Robert Lyman
Author
Robert Lyman was born in New Zealand and educated at Scotch College, Melbourne, Australia. He was an officer in the British Army for twenty years, being commissioned into the Light Infantry from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in April 1982. He has a First-Class Honours degree in History from the University of York and Master’s degrees in Strategic Studies (University College of Wales, Aberystwyth), War Studies (King’s College, London) and Military Studies (Cranfield). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2009. A critically acclaimed historian, his interest to date has been the experience of both warfare and of military command during the Second World War, producing narrative studies that explore campaigns in the Middle East, Far East and North Africa.
His Under A Darkening Sky - Americans at War, 1939-1941 was published by Pegasus in the US in 2018. A War of Empires on the Japanese invasion of South-East Asia was published by Osprey / Bloomsbury in November 2021.
Co-written with General Lord Dannatt, his A Cautionary Tale on why the British Army was catastrophically unprepared for the Second World War and the lessons we must learn, will be published by Bloomsbury / Osprey in 2023.
Praise for A War of Empires - 'This is a superb book' James Holland.
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A War of Empires by Robert Lyman
In 1941 and 1942 the British and Indian Armies were brutally defeated, and Japan reigned supreme in their newly conquered territories throughout Asia. But change was coming. New commanders were appointed, significant training together with restructuring took place, and new tactics were developed. A War of Empires by acclaimed historian Robert Lyman expertly retells these coordinated efforts and describes how a new volunteer Indian Army, rising from the ashes of defeat, would ferociously fight to turn the tide of war.
But victory did not come immediately. It wasn't until March 1944, when the Japanese staged their famed 'March on Delhi', that the years of rebuilding reaped their reward and after bitter fighting, the Japanese were finally defeated at Kohima and Imphal. This was followed by a series of extraordinary victories culminating in Mandalay in May 1945 and the collapse of all Japanese forces in Burma. The Indian Army's contribution has been consistently forgotten and ignored by many Western historians, Robert Lyman expertly proves how vital this hard-fought campaign was in securing Allied victory in the east, defeating Japanese militarism and ultimately redrawing the map of the region with an independent India, free from the shackles of empire, all but guaranteed.
