Episode 2 Burma's Secret Jungle War with Joe Simpson

Joe Simpson is on a personal journey,

deep into the heart of modern Burma - Myanmar.

Joe, an internationally renowned mountaineer, made the headlines

when he almost died high in the Andes when his rope was cut.

A story recounted in the iconic bestseller Touching The Void.

Now, 30 years on, he's in Burma.

So my father was here.

He was armed, he was behind enemy lines and I'm trying to just go

and see where he fought as a young man and get some sense of it.

Accompanying Joe is ex-British Army officer and expedition leader

Ed Stafford, the first man to walk the length of the Amazon.

Together, they are on the trail of an Allied Special Force

called the Chindits.

These guerrilla troops were dropped deep behind enemy lines

into the jungles of Burma in 1944 to attack the Imperial Japanese Army.

And Joe's father was one of them.

I've always been immensely proud of my father.

I found it difficult to tell him.

I just never did. So that's what I regret.

For more than 30 years, Joe has dreamed of following

in his dad's footsteps, to try and see what his now-deceased father,

Lieutenant Ian Simpson, experienced fighting here in World War II.

I can't even begin to think what it would have been like

to try and do this in a monsoon.

Absolutely...

unimaginably awful.

Both son and father confronted extreme events in their 20s.

Joe facing death in the mountains,

his father surviving battle in the guts of the enemy.

I wouldn't dream of comparing a wartime experience with

fiddling around on a mountain.

Dad didn't choose that, he was in a world war

and he and all those other men were doing their duty.

But Joe and Ed's modern-day journey...

Whoa! Whoa, whoa...

Keep coming down!

-Get out the way!

-..has its own dangers...

Whoo-hoo-hoo!

..when they too get caught up in a conflict,

a modern-day echo of Joe's father's time in Burma.

-We seem to have walked into a war.

-We have walked into a war.

Soon we'd better walk out of it.

I can't have waited all this time to come here and to finally think it's

just about to happen and we've got all the permissions

and then to find...

..we get the door slammed in our face.

That's not good news.

It's not good news at all.

It's the 8th of November, 2015.

A momentous day for Myanmar and its people.

Election day.

Political activist Aung San Suu Kyi and her party

the National League for Democracy are the frontrunners.

But how the military dictatorship will react is anyone's guess.

Joe and Ed got their first glimpse of this impending election

when they arrived in Myanmar ten days ago.

Just about to set off and there's about 100 motorbikes

coming down the street.

Hello!

Ah, it's an election parade!

These are the first open elections since 1990

and could end nearly 50 years of military rule.

So it's a historic time for Myanmar.

-Aung Suu Kyi's supposed to win by a landslide.

-Really?

-Yeah.

But neither of them realise that its repercussions would have

massive implications for their journey, too,

when they were moved away from their planned route,

following Joe's father's Chindit track

to the town of Bhamo in the northeast of Myanmar.

We're sort of trapped in Bhamo at the moment. It's election day.

But, apparently, there was a shooting on the outskirts of town

last night and the Army have put a cordon around the city.

The trouble is, you're dealing with politics

and you're dealing with the military.

And that's just a...

..bloody awful combination, really.

And it's just hugely frustrating to just sit here

and look at those hills and that's where he was. He was just there.

Just in front of us. Couldn't get any closer.

When they were deployed into Burma in 1944, the Chindits were

part of one of the largest airborne operations of World War II.

But today, they are a forgotten army in a largely forgotten war.

In 1978, when I was 18, it sort of lodged in my head

and I thought, "What an extraordinary story!

"Wouldn't it be fascinating if you could

"actually go back to where he went?"

Well, we're in Bhamo.

And they won't let us out of town.

Joe and Ed's journey started off well,

following Joe's father's wartime path as a Chindit

fighting with Morris Force deep in the jungles of northeast Burma.

But because of increasing tensions around the election

in rebel hotspots, they're stuck in the town of Bhamo

in Kachin State.

It's one of those situations where you have to be patient,

and that really isn't my strong suit.

