By Richard Spence

Every schoolchild in Britain learns about Dunkirk and D-Day, but who learns about Kohima, Imphal, or the 14th Army—the largest Commonwealth force ever assembled?

The Burma campaign, despite being one of the longest and most gruelling theatres of the Second World War, remains largely absent from Britain’s collective memory.

That is no accident. It reflects our Eurocentric cultural lens and the uncomfortable complexity of empire. Dunkirk and D-Day offer clean, heroic narratives.

Burma offers heat, jungle rot, and uneasy truths about how we mobilised hundreds of thousands of colonial troops for a distant war that history would later marginalise.

As a veteran of multiple conflict zones, I have seen how history shapes national identity. When we elevate some battles........

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