Burchett left Australia in August 1941 armed with a typewriter and a camera to travel the Burma Road into China and cover the Sino-Japanese war.

The morning after Pearl Harbor he interviewed Chou En-lai in Chungking. When he cabled his story to the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the reply was blunt – ‘Uninterested in Chinese Communist pronouncements’. But London's Daily Express was interested, and Burchett thus became a war correspondent for one of the world's leading dailies.

In early 1943 he was in an Indian hospital recovering from wounds received when Japanese Zeros strafed the sampan in which he was travelling on the Mayu River in Burma. This was when he first heard of Major Orde Wingate. By then he had developed a strong distaste for the ‘Colonel Blimps’ and colonial types in the higher ranks of the British army. Wingate, on the other hand, was a maverick with a strong anti-colonial stance and a taste for guerrilla warfare.

They became friends and Burchett spent several weeks with him gathering material for his book Wingate Adventure. Wingate died in a plane crash before the book was published and Burchett was re-assigned to cover the war in the Pacific.