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The Men who Served
Conditions in Burma made it difficult to maintain war cemeteries at widely separated places in the country. The battlefield cemeteries in Assam remain: Kohima War Cemetery, Imphal War Cemetery, and Imphal Indian Army War Cemetery; and the base cemeteries at Digboi, Gauhati, Chittagong and Maynamatti (Comilla). In Burma itself, those graves which could be found and had been first of all gathered together in cemeteries up-country were finally brought to Rangoon, where there are two cemeteries, Rangoon War Cemetery and Taukkyan War Cemetery, containing together more than 6,500 graves. In Tenasserim, Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery contains nearly 4,000 graves of those who died as prisoners-of-war building the western section of the Burma-Thailand Railway.
In Taukkyan War Cemetery, Rangoon, stands the Rangoon Memorial, where are commemorated all those men of the land forces who died during the campaigns in Burma and have no known grave. Those of the air forces who have no known grave are commemorated on the Air Forces memorial in Kranji War Cemetery, Singapore, together with others of their comrades who died elsewhere in South-East Asia.
In view of the difficulty of compiling records which could be accepted as complete and accurate of men of the Burma Forces who died during the campaign, or during the Japanese occupation, these men are commemorated by an inscription on the memorial which reads "In honoured memory of the men of the Burma Army and the Burma Air Force who gave their lives while serving with the units named on this panel."
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