Worst-case scenario, we don't get permissions,

I'd just be devastated.

I'll never get this opportunity again, so I'm just...

churning inside, really, trying to...

HE EXHALES

I have to put this in perspective.

I mean, it is absolutely infuriating for me

and disappointing doesn't even get near it,

but at the same time, this is an election

and this is hugely important to the people of Burma, of Myanmar.

Three days later, it's a landslide victory

for the National League for Democracy.

However, until the military relinquish control,

tensions are running high,

particularly in the northeast state of Kachin.

For Joe and Ed, there's positive news.

They've got permission to move on again, but they're

uncertain how long it will last.

I can't wait, really.

I mean, I just want to get up there

and see what he could see, be where he was.

We're just really pleased that

even though we have to jump ahead a little bit,

we can get back to the job that we came here for.

The plan is to head from Bhamo to the Taiping River Valley,

which Joe's father crossed over 70 years ago

as the Chindits fought their way north.

It seems at the moment that our original permissions

aren't valid here.

Where we want to go up in the hills,

above the Bhamo-Myitkyina road,

where Morris Force went,

we can't go there right now

and we're applying for permissions to go into that area.

For more than half a century, there's been a civil war

between the military and rebel groups like the KIA,

the Kachin Independence Army.

It's created hotspots across Myanmar,

and one of them is along the only paved road

connecting Bhamo to Myitkyina -

the road that Joe and Ed are on.

There is fighting going on at the moment.

It is an area that tourists aren't allowed to go.

We do need to be careful because without permission,

it potentially could be dangerous.

This road was also the front line for Joe's father in 1944.

Back then, it was one of the Japanese main supply lines

and was heavily protected.

Today, it's still the front line, and most of its 160km

is bristling with troops, fortified positions and military checkpoints.

This has clearly been built to be defendable.

This bridge is obviously quite a key point

in terms of this logistics route, this main road,

which is essentially the front line, that we're on at the moment,

of a war that is still going on.

This is exactly what the Japanese were doing, they were defending

the supply line, which was this road between Bhamo and Myitkyina.

And they're really in the same static position,

the Chindits could come down whenever they wanted

and put blocks on the board, blow up trucks.

KIA could do exactly the same thing.

Heading up the Taiping River Valley, they're now 50km closer

to reconnecting with Ian Simpson's route,

as recorded in his diaries and maps,

but with a plain-clothed soldier as a guide.

This morning we're walking with a military escort,

and the reason for that is that we're walking through an area

of anti-personnel landmines and there is no safe way of telling

where the mines are unless you know where the mines are.

Parts of Myanmar are amongst

the most mine-ridden regions in the world.

And up until 2013,

its government was the only state

in the world to have scattered landmines

every year since the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.

It's the indiscriminate and hidden nature of mines

that make them so very effective.

You literally only have to say they're there,

and so it's good not to take any risks.

After all, were making a programme about my father's war,

we're not trying to blow ourselves to pieces in the process.

In 2015, 79 people were reportedly injured

and 11 killed by landmines in Kachin State alone.

We go here or here?

-Good? Bad? Bad.

-Bad?

OK, so here.

We're having to stay right close to the river.

Any inclination of us wanting to move away from the river

into the jungle gets the two thumbs down.

I think that means landmines.

I'm up to my thighs in water at the moment,

just making our way down the banks.

It just shows how dangerous

our military escort considers the jungle to be.

He'd far prefer to be wading straight through the water

than going through the trees.

They have no choice but to walk along the river bank.

For Joe, who's coping with injuries from his climbing days,

it's another problem.

What I'm worried about is this is classic knee-wrecking territory.

It's rounded boulders and you're stepping onto slimy rocks,

and all I need to do is catch my foot, sit down heavily on my knee

and it could be game over.

Joe's knee was badly damaged in 1985,

when he and fellow mountaineer Simon Yates

were caught in a storm high in the Andes.

A story recounted

in the international bestseller Touching The Void.

When I broke the leg, I did it at 19,000 feet

and it was just me and Simon.

