CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Antiques Roadshow: VJ Day Special on BBC1: Poignant keepsakes of the Forgotten Army brought a lump to the throat...

Daily Mail​

15 hours ago

Antiques Roadshow: VJ Day Special (BBC1)
Rating:
The words are inscribed on war memorials across the country: 'When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today.'
But few, perhaps, know the words are sometimes called the Kohima Prayer, named after a battle in a remote part of India in 1944, a turning point in the war against Japan.
Unlike Alamein or Arnhem, Kohima is not frequently remembered.
Sadly, the courage and the sacrifice of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who defended it, the 14th Army, are often overlooked too.
No wonder they sometimes called themselves, with dry irony, the Forgotten Fourteenth.
But their story was marked with a mixture of solemnity and sentimentality as some of their descendants brought treasured keepsakes of the war in the Far East to the Antiques Roadshow: VJ Day Special.
'It's history in your hand,' remarked historian Robert Tilney, as he inspected a Japanese officer's shin gunto sword, a trophy from Kohima. 'It's a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck job.'
This episode traced the conflict chronologically, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.
JUGGLING ACT OF THE WEEKEND
A dolphin mother taught her calf how to play keepy-uppy with a piece of coral balanced on her nose, in Parenthood (BBC1). The trick was to drop it and catch it again before it hit the seabed. No using teeth or flippers... that's cheating.
The names are familiar but the horrors suffered by troops in the jungles of South-east Asia are beyond imagination, as viewers of The Narrow Road To The Deep North (which followed on BBC1) can attest.
Children and grandchildren of the survivors all repeated versions of the same line: 'He never talked about it much.'
In part, as presenter Fiona Bruce discovered, this was because soldiers who returned from the murderous Japanese prisoner-of-war camps were under orders not to discuss what they had endured.
I've always felt there was another, subtler psychological reason: these men had been through hell to protect their families.
By making light of what they suffered, they were able to continue giving that protection.
There was no doubting the debt of gratitude, coupled with a deep sense of respect, that everyone on the show felt.
None of the artefacts was given a valuation — that would have been crass.
In any case, how can you put a price on a bowl fashioned from a coconut shell, which was one man's only possession during his long imprisonment?
There was no doubting the debt of gratitude, coupled with a deep sense of respect, that everyone on the show felt. None of the artefacts was given a valuation — that would have been crass
Many of the items were impossibly poignant, such as a chess set carved from balsa wood with a penknife, or the hat worn by a soldier with the
Chindits, an explosives expert fighting deep behind enemy lines.
Possibly the most touching of all was a letter from an artillery man to his baby son, and preserved with care for more than 80 years.
'Dear little Jimmy,' he wrote, 'though you won't be able to read this, I hope you'll keep it and cherish it. Be very good for mummy as she's the dearest person in the world and love her just as much as I do.'
Jimmy had a lump in his throat as he read it. And so did I.