‘We never considered ourselves heroes': VJ Day 80 years on, by the veterans who were there

Telegraph

7 hours ago

Centenarian Edward Rutherford – Ted to his friends and family – is spending the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, which marked the end of the Second World War, at a street party in his home town of Gateshead. In his mind, though, he will be running through memories of the conflict in the Far East theatre of war, and especially what exactly he was doing there as a 20-year-old on VJ Day, Aug 15 1945.
A gunner in the Royal Navy, he was on board HMS Howe, part of the British Pacific Fleet, when Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ted's V-class battleship was berthed in Singapore, which had been captured by the Japanese in a calamitous defeat from the British in February 1942. Now he was there to see it liberated.
There was, he recalls, little by way of celebration. It was all, Ted says, 'quite muted, due to the continuing threat [some Japanese soldiers refused to believe their leader had surrendered and were fighting on]'. But there was, he concedes, 'a sense of relief'.
Weighing heavily on everyone's mind, he adds, was 'concern about rescuing the prisoners of war'. The Japanese had taken 130,000 British and Commonwealth citizens prisoner during the conflict, including 60,000 servicemen. Of those held captive, it was later recorded that 27 per cent had died before they could be freed.
Another VJ veteran, Des Heath, 99, also experienced that historic day as distinctly low-key. As a 19-year-old sergeant, he was on a ship en route from Liverpool to a posting in Burma with the Military Intelligence Corps, poised to start investigating war crimes carried out there by the Japanese occupiers and their feared military police, the Kempeitai.
Because the first VJ Day was such a non-event in his life, he is determined on the 80th anniversary that nothing is going to stop him – even a recent minor stroke – from attending the main anniversary event at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. He will be dressed in the Cyprus green beret and blazer of the Intelligence Corps as he joins the King and Queen in observing the two-minute silence for all those who served and suffered in the Far East.
'There are too many wars,' he reflects, with a wisdom drawn from his own experience. 'I would like to see a situation where we don't have to settle arguments by going to war. There are more sensible ways of doing it.'
The journey to the event with his daughter, Karina, from his home in Prestbury, Cheshire, will not be easy, he admits, but he is clearly a man on a mission. He is, he says, acutely conscious that he was one of the youngest soldiers to see service on VJ Day, and that this ceremony may therefore be the final time veterans from the conflict in the Far East like him are able to gather in person.
Ted echoes that sentiment, even though his poor health means he cannot make the trip. Instead, he will be watching a broadcast of it.
Remarkably, after so many decades, this is the first time he has publicly shared his recollections of those long ago days with Telegraph readers through the British Legion. It clearly all remains vivid for him.
'Maybe I just hadn't had the opportunity before,' he reflects. 'I think my family are proud of me, which is all that matters, really.'
A modest man who didn't want any fuss, he came home to the North East after the conflict had ended and worked as a slinger in the big local engineering firm, CA Parsons. Married to Margaret after his return, they were together for 67 years before her death. He still lives in the same house they shared for half-a-century.
'People have called me a hero, but I don't think we ever considered ourselves as heroes. I was just happy to do a job, although sometimes, after a raid, we would look at each other and say, 'We were lucky today, lads!''
The horrors he witnessed were surely hard to talk about with those who hadn't been there.
After the surrender, he was on HMS Howe as it collected those who had been held in Japanese prison camps. They were brought back to Singapore.
'They were skin and bone. Some of them had been there for four or five years and were in a terrible state.' The death rate in Japanese camps was between seven and eight times higher than in their Nazi equivalents.
'People forget that the Indians were out there with us, fighting the Japanese,' he adds, anxious to share any praise as widely as possible. 'Some of them were treated appallingly. They were in a state of hell [when we rescued them].'
Ted had been working in Thompson's Red Stamp Stores when he joined up as a 17-year-old in 1942. Two years later HMS Howe was sent to the Far East. In April 1945, it provided cover for the American soldiers landing on the Japanese-controlled island of Okinawa, the largest amphibious assault in the Far East during the Second World War.
The battle lasted for 83 days. Afterwards, Ted went ashore and witnessed a scene of such carnage that 'it has stayed with me for the last 80 years'.
'I saw the mass graves of US soldiers, hundreds of them, and the stench was unbearable. It was really upsetting.'
Another image firmly fixed in his mind's eye is May 8 1945, when the defeat of Nazi Germany was celebrated in Europe on VE Day. 'We heard it over the radio on the ship. They were reporting dancing in the streets back home [while] we were being attacked by suicide bombers in Japan. Two of our ships were hit.'
Like Ted, Des is reluctant to dwell on the horrors that he saw while working on the war-crimes investigation in Burma in the wake of the Japanese surrender. 'It was really horrible,' he says simply, 'people were tortured for no reason at all.'
