From war diaries and memoirs come first-person accounts of how the common soldier of the Imperial Japanese Army fared during the Second World War. The focus is on the Burma front, where nearly 200,000 of the 300,000 Japanese troops met their deaths. Their stories tell how they started out eager to conquer a faraway land, and how they came to feel isolated and virtually forgotten, with the constant battering by Allied air superiority and submarine attack.