Through the Jungle of Death: A Boy's Escape from Wartime Burma

In 1942, as war spread in the Far East and the British, Japanese and Chinese fought ferocious battles on Burmese soil, a 11-year-old Anglo-Burmese boy and his family found themselves trapped in the path of the advancing armies. Like hundreds of thousands of other refugees abandoned by the civil administration, their only hope of survival was to try to escape on foot to India through the dense jungles of Northern Burma. Stephen Brookes was that young boy, and in this account he describes the flight from his affluent home and the fearful 3000-mile journey that partially destroyed his family. It took them via China and the Burma Road, ending in a 300-mile barefoot trek across mountain ridges, where they were ambushed by Chinese soldiers, through the terrible jungle swamps of the Hukawng Valley at the height of the monsoon and into the horror of an internment camp where they were left to rot for months. Those eight months of fear, sickness and starvation turned him from a boy into a man as he witnessed the death of his father and took on responsibility for his mother and sick brother and sister until they finally reached safety at Jhansi in India.