In truth, he should have left me, really.

HE YELLS

Descending the mountain, Simon cut Joe's rope

when he thought Joe was close to the ground.

Joe plummeted into a crevasse.

I was damn near dead by then anyway.

I was really angry. I wanted to climb all over the world,

I wanted to live a lot longer than 25 and I didn't want to die

in a bloody crevasse on my own and I didn't want to...

..die crawling around, pissing myself, crying on rocks.

Joe survived and went on to climb many more mountains.

But with a permanently damaged right knee.

He retired from mountaineering in 2009.

Joe still bears the scars of that moment in his 20s.

His father, too, faced a life-changing experience,

carrying his own burdens from fighting the Japanese as a Chindit.

It's often said that

the rest of their lives they're a shadow of what they were, you know.

It was significant to him and if it hadn't been,

he wouldn't have written his diaries and his notes.

He wouldn't have so carefully annotated those maps.

It was almost as if he wanted someone to follow this journey.

By early afternoon, Joe and Ed want to set up camp,

but that means crossing the river to the mine-free zone.

If you go over a rapid, if you smash your head

and you're unconscious then it's a completely different ball game.

You can see here that the river is really quite fast-flowing

as it narrows and goes over the edge of the lip.

That's enough to sweep a man off his feet, definitely.

My bet actually is that we swim across in the pools,

I think they're much, much safer.

I was nearly killed in a river in Pakistan,

-and it scared the

-BLEEP

-out of me.

Despite being a self-confessed poor swimmer, Ed's in first.

In 2010, Ed set a world record for walking - not swimming -

the full length of the Amazon.

He crossed it countless times during his two-year expedition.

They're carrying 30 kilos on their backs.

I'm just going to see how buoyant this rucksack is before I jump in,

not wanting to sink like a stone.

Are you quite a good swimmer?

Not with a flippin' great rucksack on my back, but I was.

I'm going to have a little practice swim.

I'm trying.

I'm glad I did that.

I didn't realise how much when you try and swim with a rucksack...

it's pushing you under.

I saw your panic on your face, just stay upright and just do that...

Yeah, I know, I'm getting it.

Joe and Ed decide to try their luck below the rapids.

The Chindits crossed many rivers during their 17-week campaign,

losing men and mules to raging torrents.

When Ian Simpson's column tried to cross the Taiping

on the 25th of April 1944,

they found it impossible to swim across

and had to use a small bridge further downstream.

Nearby Japanese activity made it fraught and dangerous.

Just got to find a few trees.

One tree here, one tree there, that's a hammock spot already.

It's nice.

We're back out in the jungle, we've strung our hammocks up,

done a river crossing,

Joe's about to have a little fish.

He's just drying all the things that weren't in the waterproof bags

when he crossed the river.

And I think we're good, back in the game.

Joe's father's secret wartime diary describes just how tough

the conditions were for the Chindits in this same area.

He makes a reference to all of them being tired, hungry, lousy -

as in being bitten to death by lice,

they're all infested with lice - and long hard days,

carrying heavy loads up and down hills without food.

Joe's father's role was to organise supply drops,

essential to keep a mobile army like the Chindits on the move

and in the fight.

But bad weather and poor communications

often meant they went without.

Really, for the last four days,

they'd been having quite a bad time.

Big thunderstorms every afternoon with heavy rainfall

and that was cutting off their contact with the aircraft.

And at this point they ended up 48 hours without food

and Da says they took to digging up roots and cooking them.

He actually talks about trying to go fishing and falling in instead

and not catching anything.

I'm just going to go and see if I can find some of what

Joe's father describes in his journal.

His father refers to eating lots of shoots,

and I'm assuming that's bamboo shoots.

Round this area, Da said he found clear water.

This is the first clear water streams we've seen.

If I catch some fish, we're going to have a picnic.

There appears to be a little cave system.

You can just see.

It's dark and cool in here.

It's really nice, actually.

I've emerged out of that gully into just a...

A veritable field of bamboo above me.

He was a keen fisherman.

