Budleigh Past and Present

This post is the first of many which commemorate the people, linked in some way to Budleigh Salterton, who died while on active service  during WW2 . Their names are recorded on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website at    https://www.cwgc.org/ Richard Vivian Warren, serving with 1st Battalion, 15th Punjab Regiment, is thought to have died of pneumonia on 10 September 1939, aged 24, at Yatung during a forced march through Tibet. It was the first WW2 death of a serviceman listed on Budleigh Salterton's War Memorial, and it occurred just a week into the war.   Why Tibet, I wondered? I had not heard of it as a theatre of war in WW2. Most people think of Tibet before it was taken over by China as a remote mountainous land which seemed closed to the outside world. To some extent the country enjoyed its isolation and a high degree of autonomy before its annexation in 1951, but during the early part of the 20 th   century more than a hundred British o...