Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
The Kohima Educational Trust is delighted to present this webinar with guest speaker Kate Venables. Kate Venables is a retired medical academic at the University of Oxford where she specialised in epidemiology. Harry Walker, Kate’s father, was born in Middlesbrough and qualified as a doctor in 1942. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the Fifth Indian Mobile Surgical Unit, close behind the fighting front in Burma.
The Burma Campaign against the Japanese in the Second World War involved rebuilding a defeated multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Allied force, trench warfare like that of the First World War, hand-to-hand fighting of ancient ferocity, combined operations with air and naval forces, artillery barrages, opposed crossings of great rivers, tank warfare in the Burmese central plain, and a final rapid advance ahead of the monsoon to Rangoon. It was followed by the Japanese surrender in Singapore and by violent peacekeeping operations in former European colonies in South-East Asia.
Harry Walker, Kate’s father, was born in Middlesbrough and qualified as a doctor in 1942. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the Fifth Indian Mobile Surgical Unit, close behind the fighting front. The book, on which this talk is based, contextualises his letters to family friends, sisters Annie and Flo Egerton, in a researched social and military history which simplifies an often complex war situation. It is generously illustrated with images from the family collection as well as from public archives.
The letters were written in tents, bunkers, and abandoned buildings. As well as Allied soldiers, Harry treated Japanese prisoners, escaped Allied prisoners-of-war, and Javanese civilians. In the quiet times between surges of casualties, he wrote about the government’s conduct of the war and what the world might be like afterwards, about books, the vagaries of the mail, and the quality of cigarettes. The interactions with Annie and Flo created a grounded and familiar world away from the mud and blood, where he was a boy again.
After the war Harry became a consultant anaesthetist in the Teesside group of hospitals. He died in 1959, at the age of forty.
The Kohima Educational Trust is delighted to present this webinar with guest speaker Kate Venables. Kate Venables is a retired medical academic at the University of Oxford where she specialised in epidemiology. Harry Walker, Kate’s father, was born in Middlesbrough and qualified as a doctor in 1942. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the Fifth Indian Mobile Surgical Unit, close behind the fighting front in Burma.
The Burma Campaign against the Japanese in the Second World War involved rebuilding a defeated multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Allied force, trench warfare like that of the First World War, hand-to-hand fighting of ancient ferocity, combined operations with air and naval forces, artillery barrages, opposed crossings of great rivers, tank warfare in the Burmese central plain, and a final rapid advance ahead of the monsoon to Rangoon. It was followed by the Japanese surrender in Singapore and by violent peacekeeping operations in former European colonies in South-East Asia.
Harry Walker, Kate’s father, was born in Middlesbrough and qualified as a doctor in 1942. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the Fifth Indian Mobile Surgical Unit, close behind the fighting front. The book, on which this talk is based, contextualises his letters to family friends, sisters Annie and Flo Egerton, in a researched social and military history which simplifies an often complex war situation. It is generously illustrated with images from the family collection as well as from public archives.
The letters were written in tents, bunkers, and abandoned buildings. As well as Allied soldiers, Harry treated Japanese prisoners, escaped Allied prisoners-of-war, and Javanese civilians. In the quiet times between surges of casualties, he wrote about the government’s conduct of the war and what the world might be like afterwards, about books, the vagaries of the mail, and the quality of cigarettes. The interactions with Annie and Flo created a grounded and familiar world away from the mud and blood, where he was a boy again.
After the war Harry became a consultant anaesthetist in the Teesside group of hospitals. He died in 1959, at the age of forty.