My earliest memory is going out on a boat with him,

I must have been really small, catching three-foot-long barracudas.

I remember fly-fishing in North Yorkshire with him

when I was about ten,

so, yeah, he was a keen fisherman, but this wasn't fishing for sport,

this was trying to get the fish out just any which way they could.

Get the fish, bring them back, feed the men.

And clearly if he was doing what I'm doing now,

he'd have been very hungry.

Every bamboo shoot that I see... it's a bit like cardboard,

it's just dead.

Maybe bamboo shoots is off the menu.

Nothing, not a squiggle.

That's it.

No fish tonight.

Unlike his father, who went hungry here,

Joe and Ed have rations to keep them going.

But the psychological effect on Ian Simpson

and the Chindits was profound.

You're a hidden army.

You're hiding up in the jungles and making lightning attacks.

You're constantly attacking and hiding,

attacking and hiding, attacking and hiding.

And that sense of sort of,

"Am I being chased, will I be found?"

I can imagine the psychological stress can weigh you down

as much as just the physical stress of every day getting up,

trying to march through this stuff.

You know, I've been in through some hairy places in Afghanistan

or in the Red Zone in Peru, actually when walking,

but where I've thought that my life was at threat, directly at threat,

and I think you can't underestimate how that saps you of energy

because you can't help but worry.

I don't care. If somebody says to you they are going to kill you,

you can't you can't go to bed and sleep well.

Just received a text message on the satellite phone to say that

apparently there's 100 troops have just arrived at the base

where we left off yesterday

and we've been ordered to return immediately.

Our military escort disappeared last night.

So we are picking our way down the side of the river

as best as we can remember,

but clearly...

we are still in the area of landmines and...

So I'm just being a little bit cautious.

Overnight hostilities between the KIA and the Burmese Army

have escalated just up the Taiping valley

and the local military commander wants Joe, Ed and the film crew

out of harm's way.

The military guys on the other side of the river.

Coming back into the military camp now.

Over 100 heavily armed soldiers are on their way to reinforce

a strategic hydroelectric dam further up the Taiping River.

Once again, Joe and Ed's plans are thwarted.

There's apparently KIA members on the banks of the Taiping

taking pot shots at military soldiers

so that they literally can't even go and fill up their water bottle,

and they've said there's no chance that we can go up the Taiping now,

it's just far too dangerous, basically.

They were very heavily armed.

They had 50 cal machine guns, light machine guns, mortars, RPGs,

they had the lot. They were seriously tooled up.

They looked like they were going into battle, quite frankly.

We seem to have walked into a war.

We have walked into a war.

We better walk out of it

Joe and Ed are almost halfway along Ian Simpson's track,

but now they're having to walk further down

the Taiping River valley.

It's taking them out of harm's way,

but also further from where Joe's father and the Chindits were,

high up on the ridges that look down on the Bhamo-Myitkyina road.

This is the river that Da crossed, he crossed 20 miles up there,

up in the hills where we can't go to so, this is as close as we can get.

Which is a shame, but you get some sense if you look up on the skyline

of the mountainous jungle ridges, that's where he was moving.

The Chindits used the high ridgeline as their base of operations,

ambushing Japanese positions along the main road

which runs parallel to the ridge.

They were actually relatively safe from the enemy up there.

In many ways this forest, which I found intimidating

and claustrophobic and horrible to move through, became their friend.

With the fighting between the military and the KIA escalating,

Joe and Ed can't get to where his father was, but they can walk along

the road that the Chindits were trying to disrupt.

It's the front line in today's battle.

It's taking them past yet more minefields.

Got a flag here, mate, on the left-hand side.

-Mines?

-Mines, yeah.

Fortified military positions...

Look at the door, it's a spiked door.

It just drops shut, you can't get through.

..fences blocking jungle paths...

It's just so crude though,

rather than barbed wire you've got sharpened sticks and bamboo.

It's brutal.

..and deserted villages.

It's all abandoned, it's quite sad, really.

