dustcover information:

America was still neutral when, in the fall of 1941, a tall, solid thirty-year-old advertising executive from Connecticut volunteered to serve as an American Field Service ambulance driver in the British Army. It was the start of an adventure that took Scott Gilmore to Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, India, and, finally, to the jungles of Burma.

After an exciting and dangerous year in North Africa, where he witnessed the fall of Tobruk and the battle of El Alamein, Gilmore was accepted for training as an officer in the elite Indian Army. This was the old Indian Army of the British Raj, a fighting force of unflappable English officers, hardy Indians, and the legendary Gurkhas of Nepal. It was an army at the apogee of its skills and about to inflict on the Japanese their greatest defeat on land. With dry, offbeat humor, Gilmore describes his challenging months at the Officers Training School and with his new unit, the 8th Gurkha Rifles. As he endures the assault courses and marches, confronts the arcane rituals of the officers' mess, and learns the language and customs of his diminutive fellow soldiers, Gilmore's adaptability and good nature is notable, and his American viewpoint on the mix of cultures refreshing. Moreover, like generations of Britons, he learns to love and respect the kukri knife-wielding Gurkha warriors.

When Gilmore's 4th Battalion is finally deemed ready to be put to the test as part of General Bill Slim's Fourteenth Army, it plunges into battle in the jungle-covered mountains of the Indo-Burmese border. He and his comrades fight their way across the dry plains of central Burma, execute a dangerous crossing of the mile-wide Irrawaddy River, and press on to Rangoon, enduring a hostile climate and tenacious Japanese opposition. As Gilmore moves up in responsibility to company commander and engages in night reconnaissance patrols and set-piece attacks, his experiences give a forceful picture of the fighting in one of the most difficult and remote theaters of World War II.

A Connecticut Yankee in the 8th Gurkha Rifles is a war memoir unlike any other It is a fast-moving story of a quietly witty and observant young American serving with a band of legendary Asian fighting men during some of the days of Britain's greatest glory. Scott Gilmore's war is one you will not soon forget.

Contents

Preface 1. A Call to Africa 2. With the AFS in the Western Desert 3. We Shift Our Talents 4. An Officer of the Raj 5. I Join the Gurkhas >6. The Gurkhas 7. Mountain Interlude 8. To the Arakan >9. Cut Off at the Pass 10. North to Naga Country 11. At Kohima 12. March to the Irrawaddy 13. Across the Great River 14. Enemy on the Run 15. The End of the Chase 16. After the Monsoon Epilogue Appendix. The Gurkhas in and After World War II Notes Select Bibliography

 

Preface

Four of the officers I knew well in my battalion have written and published books since World War II. More challenged than daunted by this record, I set out to have a go myself, armed with the unique slant of an American with the Gurkhas (who were part of Britain's then Indian Army) and in confrontation with the Japanese in Burma. I determined to bring to the reader---likely to be more familiar with the war in Europe and the Pacific, and uninformed on Burma---a picture of some of the events and the men involved in those campaigns. Also I must tell the reader how it was I came to reach such unusual employment.

The Royal portable that I had won in a raffle in 1939 was replaced by an ornery electronic typewriter. By the end of 1991 had knocked out fifteen chapters.

Friends shown the manuscript were polite in their praise, if holding back from all-out endorsement. My story suffered from gaps, questionable accuracy, and a tendency toward convoluted sentences sure to baffle the reader. Miss Woods, my English teacher at Greenwich High, had installed a desire to write. She had not installed the basics needed for a free-flowing rhetoric, even though Truman Capote and Francis S. Steegmuller had been her students.

What to do? A good bit of revision would be necessary before any publisher would reward my efforts with a pot of gold. I had read accounts of how Maxwell Perkins had guided the writings of Thomas Wolf and Hemingway to success, and I knew how important a good editor could be. I suggested to Pat Davis that he might be my Max Perkins. He said he would try.

Pat had spent his earliest years in India, part of a family that included a great- grandfather who won the Victoria Cross with a Gurkha regiment. Pat's knowledge of the political and historical background in India, his literary talents---which included a well-reviewed account of his own part in the Burma campaigns, A Child at Arms---and his subsequent career with the Oxford University Press and the London School of Economics, together with his patience with my scrawled notes, more than qualified him for the job ahead.

From mid-1992 until the present, reams of copy have gone back and forth between Greenwich, Connecticut, and Kent, United Kingdom. Pat was ever pressing me to remember places and events in proper order, to be sure of the facts, demanding accuracy and clarity.

Brassey's requests to add more coverage of the overall military picture in Burma, of the American participation in the campaigns, of the demands of the Indians for freedom, and of many other matters small and large, required Pat's historical training. And all the while he insisted that the main stream of the book, my personal account of day-to-day life with the men in a Gurkha rifle company, remain in my own style as free as possible from editing. As they say at the Oscar awards: "Without my director, I would never have made it."

For the reconstruction of my year with the American Field Service (AFS) in North Africa and of our time at the Officers Training School in Belgaum, India, both Jupe Lewis and Bill Nichols, in Stamford and Manchester, Massachusetts, respectively, have helped immensely by digging into their diaries, letters, and memories. When I visited the AFS headquarters in New York, I was made welcome by Bill Orrick and Eleanora Golobic, who spent a morning researching the archives for me.

Over in the United Kingdom, Bob Findlay, whose ancestor was one of the Scots who founded the Irrawaddy Flotilla, the sidewheelers that plied the great river from Rangoon to Mandalay and upper Burma, has supplied me with enough background for another book. Down south of the border in England, Peter Myers and Peter Wickham, both now retired and both lifelong friends, have been generous with their readings and suggestions as the manuscript progressed.

David Quaid, historian for Merrill's Marauders, and a combat photographer with that hard-fighting group, provided me with enough guidance to do another book. Unfortunately there was just not room to cover the Marauders in depth in this one.

A word about the photographs. Quite contrary to regulations, I carried a small Leica throughout the war. For permission to reproduce theirs, I am indebted to Britain's Imperial War Museum, General Sir Walter Walker, and Pat Davis. Prints of the remaining photographs were graciously loaned by Pat Davis, Bill Dodd, Peter Myers, John Peters, and Toby Willcox. Their captions lack credits because no one remembers who pressed the camera button. My thanks, no less sincere, go to the unacknowledged snappers.

Above all I thank my wife, Peggy, for her encouragement and counsel during the long writing process, and for keeping me on a low-cholesterol regime to ensure that I am still around to enjoy the royalties.

Doing this book was both fun and hard work. It will have been worthwhile if it meets with the approval of you, the reader.

SCOTT GILMORE
Greenwich, Connecticut

---

work under copyright
copies may be available at: