World Tour

Arvel Griffith said he remembers the kindness best. The kindness contrasted sharply with the war, the jungle, the deprivations, hardships of disease and monsoons and the terror and fear that washed over him as the Japanese army advanced on American troops during the World War II Burma Campaign.

A native of Elmore County’s Red Hill community, the 97-year-old Griffith was a young man when he was drafted in 1942, the year in which the Japanese army invaded Burma (now Myanmar) in the South-East Asian theatre and drove out the occupying British forces. The Alabama man headed west for an undisclosed first assignment; he circumnavigated the globe before seeing home again four years later.