Marrin's Bookshop

Item Description

FIRST EDITION. 8vo. 6 x 8.75 inches. 363 pp. Bound in original blue cloth, gilt, in price clipped pictorial dust wrapper, with slightly sunned spine. A little wear to extremities, but otherwise a very good copy. Inscription on first free endpaper and 1999 purchase record of RAF Dakota flight crew member, Chittagong, Bengal,1945-46, on front pastedown. Illustrated by 2 maps. Account of clandestine operations against the Japanese in South East Asia by Squadron Leader Terence O'Brien, D.F.C. in command of a Dakota flight based at Jessore, Bengal. He reveals that ' these operations were, in the main, a deeply scandalous waste of life and resources.' The book is the first formal record of a subject previously hushed up. Terence O'Brien (1915-2007) made his way from Australia to Britain in 1939 to join the RAF. He flew in Europe on anti-shipping strikes and was sent to Singapore from which he escaped in early 1942. He served with the Wingate force (described in Out of the Blue: a Pilot with the Chindits, 1984) before becoming flight commander of the Special Duty squadron described here.