How Vera Lynn’s death-defying tour of Burma helped defeat the Japanese
A fascinating new book by the singer, now 100, reveals how her courage and kindness inspired battle-weary troops
WHEN Vera Lynn was 16 years old and making a name for herself as a singer, her local newspaper in London’s East End ran an article about her headlined ‘Star in the East’. How big a star she would become, and how brave a contribution she would make to Britain’s war effort in the Far East, the writer could never have foreseen.
To mark her 100th birthday this year, Dame Vera, the Forces’ Sweetheart, has written her memoirs of that particularly poignant period of her life — the three months between March and June 1944 that she spent in and around Burma, singing to Allied soldiers battling to repel the Japanese advance on India.
‘I had never travelled at all, apart from one touring visit to Holland,’ she recalls in her book. ‘And I had certainly never been in an aeroplane. But I wanted to make a difference. I was determined to benefit those troops who had not had much in the way of musical entertainment up until that time in the war.’
So she did — and the rapturous reception she received from the soldiers of what became known as the ‘Forgotten Army’, some of whom had not seen their homes and families for five years, was beyond her wildest imaginings.
Letters she was sent at the time — and continues to receive today from Burma veterans and their relatives — are testament to the extraordinary impact she had.
Harry Procter, who heard her singing at an RAF base in Agartala, northern India, on May 10, 1944, wrote that night: ‘You earned the title of “Sweetheart of the Forces” way back in Blighty. Somebody ought to get cracking now with, I suggest, “Sweetheart of the Jungle”.’
Frederick Weedman, who heard her in Burma, remembered: ‘The men of the 4th Brigade were divided in their opinion of her voice — but not after that hot, steamy evening in 1944 in the Burmese jungle, when we stood in our hundreds and watched a tall, fairhaired girl walk on to a makeshift stage and stand by an old piano.
‘It was Vera Lynn. She sang half a dozen songs in a strong, clear voice.
‘She tried to leave the stage but the men were clapping and cheering. She sang three more songs but still they went on cheering. She started to sing again but whenever she tried to stop, they yelled the name of another tune.
‘She sang until her makeup was running in dark furrows down her cheeks, until her dress was wet with sweat, until her voice had become a croak. She was the only star we ever saw in the jungle.’
Lance Corporal Lindsay wrote from Burma to his sister in London: ‘We went mad. Never have I yelled, bellowed, hollered or clapped so much before . . . we gave her an ovation, all right. She couldn’t sing for ten minutes and she cried, too.
‘Broken hand or not, I made it clap . . . I saw blokes crying with joy at seeing our own Vera.’
Vera Lynn, already a celebrity, had just turned 27 when she set out from the Dorset coast with her pianist, Len Edwards, and a small piano in March 1944.
Decades later, she confesses she hadn’t even consulted her husband of two years, saxophonist Harry Lewis, about her plans to travel 5,000 miles across the globe in treacherous wartime conditions, or how he might have felt about her being the only woman among thousands of men.
‘I never thought to ask him,’ she laughs. ‘But he wouldn’t have tried to stand in my way.’
Getting to Burma was a major ordeal, starting with a journey by Sunderland flying boat to Gibraltar. There were no soft seats or other luxuries in transport intended solely for servicemen, and Vera was sick for the whole seven hours.
Typically, though, she shrugs it off: ‘I didn’t mind a bit of hardship. I always felt that whatever I had to endure was nothing compared to what the average soldier, sailor or airman had to put up with.’
The next night she took off again for Tripoli, past searchlights scouring the sky for enemy planes, and in Cairo she sang in a sandstorm to 3,500 men in a marquee.
‘The wind was letting in great blasts of sand through the base and sides,’ she recalls. ‘It got everywhere — in my ears, nose and throat — and I struggled even to see my audience, let alone make myself heard. But the boys seemed thrilled.’
SToPS at Fallujah, Basra and Bahrain were followed by a stay in Calcutta.
‘Despite her nausea, Ma stopped for breakfast, tea and sandwiches on the way, as though she and Len were on a day trip rather than a great journey across the world in the middle of a war,’ says her daughter Ginny LewisJones, 71.
‘To me it enhances the idea that she had just popped out to see the boys, to sing her songs and have a cup of tea. It shortened the distance from home, which up until the time she came had felt so enormous to so many of the servicemen.’
At each stop, Vera insisted on visiting wounded soldiers in hospital, making sure she toured every ward, sat on every bed and chatted to every patient. ‘Talking to the boys, giving them the chance to ask me questions and simply being there for them was just as important as the actual singing, if not more so,’ she says.
‘I was always asked: “How are things at home?”
‘Because I had travelled around so much in Britain, from Sunderland to Brighton and from Cardiff to Crewe, I’d ask where someone was from and try to tell them about something I had seen in their home town. I let them know that things were all right — that we were holding our heads up and carrying on as usual.’
But sometimes the emotion was too much for the men. ‘There were often tears, occasionally during the concerts but more when I was alone with them,’ she remembers.
‘They saw me as a link with home and that aroused a lot of emotions — joy at being reminded of that connection, and sorrow because home seemed so far away.