Five decades of fighting across the whole of Myanmar

has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

This one's even got the front door open.

Don't worry about the landmines, Ed.

It's still in one piece, it hasn't been deserted long, has it?

Depressing.

It's quite eerie.

What I do think is amazing coming out of the trees is

the ability to see, it's almost like a release, I suppose.

Oh, that's nice, just the ability to have a view,

to see more than ten metres is making me smile.

-Big country though, isn't it?

-Huge.

After the frustrations of the past few days, finally Joe and Ed

have a chance to reconnect with his father's journey.

Below, on the flood plain, is the village of Nalone

that the Chindits attacked in April 1944 - one of the few places

villagers haven't fled from along the main road.

We've just come down to the village of Nalone

and we need to find somewhere to stay.

As recently as 2011, it was occupied by the KIA

and the government planes bombed the village.

DOG BARKS

Shut up. Shh.

Don't even think about it.

ED LAUGHS

I'm not in the mood.

In the Spring of 1944,

the village housed a Japanese garrison.

It was an important target.

-Mingalaba.

-Mingalaba.

Is it OK to put these hammocks over there?

Yet, despite all they've been through,

they still welcome strangers with open arms.

HE SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE

OK, these guys have very, very kindly allowed us to

string our hammocks up around their well.

OK, mate, you put yours up on that side, I'll put mine on that side.

We've heard that the old lady was a nine-year-old girl when

the Chindits were here

and apparently there's a bomb crater in the village.

86-year-old Daw Tawnt was a young girl in 1944.

Were you scared when fighting was taking place?

Is there any evidence of the war still left here in the village?

Were you angry with the British and the Japanese,

that they were fighting in your beautiful country,

in the middle of your peaceful village?

In April 1944, the Chindits ordered an airstrike on

the Japanese garrison in the village.

An account written at the time by Terence O'Brien

captures what happened.

"The last remnants of the night mists

"were being swirled away by the rising sun.

"A few columns of cigarette-blue smoke rose vertically in the air

"above the tranquil village.

"I could see a woman in a classical pose of arms upright

"to a terracotta pot on the head

"moved back towards us from the river.

"When you thought of the death-loaded aircraft,

"now thundering towards the peaceful village,

"you wanted no part of this sort of thing.

"The destruction of the village was a terrible thing to watch.

"You could see the houses splinter and shiver under the cannon fire,

"and when it was all over, there was no more blue smoke rising gently

"from the scene, but black clouds of it churning up into the sky

"and spreading over the plain to the west."

Hard to believe, really.

HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

Very.

The Japanese had chosen to set up a barracks here,

so they were a legitimate target.

And as always in war

it's the civilians who get stuck in the middle.

And then when you come to the present situation today and you see

this same Myitkyina-Bhamo road is blocked all the way along by

the Burmese Army, and you think

"You're in exactly the same position as the Japanese,

"all you own is the road." It's uncannily the same, actually.

And it's desperately sad that these people have just been stuck

in this conflict for 70 years.

And I've got to say, they're some of the most...

I don't know, loveliest people I've ever met.

They say the first casualty of war is truth,

well, the second casualty of war are the civilians, really,

and that's never, ever changed.

Today, all that remains of those bloody days is the bomb crater.

It looks like a village pond! Just needs some ducks, mate.

Yeah, it's quite a big crater, really.

They said that they went in and dug the shell casing out

and used the metal to make woks and pans and stuff.

To make frying pans. Yeah, they did.

So, this here could be the only physical evidence

that's still left today.

What's poignant is the thought of a whole wing

of P-51 Mustang fighter bombers, sweeping down this valley,

dropping 250, 500lb bombs and the villagers

running for the hills.

I mean, the villages are, almost, medieval agricultural community

and these were the most advanced... warplanes in the world.

I mean, that would have been bloody awful for them.

They must've been just utterly confused.

-If I sleep on my back I snore like a dog, as you noticed.

-Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I do, yeah.

-I haven't been snoring the last few nights?

-You have.

-Oh.

Back on track, the ever present jungle is uppermost

in their thoughts.

