Twice a hero of bitter fighting in Burma during the Second World War, Charlie Hoey’s crowning achievement was a perilous raid designed to help break the deadlock in the crucial ‘Battle of the Admin Box’. Steve Snelling chronicles a little-known saga of courage in the so-called ‘Forgotten War’.
The moon was eerily bright as the raiding party moved out from Badana West. It was 01:00 on 16 February 1944, and two companies of infantry from 1st Lincolnshires, supported by battalion headquarters, a couple of squads of pioneers and a section of medics, were headed south into enemy territory on a mission fraught with hazard. Their objective was a key Japanese hill-top position and their aim was to strike a blow against enemy forces laying increasingly desperate siege to British and Indian troops manning ill-sited and mostly overlooked defences in what had been intended as a forward base for a second offensive in the Arakan region of Burma. For 10 days, surrounded units of the 7th Division, sustained by a precarious lifeline of aerial supply drops, had been holding out in a 1,200 square yard patch of hill-fringed paddy fields near the village of Sinzweya known as the ‘Admin Box’.
Some of the heaviest fighting…
