The European theatre was a tangled welter of men and materials. Slowly but surely the allies were turning the tide. The erstwhile invincible juggernaut of the German High Command was being broken, scattered.

But the broken pieces still had hidden barbs and it was the task of the infantry-men, the light tanks, the armoured cars to seek out those barbs and destroy them.

Theirs was the oldest type of war, the essential war; in the last analysis perhaps the only war that counted.

Not for them the shudder and thunder of big guns, the tremor of a joystick, the shriek of diving plane, the crash of falling bomb. Their comrades fell beside them. Their frail armour was wreathed in smoke and flame. From all walks of life they came, the high-born and the humble, the fate of the world in their grimy hands.

This is the authentic story of a handful of them... you, me, the man in the big house across the way, the kid next door... the innocent and the evil, the tough and the tender...

Burma: already captured by the invading Japanese and held in the grip of tyranny. On the Plains of Imphal, white and yellow fought a savage battle which would determine the future of the continent of India. But this was to be the turning point, the end of the long retreat for the British and Indian soldiers and the beginning of the long journey back through the steaming, poisonous jungles where the face of the enemy was seldom seen, where a bullet or a bayonet struck without warning, where there was only the scream, the blood on the muddy trail, and the endless green blankness of the jungle which hid a thousand terrors and a thousand ways for a man to die.

This is the story of a small unit of men, moving ahead of the main advance, cut off by a savage Japanese counter-attack, forced to hold out in a small native village deep in the jungle - and of the Burmese who helped them in spite of the danger, in spite of the knowledge that should the Japanese break through the tenuous defence lines, their own lives would be forfeit.