THE Second World War was truly a world war and this weekend's celebrations of the landings in a small corner of Europe are a little galling for those veterans who, unacknowledged, were fighting in other, forgotten, corners of the globe.

"We are a little off-put by all this," said one North Yorkshire Burma veteran yesterday. "We'd been fighting for bloody months before D-Day."

In fact, on the day before D-Day, Captain Alan Brown was one of the first Allied soldiers into the newly-liberated city of Rome, in Italy. He had been away from his home in Darlington for three-and-a-half years.

Before the war, he was a teacher at Cockerton school on the outskirts of Darlington. He joined up in September 1940 and, via Catterick, was sent to the Malvern and Worcester 67th Field Artillery. He was in charge of a 25lb field gun, firing shells made in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham.

"Please spare a thought - and a paragraph - for those who had fought across North Africa to Tunis and on to Italy and, after a tremendous battle for the Anzio bridgehead, captured German-occupied Rome," says his widow, Brenda, who still lives in Darlington.

When he arrived there, while the Normandy soldiers were still in their boats, the Battle of Monte Cassino - possibly the most vicious fighting of the entire war - was only just over and, to compound matters, Mount Vesuvius was erupting.

"When he entered Rome he was nearly ankle-deep in dust," says Brenda. "He always said that to those landing in France it must have been a great boost to know they had got into Rome."

After Rome, Alan served in Gibraltar before returning home in 1946 to become deputy head at Eastbourne Boys' School in Darlington. For 16 years, he was head at Ripon County Secondary School. He retired back to Darlington where he died in 1996, aged 83.

And then there was "the forgotten army" fighting in the Far East. Just as D-Day was decisive in the war in Europe, so the Battle of Kohima, being fought at exactly the same time in north-east India, proved to be the turning point in the Burma Campaign.

Earl Mountbatten called it "one of the greatest battles in history...in effect the Battle of Burma...naked unparalleled heroism".

Henry Crook-Rumsey, of Newton Aycliffe, was there, fighting in the Naga Hills, hacking his way through paddy fields, and surviving on rations dropped every five days from the air.

"I boxed at 12st 12lbs before the war, and came out at 7st 2lbs," he said. "Most of us had dysentery and tropical diarrhoea, and there was malaria and dinghy fever.

"Our main object was to cut the Japanese communication lines. The local people, the Nagas, were fantastic: they were our guides, our spies and our interpreters. They were still headhunters. I remember going into one village and they had five Japanese heads on posts. They would tell us where the Japanese were, and we would sit and wait for them, usually with machine guns."

He remembers D-Day because a Hurricane bomber flew over and dropped a parachute containing news of the landings, news that was relayed down the line by wireless.

"We were glad that they had landed," he says. "We were known as 'the forgotten army', always short of supplies, and we hoped they'd finish the Germans and get some reinforcements over to us."