There's no hiding the fact, that you know, 70% of the guys here

died from jungle related diseases.

So Joe's father would have

experienced horrendous atrocities. Literally watching his friends

that would have loved each other and they would watched each other die.

That must have had a big impact on him.

A big, big, emotional, psychological impact.

He cannot fail to have gone home with some scars.

Some really, really, really big scars.

I think he was very proud to have been a Chindit.

And you'd think that, if that was the case,

then he'd be proud to tell his son.

But Da wasn't that good with emotion, really.

Didn't give much away.

I had all that time when he was ill

towards the end, where I could have just sat down with his diaries

and said "Explain this. What happened there? What happened here?"

I didn't.

I can't believe I didn't.

Ed's relationship with his parents was difficult, too.

He was given up for adoption by his teenage mother.

My birth mother and birth father stayed together

and they had two more sons, so I've got two full brothers.

So, did they have you when they were very poor, where they couldn't...?

Yeah. My mum was 15.

It's quite mad. I've got two brothers,

one ten years younger than me, one 12 years younger than me.

-Pretty weird, isn't it?

-It's bonkers, yeah.

You never met them?

-Yeah, yeah, I've met them now, we're good mates.

-Really?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Oh, that's neat, isn't it?

-Yeah. Yeah.

That's brilliant.

After days of skirting around the troubles,

following the road so often fought over,

finally, Joe and Ed are back on track, heading up to the ridgeline.

We're going to point 60 today, which is right on top of a hill.

So, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a bit of a cheeky climb this morning.

Um, we've not got permission to stay at the top

because of the tensions, at the moment,

so we're going to have to go up there

and come back down the same day.

So, quite a long day.

I can imagine him doing it, yeah,

and, er...

with hundreds of men, in a single column,

in the monsoon, of course, pouring rain,

would have made this absolute hell.

Must have been dreadful,

I cannot imagine marching, heavily laden, round these jungles

in a monsoon, let alone...

trying to fight an enemy, much greater than your size.

-BREATHLESS:

-Really quite unimaginable.

Got to be near the top of this sometime soon, I think.

Steep hill, 1,000 feet in...

..two kilometres, so...warm.

Kind of cheeky, isn't it?

As soon as went from the paddy fields into the forest

there was... You're just hit by this coldness, this fresh air.

It's so much cooler under the canopy,

but the hill is steep, really steep.

-OK. Go for it, Joe.

-You go first.

-OK.

Oh, wow!

Look at this!

HE LAUGHS

Ah!

Look at this!

Wow! That's a view.

That is an extraordinary view.

Down below is the plain of the Irrawaddy River,

as it flows past Myitkyina

and the small towns of Maingnar and Waimaw.

Waimaw is the first village they attacked.

They just, basically, went down into the plain

and pretty much walked single file, straight into the town.

Met quite a bit of resistance.

Of course, militarily, it was just bloody stupid.

It was stupid. A lot of men died.

Joe's father's diary records the events of the time.

"Tuesday, 30th of May.

"Mustangs pasted hell out of Maingnar North, all day.

"Very tough nut to crack."

It must have been very satisfying

when you've been staggering around in the jungle,

just to sit here and watch the enemy just getting blown to pieces.

They had air support, but, um, it wasn't perfect air support,

because he describes watching a C-47,

a Dakota, being shot down in flames...

..by six Japanese Zeros, which were fighter planes.

So they, they weren't having it all their own way.

It's quite noticeable in the diaries that, up until now,

occasionally somebody gets ambushed and somebody gets wounded,

but it's just a continual list

of wounded and killed from now on, which shows how the war had changed.

-How many years ago did your dad die?

-Um. Good question.

He was 86. Um...um, born in 1922.

Yeah, doesn't seem that long ago.

It's odd that, isn't it?

When people die, how fast time goes by.

Particularly, when Da went,

I felt more alone in the world.

Mmm.

I regret never telling my father what I thought of him.

I mean, you know, without being schoolboy-ish, or anything,...

