The long journey
From the Western Front to Burma — and home.
The documentary treats Witherow’s life as a journey rather than a sequence of campaigns. The wars matter, but so do the decades between them, the landscapes, the people, the home movies and the repeated experience of leaving and returning.
Western Front
Commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery aged nineteen. Within a month, while serving as a forward observation officer, Witherow was hit by mustard gas and survived.
Waziristan
Serving with 7th (Bengal) Mountain Battery, he kept the field journal that survives in the archive. It records, among many other actions, a 7,480-yard shoot from Spinkai Ridge towards Kot Kai.
India in colour
Polo, hill stations, regimental life, travel, gardens, pageantry and private life — much of it captured on cine film.
Burma
Commanding 23rd Mountain Battery during the campaign and retreat. The surviving account describes an exhausted regiment reaching India with its guns and its pride intact.
Counter-Battery Pool
After recovering from a serious accident, Witherow took command of the 14th Army’s Counter-Battery Pool, working on the problem of locating and suppressing Japanese artillery.
The long way home
After Whitehall came troopship service: commanding soldiers being repatriated across the Indian Ocean and on voyages around the world, including aboard Felix Roussel.
Home
On 15 April 1947 he passed the stranded RMS Queen Elizabeth on the Brambles Bank, returning to a country very different from the one he had left.
