Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Well, we've been getting a lot of questions about the last year of the war and,

and as we haven't yet had time to answer them, we thought we'd devote a whole episode to doing just that.

Well, let's kick off with David in Norway, who says it was good to hear about wars in the east.

My grandfather, Arthur, fought far away in Burma.

They recruited troops from Africa and went to Burma. He never spoke of

their time. They're too horrific with disease and the weather of fighting too. He shared these things

with my grandmother, but he goes on to say, David, we can't remember us devoting much time to the Brits

in those jungles on your rather brilliant podcast. Well, thanks for the compliment.

We have done a fair bit, haven't we, on Burma, for example, Saul?

Yeah, we have. We're going to do a little bit more, actually. I mean, we've got the end of the war coming up, VJ Day,

and I thought we'd take the opportunity to recover some ground. And that is the famous

battle of Mekteela. So we're going to be speaking to Jack Boucher, who's written a book about

that in the not too distant future. So anyone who is interested in Burma, we do get the

endless messages saying, more on Burma, please. There's obviously a group of keen acolytes out there.

We will be talking about the Battle of Mechthela,

which was, as I mentioned before,

and I will say again, probably the finest British battlefield victory

of the Second World War I, of course,

by Field Marshal Bill Slim.

Now, we have a really nice contribution here from Andreas Prokopp, who is a professor of

University of Manchester in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health. And he's very kindly passed

...