An extraordinary account of the atrocities of war
Mark Rylance’s grandfather survived one of the most notorious atrocities of the Second World War and spent four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. In the trailer for My Grandparents’ War (Channel 4), which revisited the scene, the actor was visibly upset. “The horror of it is very difficult to talk about,” he said, in a voice choked with emotion. “Absolutely, absolutely horrific.”
Only at the end of the film did we discover that Rylance was not talking about his grandfather’s experiences, but the death toll visited upon the Japanese in the Allied bombings that precipitated the end of the war.
This latest instalment in the series was an extraordinary film. Rylance, a campaigner for Stop the War, was at such pains to be even-handed that at times he appeared almost overwhelmed by the plight of the Japanese. Told of his grandfather’s last stand, taking a bullet wound to the stomach as 35 of his comrades were killed around him, Rylance said sadly, “The Japanese were about to lose a lot of men as well.” Learning of the brutal conditions in a prisoner-of-war camp, he shook his head in sorrow at the mention of a Japanese officer dying by suicide.
Osmond Skinner, Rylance’s grandfather, was an HSBC banker who became a member of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps as invasion loomed. With no military training, he was pitched into battle on Christmas Eve, 1941. His platoon sergeant recorded afterwards: “I have seen films and pictures of warfare but never in all my life have I seen anything like the sights or heard such a noise as came from Stanley village that night…”
An injured Skinner was taken to a hospital at St Stephen’s College. There, on Christmas Day, he witnessed one of the most notorious massacres of the war. Japanese soldiers stormed the hospital and bayoneted the wounded in their beds. One man had his eyes gouged; other testimonies, not heard here, are of tongues cut out, ears severed, nurses raped and mutilated. Rylance said his grandfather had never spoken of these horrors, except to say he “had witnessed something that he would never forget”.
The actor wanted to know how the Japanese could treat their enemy with such cruelty. An academic showed him pictures of burns victims from the Allied bombing campaign that claimed 300,000 lives before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was this conversation that made Rylance angrier and more upset than we had seen him. The British and the Japanese armies were the pawns of
Empire, he concluded, comparing Churchill to Emperor Hirohito.
His grandfather was a Christian, but he could not forgive the Japanese for what they did. “I don’t think he could even imagine human beings were capable of such a thing… But he was of a different age, you know.” Rylance saw both sides as victims. But it’s easy to forgive when you weren’t there.
‘The challenge for you right now is to use this as a wake-up call,” said Michael Buerk in Britain’s Great Pension Crisis (Channel 5). I suspect that, for many, it was akin to being woken up by having someone slap you in the face then dangle you off the edge of a cliff in a gale force wind.
Of course there are those, either sensible or fortunate or both, who have put away a tidy sum and can fund the retirement of their dreams. But plenty of others have their head in the sand, and this documentary was for them. It asked the terrifying question: “Can you really afford to retire?”
Gavin and Louise were planning a retirement – early, in the case of Gavin, who had spent 21 years in the Army
– of far-flung holidays and nights at the theatre. They had a combined income of £57,000 and a couple of pension pots. They went to a travel agent where they picked out an activity holiday in New Zealand that cost just shy of £15,000. Then financial experts worked out their retirement budget, and informed them that they’d have £2,500 a year to spend on getaways.
At least they could do something about it – work longer, downsize the house. There were others far worse off – either self-employed and without any savings to their name, or one of the many women who believed they would be retiring at 60, only for the government to move the goalposts.
The programme didn’t need Michael Buerk acting out a relaxing retirement by stripping off for a massage in a hotel spa, but I suppose they had to lighten the tone somehow. It could also have done with more practical advice on how to build a pension pot. But the message was clear: stop spending, start saving.
My Grandparents’ War ★★★★ Britain’s Great Pension Crisis with Michael Buerk ★★★