Harry Birrell’s War

Far East Diaries 1939-45

Born in Paisley in 1918, Harry Birrell was gifted a cine-camera by his Grandparents at a young age. It was to change his life and spark a lifelong obsession with documenting the world around him. Intending to join the professional film industry, his trajectory was cut short by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Harry volunteered to serve and was assigned to the Indian Army. In late 1940, he travelled to India at the age of 21 to take charge of his assigned regiment, the 7th Gurkha Rifles, carrying only one still camera and, remarkably rare for the time, a colour cine camera. Through the next five years, he put them to extensive use, creating a unique photographic and cinematographic perspective of a young man in the Far East during a time of global war and fast approaching Indian independence.

Operating primarily as a property surveyor, his critical role required him to map out terrain directly on the front line so fighting troops had accurate references. His wartime journey took him from Bombay (now Mumbai) to the mountains of Nepal and deep behind enemy lines into the jungles of Burma. Throughout the brutal Far East campaign, Birrell kept his camera rolling and maintained copious diaries from 1939 to 1945 so his family would have a record of his life should he not return.

It wasn’t his intention to create a political or socio-anthropological treatise on the history of the war which was unfolding before his eyes, but merely to capture the vicissitudes of an ordinary life, that of a young man caught up in its aftershocks, thrown on the shores of a foreign land and into a series of jobs, journeys and postings with which he was tasked, often against his will.

Contributor: James Holland (Edited by)

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