..I thought he was a hero to me.

We're just one of those bloody families who don't talk.

And, actually, if I had said

something like that, he would've just been embarrassed...

So...

So, yeah, there's regrets like that.

I'd written seven books, for God's sake,

and only discovered years later that he'd read all of them.

Had to discover from my sister.

And he never said a word.

He never said a bloody word to me.

Can you imagine if your son wrote a book?

Doesn't matter, even if it was a terrible book,

but if it was a bestselling, world, bestselling book...

And he never even told you that.

He could at least say, "Well done, son."

Or, you know, "I read it." You wouldn't read all of his books

and then not say a single word!

Go figure.

That's quite an insight, actually, isn't it?

-Wouldn't tell you he loved you, then?

-Never did, no. No.

Don't even know he did, for that matter.

But, you know, it sounds as if I'm criticising him.

That's just how he was, you know.

He was a good father, he was a good man.

I think he was a good soldier.

On Tuesday 30th of May 1944, Joe's father walked straight up

this road to attack the small village of Waimaw

and its heavily entrenched Japanese garrison.

Back then, it was a dirt track

and the noise would have been of war, not hustle and bustle.

It's a bit unreal to think that my father

came marching up this road, taking out Japanese bunkers,

and got to this crossroads,

at which point they'd pretty much run out of ammunition

and had to retreat all the way back,

and then came back and attacked it the next day

and consequently took quite heavy casualties.

But they couldn't take... take the town.

They just didn't have enough men.

The Chindits were nearly three months into their campaign

and by now were exhausted, malnourished,

and suffering with various tropical diseases.

Looking at Da's diaries,

it wasn't a well-planned, well-coordinated attack.

Over 70 years ago, the Chindits faced

some of their toughest fighting to date,

and, today, Joe and Ed are facing the reality

of the ongoing post-election conflict.

Slightly ominously, we've just been called in to a meeting.

It would appear that the situation is deteriorating quite rapidly

So we may have to move out of here.

We've been told that we were on curfew for 24 hours,

but I think it's gone beyond that.

The local fixers are sharing the latest news

about the fighting between the rebels

and the government.

So, what are you hearing? What's happening and where?

Actually, Kachin State, Shan State, so the Burmese military

and the Kachin military and Shan military, they are fighting.

They lost lives from both sides.

So it's all on Facebook, local news.

The fighting's contained within restricted local hot spots

in northeast Myanmar.

There are rumours of up to 8,000 refugees fleeing the danger zones.

As a result of the increasing violence,

the film crew have been banned

from travelling back down the Bhamo-Myitkyina road.

And the local porters, mostly from areas near the fighting,

want to leave so that they can get back to their homes.

We should let them go to their families

and I think the sensible thing for all of us, is to go to Myitkyina.

We should just get over the bridge

so, at least, we're near the international airport.

It would appear that the situation is deteriorating rapidly.

I laugh, but it's turning into a fairly serious situation.

The team have two hours to get out of town.

For now, the trip is over.

This is the Burmese Army flexing its muscles,

showing how important it is after the election,

showing that they're needed, showing that they're a security force.

Unfortunately, to do this,

they're killing people, on both sides.

Two days later and there's news about one of the villages

that welcomed them en route.

The little village of Nalone, which we were in only a few days ago,

apparently, there's three tanks now in the village

and the military are occupying it.

And, erm, that's quite...that's quite shocking to be told.

Well, it was only a few days ago we were interviewing an old woman

who said she'd spent her entire life ready to move

and she'd moved countless times, you know, and three days later,

she's moving again. Yeah, that's...it's desperately sad.

It's sad for all of them.

The fact that we'd, you know, been presented by

nothing but smiles and openness and happiness.

To know that the army's gone in there now and occupied it,

having been told how...

How they behave when they do go and occupy,

I think that's very shocking.

Whilst Joe and Ed are stranded in Myitkyina,

by sheer luck they meet 101-year-old Dawng Gawn Tang.

I'm very pleased to meet you.

He served with the Chindits during World War II.

