5 days ago
VJ Day is rapidly slipping from active memory – we must document it now
There will be a day soon when there will be no one alive who fought in the Second World War. Collecting and preserving the first-hand stories of those who served – Britain and the Commonwealth, yes, but from every nation – is an act of national and global importance. VJ Day 80: We Were There (BBC Two) was not just a fascinating and moving documentary, but a profoundly important document of a time rapidly slipping from active memory. One imagines many more hours of interviews were filmed than the brief 60 minutes we had here. Hopefully every minute has been catalogued.
There has always been a bitter irony that 99 days passed between VE Day and VJ Day, with those in the UK hanging up the bunting and swinging from lampposts while the Fourteenth Army continued a brutal and harrowing war against the Japanese in Singapore, Thailand, Burma (now Myanmar), India and the Pacific Ocean. It was not lost on those interviewed here, most of them over 100. As Reg Holbrook of the Fleet Air Arm said: 'What did it matter to us if the German war started or finished?'
Presented by Radio 5 Live's Rachel Burden, We Were There deserves credit for refusing to sentimentalise, romanticise or censor the testimony of the veterans.
Some of it was appalling to hear and much anti-Japanese sentiment was expressed, but these were honest, raw interviews with people who were often in visible distress. Robin Rowland of the British India Army remembered Japanese soldiers bayoneting 31 British soldiers who lay in a field hospital and coming across mounds of Japanese troops who had starved to death. Jim Wren of the Royal Marines, who seemed visibly weighed down by the awfulness of his memories, was blunt: 'It's ruined my life. To see men die like that.'
A Pathé newsreel of the time announced that 'the triumph in Burma has brought everlasting glory to our fighting men'. Yet here were those lucky fighting men who survived. None of them mentioned glory. There was no glory for Olga Henderson, a prisoner of war in Singapore aged nine, who looted the bodies of Japanese officers who had committed suicide after the surrender. She tried to pull gold teeth out of their mouths, 'with no feeling at all'.
When taken prisoner, Henderson and her family had crossed a bridge lined with the decapitated heads of Commonwealth soldiers. Later, in a moment that would have had a statue in tears, Henderson wept at seeing a news report of a starving little boy begging for food in a modern-day war. 'That's what we were doing,' she said. 'What have we done? What are we doing to the world? Nothing's changed.'
There was light in the dark. Tales of 'friendships' formed between soldiers and nurses on a boat to India, of the beautiful feeling of a monsoon on your body after weeks of baking heat, of one soldier's amazement at all the yellow balloons that suddenly appeared when the Japanese surrendered (they were condoms). And the wonderful Yavar Abbas, of the 11th Sikh Regiment, who was sent to Japan as part of the occupying force after the war and 'fell in love' with the people. The end credits informed us that many of those interviewed have since died, underlying the sheer importance of this film.