His role was to gather evidence and eye-witness accounts to enable successful war crime prosecutions of Japanese killings in Burma in court in newly liberated Singapore. One of the Kempeitai's methods of instilling terror in local communities was to bayonet babies to death.
His original plan, he remembers, had been to join the RAF and pilot a Spitfire, but he was persuaded because he could speak schoolboy French to sign up for the Military Intelligence unit. 'They told me they paid expenses and the RAF didn't,' he jokes.
He was posted first to India, then to Burma. The British forces in the Far East, the Fourteenth Army, are often referred to as the ' Forgotten Army ' but Des feels he and his comrades got an even rougher deal.
'I was in the Twelfth Army, which was an Indian army. Unlike the Fourteenth, it wasn't the forgotten army. It was the never-heard-of army.'
His war crimes work was based in the city of Bassein, now called Pathein in modern-day Myanmar. He would wear civilian clothing, he recalls, because the local population 'didn't trust anyone in uniform'.
With the help of a translator – though he quickly became proficient in Burmese – he was able to persuade them to show him sites where atrocities had taken place and agree to give first-hand testimony in court.
'They had had relatives and friends shot and tortured. We dug up the bodies and got the offenders sent to Singapore to be tried. One Kempeitai mayor I dealt with got 40 years. He only just missed the death sentence because it had been abolished shortly before.'
His work attracted praise from Lord Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander of the South East Asia Theatre, who oversaw the recapture of Burma. Despite all the inhumanity he witnessed, he holds no lasting grudge against the Japanese people.
'What we saw made us dislike the war criminals, but a lot of the Japanese army was quite civilised. I found people in the jungle, Japanese deserters who had married Burmese girls. They were lovely people, which is why they had deserted.'
Once he got back home in 1948, after Burma became independent, he went on to study agricultural science and spent his career thereafter working in south-east Asia, returning to Burma regularly. While a soldier there, he had one day shared a railway waiting room with Aung San, the Burmese independence leader and his two-year-old daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner, whom he bounced on his lap. 'I gave her Huntley & Palmers biscuits.'
Others had only nightmarish memories of Burma, he acknowledges. He recalls meeting some of the surviving prisoners-of-war freed there after the surrender – whose numbers included those who had worked on the notorious 'Death Railway', later the basis for the 1957 epic, The Bridge on the River Kwai.
'They had all been so badly treated. If you got ill, they didn't treat you. There was no food, no medicine.' Some 12,000 Allied soldiers died while doing forced labour for the Japanese on the railway, along with 90,000 civilians.
Among his colleagues in the Military Intelligence Corps, their work unearthing appalling crimes took a terrible toll. 'Because of all the things he had been through, a sergeant I knew was losing his mind. I tried to get him to hospital but before I could he shot himself. I found him slumped on his seat. The bullet went through his head.'
Owen Filer, at 105 the oldest living man in Wales, is another to have seen first-hand those who emerged from the torture of Japanese occupation of Burma. Posted with the Military Police in 1945 on the border that separates Burma and India, Japanese-controlled territory and the British Empire, he watched as Chindits, special operatives of the British and Indian armies, were dropped by gliders over the border into the Burmese jungle to disrupt the Japanese supply lines.
They returned looking like ghosts, he says, if they returned at all. 'The bodies came back but their minds didn't. They'd had no map, didn't know where the hell they were, and the jungle in Burma was awful. Good men were sacrificed there. Churchill had made up his mind that we were going to take back Singapore and that started from India.'
Twice-a-widower but dapper and sprightly in his trilby, Owen retired from his job on the railways in 1983. He still goes out everyday in Cwmbran in South Wales on his walker to the local shops while his son, Barry, 77, lives just round the corner.
He too recalls news trickling through to those service personnel on the India-Burma border after atomic bombs had been dropped in early August 1945. 'We knew that they had dropped a big bomb that killed thousands of people in one go, but that was all.'
And before VJ Day came along, Owen was on his way home, granted compassionate leave because his father had died. On this 80th anniversary, though, like Des, he is determined to be there at the National Memorial Arboretum, in his red cap of the Military Police.
He confesses that he sometimes wonders why he is still here when he saw so many colleagues lose their lives at a young age, but that thought is strengthening his resolve to be there on Friday. He will be among a 30-strong group of veterans who are coming with the British Legion and pay a personal and public tribute to those who died to honour the sacrifice they made for all of us.
Additional reporting by Simon de Bruxelles
Owen Filer and Des Heath will be among veterans attending as guests of honour at the Royal British Legion's Service of Remembrance at the National Memorial Arboretum this Friday marking the 80 th anniversary of VJ Day, to be attended by Their Majesties The King and Queen.