Was the fighting frightening for you at the time?

Over the next few days, the situation calms down,

Joe and Ed venture out once more, on the final leg of their journey

deep into the heart of Burma,

following Ian Simpson's wartime path, heading for point 68.

It's quite emotional, really, thinking about it.

This was the bloody end and they took a lot of losses.

A lot of casualties.

I mean, there's one reference in the diaries to 23 wounded and four dead,

and, of course, those wounded, not all those would have survived.

Now, point 68 is a sleepy cattle wallow,

but back in 1944, it was the scene of another bloody battle.

We're here, this is it.

This is where my father's commanding officer, Major Monteith, was killed.

He ran into a Japanese ambush,

machine-gun post, and...

he was wounded and a Japanese officer ran out

and decapitated him with a sword.

So, so close to the end and he just died like that, seems a great shame.

But within a week of this attack,

Da had succumbed to what he called scrub typhus,

he had a temperature of 101 and he was very ill

and he was flown out from here to India.

He nearly died, actually.

All his hair fell out, and six or seven days later,

the rest of the Chindits flew out after him and that was the end of it

and, as Da says in his diaries, "Here endeth the lesson."

When the Chindits were finally evacuated back to India,

medical officers discovered that well over 50% of the survivors

weren't fit for active duty

and many of them were never fit enough to return to duty again.

For many, the psychological wounds would last a lifetime.

The amount of death

and the amount of aggressive death that they would have seen

would have been very difficult for any mind to process, really.

This was back in the day where you just got on with life, you know,

you just didn't go there, really,

because it was a dark, scary place to go,

so I would have thought that people would have come out of this campaign

very affected, yeah.

After one final push...

..Joe and Ed arrive at one of Ian Simpson's last camps in Burma.

Right, we could just literally set the tarps up down here

and just sleep on the ground, don't you think?

They are going to camp one last night,

at the same place that Joe's father did some 70 years ago.

I'll stay further away because you were snoring.

YOU were snoring, you mean!

JOE LAUGHS

Cheeky...!

Em...I suspect that Ed is doing it rather more efficiently than me.

-Eh?

-The pegs go in quite easy.

He's made pegs.

All right, pegs, OK, pegs.

For Joe, this trip is the culmination of a 37-year dream.

I wish I had done it when Da was still alive.

I wish we had been closer.

I wish we had a different relationship.

I wish we could have talked.

I wish I could have shared the things I did in my life with him.

Because he gave me that life and... I owe him everything.

I wish I could have told him what I thought of him.

How proud I was of him.

It's like I've said goodbye, really.

And what I really wanted to do was say hello.

There were nearly 74,000 Commonwealth casualties in Burma

fighting the Japanese, who finally surrendered in 1945.

The memories of this bloody time rest with a few remaining veterans,

with the words in diaries like Joe's father's

and at places like Yangon's War Memorial.

4th Gurkha Rifles.

17th of July.

It's... It's quite strange, seeing these graves here,

to recognise the names and the dates

that correlate exactly with Da's diaries.

The diary suddenly becomes much more real, desperately sad.

Look at these names on the walls,

these are just the soldiers whose bodies were never found,

there's 27,000 of them.

It's the end of quite a long journey, actually.

A sort of a fitting end, really.

I've got a much better idea of what he went through.

Only...a tiny idea, really,

but it's turned into a goodbye, really.

So...

oddly enough, it's led to something that I'd never really expected,

which was understanding that something rather more important

than my obsessive desire to follow the Chindits

was happening all around us.

You know, this was a momentous, historical time.

In a funny way,

rather more significant than the old, dead history of my father,

and I think he would think the same, as well, actually.

I didn't expect to be as moved or as touched by the people of Burma.

It's seeing such generosity and openness of hearts

after you know that they've suffered,

that's what has just blown me away

and that's, I suppose, a lesson in just the human spirit, really.

It's extraordinary.

To me, the star was the country and the people.

And...

And I was so obsessed with my father and what he did,

that it never crossed my mind that that might be what would happen.