, was essential to the successful prosecution of the war. This was ultimately far more important than holding Singapore or Malaya and indeed ranked second only to maintaining the Atlantic lifeline.