Last VJ Day veterans tell their stories on 80th anniversary

Times

11 hours ago

John Harlow was not able to read his words in person. But he was able to be there, near the King, to listen to them be read. And where others at the National Memorial Arboretum service spoke of grand themes — of peace, war, humanity — he marked the 80th anniversary of VJ Day by speaking instead of a friend.
On January 9, 1945, Harlow was on a submarine, laying mines in the Indian Ocean. Mark Webber was on a different submarine. The pair had trained together, become telegraphists together and debriefed over cold drinks together. That day Webber's ship sent a message confirming her mission was complete. Then the crew were never heard of again.
'It could so easily have been me,' said Harlow, 100, in words read by the actor Anton Lesser. His was, he said, the only submarine minelayer to survive. So every VJ day, he said he remembers Webber. 'War doesn't grant you the luxury of goodbyes.' Not for the last time that afternoon, the King wiped his eye.
As Britain marked 80 years since the end of the Second World War, the stories of the surviving veterans — read in person where possible at the National Memorial Arboretum, or read by proxies or pre-recorded on video — were once commonplace.
Once, there were thousands of Johns and thousands of Marks. Once, those who survived the Far East, who came to call it with occasional bitterness 'the forgotten war', numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
They were the British sailors, like Trevor Taylor, 100, who remembered the kamikaze planes flying over his ship. They were the Commonwealth soldiers, such as Joseph Hammond, from Ghana, who told those at Friday's service how the Japanese fought 'like devils'.
They were the civilian prisoners caught up in the conflict, such as Olga Henderson, 93, who spent her childhood 118 people to a hut with one toilet. 'There was quite a lot of disease, and your head was full of creepy-crawlies,' she said. 'We used to get these little baby snails and then just break the shell. And we could chew that all day and think we're eating something.'
There were those who struggle still with the memory. 'There's only one thing I think about to be honest,' Bernard Francis Madden told the audience — which included the King, the Queen, Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch. 'I killed 20 Japanese. That preys on my mind.'
Then there were the thousands of scared and brave men, such as Tom Jones, 103. He recalled in a pre-recorded message how, 'I saw this Japanese officer, he got his sword and he's running straight at me and I'm thinking to myself, this is my last day.' The only reason it wasn't was that a Gurkha shot the attacker.
But now, they are rare. After an appeal by the Royal British Legion, only 33 veterans could make the event. One could not. Eighty years after Jones thought he had seen his last day, he finally did. On Thursday, after recording his message, he died. And there was one fewer living link to the war.
So it was that in heat that might have been more worrying for the centenarians had many of them not previously endured months hacking through the jungles of Burma, the nation honoured in the words of the King, the 'courage and camaraderie displayed in humanity's darkest hour'.
Three months earlier, many of the same dignitaries had met in the same place to remember VE Day. Friday's ceremony, outdoors and on the Armed Forces Memorial, was different. It was different partly because the war in the east was more global.
CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/PA
Ben Okri, the poet, gave a reading in honour of the Empire troops. 'It was not really their quarrel, but those who fought had heard a higher call that said it's worth dying to stop the world being turned to hell,' he said.
One of those Empire troops was Yavar Abbas, 104, from the 11th Sikh Regiment. He read from his diary, in which he had written of being sniped at at 30 yards and comrades falling beside him.
But before beginning, he apologised, 'for briefly going off the script to salute my brave King, who is here with his beloved Queen in spite of the fact that he is undergoing treatment for cancer.' He too, he said, had had cancer. 'I salute him for attending this occasion. By his presence here he has gone a long way to make sure that his Grandad's 14th army is never given the sobriquet of the forgotten army.' On returning to the royal box, they saluted each other and spoke for almost a minute.
There was something else that marked the ceremony out. Thousands of miles away in Tokyo, Japan's prime minister became the first in over a decade to use the word 'remorse' to mark the anniversary.
'We will never ever make a mistake in choosing the path to take,' Shigeru Ishiba said. 'The remorse and lessons from that war should once again be engraved deeply in our hearts.
TOLGA AKMEN/EPA
It was the first time since 2012 that a Japanese premier used the word at the ceremony, which is held to mourn the 3.1 million casualties of war in Japan.
A moment of silence was observed at midday, exactly 80 years after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration in a radio broadcast.
The four-and-a-half-minute address by the emperor, delivered a few days after the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and replayed from a scratchy phonograph recording, stunned the nation in 1945, when Hirohito said that 'the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage'.
After the Red Arrows streamed over the royal box, and before the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight flew over at a more stately pace, there was a final word from Jones — the final words, as it turned out, of his life.
'As far as war is concerned,' he said in the video, 'there's no pride and no glory. So, forget war and pick peace.'