World War II
The regiment was expanded during the Second World War to a total of 14 battalions and served through the Japanese invasion of Burma during the Burma Campaign. Eight Battalions of Infantry were raised along with a holding battalion, a training battalion and four territorial battalions. The men of the territorial battalions were under no obligation to serve outside the borders of Burma.
After the British Burma Army's retreat from Burma, a reconstituted 2nd Battalion continued to take part in the Burma Campaign. The remaining highly weakened battalions were disbanded although many of the non-Burmese nationals (Indians and Gurkhas) from them went to form battalions of the Burma Regiment created in September 1942.
The 2nd battalion participated in the 1st and 2nd Chindit expeditions into Burma. In his official report following the first expedition Orde Wingate the Chindit commander wrote:
| “ | I would like to record here that I have never had under my command in the field as good a body of men as the 2nd Burma Rifles. | ” |
As a result, for the 1943 Chindit operation, the battalion was expanded and broken down into reconnaissance platoons for the Chindit columns. In 1944, the battalion was broken down into sections among the Chindit force.
In 1945, the 2nd Burma Rifles was reconstituted as an infantry battalion. In July 1945, the 1st battalion was re-raised in Burma. Over the following three years leading up to Burmese independence, the 3rd through 6th battalions were re-raised.
Read more about this topic: Burma Rifles
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded women. There is not one which has not made her subject to man.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)