For their mission, they are assigned Gurkha guides, a Chinese Army Captain and an older war correspondent whose character is used to explain various procedures to the audience.

The remaining soldiers head out on foot and come across an enemy encampment where the captured troops have been held prisoner but discover, to their horror, that they have all been tortured and mutilated.

Fighting an almost constant rearguard action, Nelson's paratroopers also succeed as decoys leading Japanese troops away from the site of the British 1944 aerial invasion of Burma.

Uncredited Cast Jerry Wald claimed he had the idea for doing a film set in Burma in Christmas 1943, feeling this particular theatre of the war would soon be active, and hoping the movie could be made and released before then.

[3] Lester Cole says the original story was written by Alvah Bessie who wrote a "dozen or so" pages before being pulled off the project by Wald and assigned to something else.

[8] The production began in April 1944,[9] when the Allied Burma campaign was already well underway; this stopped Wald releasing the film in the same way Casablanca premiered just weeks after the launch of Operation Torch in 1942 (when US forces joined the British to invade French North Africa)[3] Walsh said Flynn "was on his good behaviour because he was writing a book when I was not using him.

The movie also contains a large amount of actual combat footage filmed by U.S. Army Signal Corps cameramen in the China-Burma-India theatre[13] as well as New Guinea.

"[17] Film Daily wrote: "The picture impresses with its air of authenticity and the vivid realism that has gone into the telling of its story, and it possesses almost unremitting action crowded with the starkest of drama ...

"[18] Filmink called the film: "serious, hard and lacks any sort of female interest – the enemy are ruthless and clever and the soldiers still wisecrack, but they are professional, no-nonsense killers who follow orders and get along with each other (unless really stressed) i.e. there is no contrived in-fighting.

"[19] The Washington Star thought the film overlong - “It is one thing for an actual mission to be that long, quite another for a movie based upon it, a truth that has not yet occurred to Hollywood” - and too familiar, despite the novel location: “The characters...are pretty much the same ones who have fought through other cinema military missions....The dramatic incident devised to break the monotony of the jungle trek in Objective Burma has become the familiar material of a dozen such films....for the most part things happen just as they always have under the circumstances.

There is one reference to the Fourteenth Army; during the course of the action it is rashly presumed by one of the party of American parachutists that a British outpost may be somewhere about, but this suggestion is promptly snubbed, and for the rest Mr. Flynn and the indomitable band he leads have it all their own way....the Japanese are shown as contemptibly inefficient fighters in their own kind of territory, and not all the parade of stubble chins and sweat-grimed faces can disguise the film’s lack of honesty in its account of a particular operation as well as of the general campaign.”[21] According to Warner Bros records, Objective, Burma!

It was the studio's sixth most popular film of the year, after Hollywood Canteen, To Have and Have Not, Arsenic and Old Lace, God Is My Co-Pilot and Christmas in Connecticut.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill protested the Americanization of the huge and almost entirely British, Indian and Commonwealth conflict ('1 million men').

London 1945 premiere was remarkable: At a line in the script, (by an American, to the effect) "We should head north, I hear there might be a few Brits somewhere over there" - The entire (English) audience walked out in outrage.