Remembering Rutherglen soldier who survived 'brutal' Far East war

Glasgow Times

a day ago

I asked him if he was ever frightened and he replied: 'No, we had too much to do." I asked him, did he ever think anything would happen to him? He replied: 'If we had thought like that, we wouldn't have been able to do anything.'
He asked for his medals to be brought into the hospital and in his last hours I held his hand, and stroked his forehead, and he said: "I'll be all right." Brave to the last.
Jack Connor, who survived the brutal war in the Far East during WWII (Image: Dorothy Connor)
I'm remembering this, as we mark the 80th anniversary of Victory Over Japan Day.
At the age of 22, Jack Connor was called up to serve as a gunner in the 311/129th Lowland Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, 17th Indian Division, 14th Army - The Forgotten Army - and he spent most of his service on the front line fighting in savage battles at Meiktila and Tiddim to secure the safety of India and Burma from the invading Japanese forces.
Jack and regiment in Burma (Image: Dorothy Connor)
They fought a brutal enemy, whose leaders were described by the Supreme Commander South East Asia Bill Slim as being "beyond humanity." They endured sweltering jungle heat, disease and a hostile terrain, often with little food and few supplies. The air drops were often stolen by the Japanese, including the longed-for letters from home.
After the war, my dad met up with other Rutherglen lads, but reported that a number had been killed in the first Burma campaign. They were told not to talk about their experiences and just get on with their lives - which they did.
It was 1946 before he returned to his work as a hospital engineer at the Southern General Hospital in Govan where he was a trade union shop steward.
(Image: Dorothy Connor)
On Saturday afternoons he would get on his soap box at Speaker's Corner in Rutherglen Main Street and fight for workers' rights and socialism. When my brother and I were born in the 1950s he met with hospital management to demand better conditions for mothers and babies.
When we were growing up he would often say "I was in the Battle of Meiktila, I marched in the Victory Parade in Rangoon.'
In the 1980s, when my dad was in his late 60s he would sometimes wake in the middle of the night thinking he was still fighting the Japanese.
(Image: Newsquest)
As well as the memories in his mind he carried the battle scars on his body as all his comrades did. He died, aged 70, in 1990. I put his Burma Star on his coffin and conducted his funeral myself.
His entry in the Book of Remembrance at the Linn Crematorium in Glasgow is a simple one. It's the last line from his favourite poem: "Tonight, with comrades who have claimed and found me, I march towards the East."
Afterwards, a parcel arrived from his sister Cathie in Somerset. In it were all the letters and photos he had sent to her during the war. Their mother Dorothy had died in 1938 when he was just 18.
Cathie died a few months later. Mum and I went to her funeral and stopped at the cenotaph in London where there is a statue of the Supreme Commander Bill Slim.
My mum laid down a tiny posy of a red rose and a sprig of heather, tied with tartan ribbon, planted by my dad and grown in rich Rutherglen soil and said: 'There you are now, you've not been forgotten." She did that for all the men.
In his book Defeat Into Victory, Field Marshall Slim said: 'The war in Burma was a soldiers' war. It rested on their courage, their hardihood, their refusal to be beaten. It was they who turned defeat into victory."
I have sent Rutherglen library a peace lily and red roses this week for their VJ Day 80th anniversary remembrance display and will lay a wreath at Rutherglen Cenotaph.
The message reads: 'For all the men of the Forgotten Army. Always remembered, always loved.'
Dorothy Connor
Rutherglen