One of the most poignant moments in the documentary VJ Day 80: We Were There (BBC2, Wednesday, August 13) is also one of its most understated.
It’s a simple on-screen coda listing the names of 10 contributors to the film who have since died.
Given that the interviews were conducted over a six-year period, when some were nearing or had already passed the age of 100, it was inevitable not all of them would still be with us when the programme was broadcast.
If anything, this just underlines the importance of the documentary, which is the latest in Rachel Burden’s excellent series of oral histories.
Television documentaries about the war tend to be heavily weighted in favour of the European conflict. The result is that the war in the Far East and the Pacific – which raged on until August 15, 1945, four months after Germany surrendered, and was characterised by some of the most savage fighting of the whole conflict – is often relegated in the public mind.
What did it matter to us if the German war started or finished?
The outbreak of jubilation on VE Day wasn’t shared by many of the battle-weary combatants who, having helped defeat Germany, found themselves shipped out to fight the Japanese.
“What did it matter to us if the German war started or finished?” says Reg Holbrook, who served with the fleet air arm. “We were thousands of miles away.”
The first that James Fenton of the royal artillery heard of the war in Europe being won was when he received a letter from his brother describing the VE Day celebrations in the streets.
Adrian Rouse, an officer with the British Indian army who joined up with a group of borstal boys from Wolverhampton (“I learned a lot from them,” he says, “including how to pick locks”), recalls that when the news came through, “everyone got a bit pissed”. Then it was back to the fighting.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Habour in 1941 was the turning point that finally pushed America into joining the war. Forty minutes earlier, however, the Japanese had launched the invasion of Malaya (now Malaysia).
Royal marine Jim Wren, then just 21, was on a battle cruiser when it was hit by a bomb. Luckily for him, it crashed through three decks before exploding.
“It was every man for himself,” says Wren, who spent a couple of hours floating in the ocean after the cruiser tipped over.
Hundreds of men, his comrades and friends, died. Wren looks at the floor and quietly says: “I’ll never forget them.” For these people, the horrific experiences of a lifetime ago are as vivid as if they’d happened yesterday.
The fighting in Singapore, Hong Kong and Rangoon, the capital of Burma (now Myanmar), all of which fell to the Japanese, was brutal.
The terrain was difficult, the heat was unbearable, there were snakes everywhere, dysentery and malaria were rampant, and the Japanese were a particularly vicious enemy.
“Their attacks were pretty much suicidal,” says Robin Rowland, then a young officer with the 14th Army, led by Lieutenant-General William Slim. The Japanese didn’t take prisoners. In one especially barbaric incident, they bayonetted every patient at a field hospital.
The tide of war in Burma was turned by the 14th, which was the most multicultural, multi faith military force ever assembled.
The immensity of its achievements haven’t always been acknowledged, though, which is why it’s often referred to as “the forgotten army” that fought “the forgotten war”.
Away from the heat of battle, the worst atrocities were inflicted on the captured soldiers used as slave labour to build the Thai-Burma railway. In total, 100,000 died, often from exhaustion and starvation.
The testimonies of those held for years in internment camps, such as Olga Henderson, who was 10 when she and her family were captured, are no less shocking than those of the combatants.
Henderson recalls crossing a bridge and being horrified by the sight of the heads of Allied soldiers which the Japanese had stuck on spikes.
In the closing moments of this remarkable documentary, past and present fuse for Henderson when she talks about recently seeing an image on TV of a young girl begging for food, just as she once had to.
She breaks down. “What have we done?” she sobs. “What are we doing to the world? Nothing has changed.”
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