To Slim, Fraser gives the best compliment any general has ever received from a private: “And when it was over and spoke of what his army had done, it was always ‘you,’ not even ‘we,’ and never ‘I.’”įraser’s account, while dark at times, possesses a sense of bemused humor, making his tale less forbidding but no less moving.įraser, an unmotivated 18- year-old in 1943, flunked his exams to get into medical school and then failed to pass the officer selection board. Under Slim’s extraordinary leadership, the mixed bag of units, races and nationalities that made up the 14th Army-Africans, Indians, Scots, Welsh, Gurkhas and English, among others-became the finest army the British would field during the war. 2, 2008, was best known for his wonderfully hilarious set of novels about that bounder of an officer Harry Flashman. Author George MacDonald Fraser, who passed away on Jan. The former is undoubtedly familiar to many Americans the other, however, is much less known, as it relates the experiences of a lance corporal in Field Marshal Lord Slim’s 14th Army in the Burma Campaign. Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa and George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here (first published in 2001). Two memoirs by those who fought in World War II qualify as great literature: E.B. Quartered Safe Out Here: A Harrowing Tale of World War IIīy George MacDonald Fraser, Skyhorse, New York, 2007, $14.95. Military History Book Review: Quartered Safe Out Here Close
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