On the subject of books and the war against Japan, but with a local twist, the one to read is 'Where Fate Leads' by Harry Howarth. The book is effectively the story of the 9th Battalion, The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers in WW2.
The 9th Battalion was a duplicate of the 7th, both machine gun battalions and contained many local men. The 9th landed at Singapore a few days before the surrender to the Japanese, most of the book is about the trials of the men in captivity building the Burma railway.
Howarth himself was not a local, he was Lancashire born and joined the Cheshire Regiment at the start of the war -he trained as a machine gunner - then he was transferred to the 9th RNF with a detachment of other trained machine gunners. When they arrived he states the men of the 9th knew nothing about the Vickers machine gun and had not even fired their rifles. So they were effectively the trained core to bring the rest of the battalion up to speed.