‘It was impossible for me to be impassive. I saw the happiness, hope and sadness move across their faces and I felt those emotions, too.’
Mostly she performed for crowds of hundreds, if not thousands. But sometimes, when men were too ill to attend her concerts, she would sing to them at their hospital bedsides.
‘In Dimapur I sang to an audience of two — Gunner Fred Thomas, from Bootle in Merseyside, and Private John Badger, of Sheffield,’ she recalls. ‘They asked me to sing We’ll Meet Again. I had a lump in my throat as I was singing it, as slowly and tenderly as I could. In the end, only one of them, Fred Thomas, made it home.
‘Years later, in 1957, I was invited to do This Is Your Life and they had managed to find him. I was so surprised and moved.’
According to Ginny, there was an innocence about the way the men regarded her mother.
‘It was all to do with her personality, her background and the type of songs she sang. Rather than being a substitute for girlfriends and wives, she was a messenger between them. Rather than being a pinup, she was a sister and friend.’
Dame Vera describes the respect she was shown by her audiences. ‘I performed what I believed the boys wanted to hear, which was mainly my biggest hits — the love song Yours was always a favourite, and sometimes I’d throw in a cover of someone else’s song.
‘one of these — If I Had My Way — was always greeted with laughter because, I suppose, there was an obvious innuendo, and many of them had had little or no contact with women for years.
‘They were no doubt thinking of what they would do if they had their way. Looking back on it, I realise
I was naive. Yet the boys were, without exception, decent and honourable to me.’
In Burma itself the intense heat was punishing and young Vera also had to cope with insects, humidity, monsoons, lack of facilities and sheer exhaustion.
According to Ginny, the military situation in some areas was highly volatile and it was quite conceivable that an enemy patrol could have intercepted her mother. One soldier was quoted in newspapers at the time as saying: ‘Vera Lynn was very brave because there were pockets of Japanese all around us.’
But when this is mentioned to her mother ‘ she just laughs and waves me away’, says Ginny. IS IT a coincidence that shortly after Vera Lynn’s visit, events in the Burmese campaign began to change? Perhaps not entirely, Ginny believes.
‘ Her time there coincided exactly with the point at which fortunes shifted.
‘Just six weeks earlier at the same airfield from which she was flying out, men were in fear of their lives. On May 25, 1944, they were beginning to imagine what a victory against Japan in SouthEast Asia might look like.
‘Of course, I don’t think it is possible for my mother to claim responsibility for the change in the fortunes of the Allies in Burma. But she boosted their morale, gave them something to hope for and to fight for.’
General William Slim, who was in charge of operations in Burma, understood only too well that the men serving under him were not machines: they needed emotional and spiritual nourishment as much as bully beef and bullets.
‘Morale is a state of mind,’ he wrote. ‘ It is that intangible force which will move a whole group of men to give their last ounce to achieve something without counting the cost to themselves; that makes them feel they are part of something greater than themselves.’
Says Ginny: ‘Ma did understand that she raised the spirits of the men she sang for and gave them hope and joy.
‘ I believe, she gave them a connection with what Slim called the “part of something greater than themselves” — in particular, the idea of home and everything it meant.’
Despite the objections of military top brass and even Cabinet ministers, who described her music as ‘sentimental slush’ that should be taken off the radio because they thought fighting men should be listening to martial music, Vera Lynn touched a nerve with her listeners in a way few, if any, have surpassed.
Of her most famous song, We’ll Meet Again, which she first came across in 1939, she says: ‘It is a greetings card song — a basic human message that people want to say to each other but are too embarrassed actually to put into words. Ordinary British people don’t on the whole find it easy to express their feelings, even to those closest to them.’
Vera Lynn arrived back in Britain on D-Day, June 6, 1944. ‘The skies over Europe were full of planes and I think it must have been something of a miracle we were allowed to fly in on that most crucial of days,’ she says.
‘ Returning to England, I thought in those first few hours a great deal about D-Day, but I also felt exhausted emotionally and, I suppose, over- stimulated from the past few months.
‘I had a feeling that I think many other people also have after a lifechanging experience — a feeling that that experience could never be surpassed.’
Later she would reflect: ‘I never really got over that period in my life. The journey to Burma is etched in my brain, full of all sorts of intense memories.
‘I met some of the brave men who were fighting that forgotten war again at various reunions after the war and felt connected to them. I wasn’t just someone going to sing a few songs — I felt I was one of them. I still do.’
GInnY, who was born two years after the war ended, adds: ‘ There are so many stories of men who would talk of nothing else that happened in Burma to their families once they were home, apart from seeing my mother singing.
‘Of course she kept the good old British stiff upper lip, but the experience exhausted her — and I believe the most draining thing of all was also the most thrilling — it was that the men saw her as their salvation.
‘She helped them express their emotions, which in the Forces are often necessarily suppressed.
‘She helped them articulate their relationships with sweethearts and families back home.
‘She helped them remember England and gave them the hope they might one day return there. That is why she never got over it.’
Keep Smiling Through, by Vera Lynn and Virginia Lewis- Jones, is published by Century, £16.99.