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Gong-winner Stars of Dunkirk and their real-life war hero relatives Pows’ silence on Japanese horror camps Tom’s pint-sized forebear made waves in Navy

MARK Rylance plays boat-owning civilian Mr Dawson in the film – one of the hundreds of people approached by Churchill to help rescue the men using the so-called Little Ships.

But while Mark’s ancestors were not at Dunkirk, the 57-year-old is only too aware of the suffering soldiers went through between 1939 and 1945.

Both his grandfathers were prisoners of war in Japan.

Mark has said they never spoke of the full horror they saw. He chooses to instead remember the peaceful days spent in one of his grandfather’s gardens in Kent as a boy.

But the Japanese camps were renowned for being brutal. It is estimated more than a quarter of Western Pows lost their lives in Japanese captivity, while there were stories of starvation, rampant disease and men being worked to death.

The star, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Bridge of Spies, was signed on to star in Steven IT is a film based on heroic deeds summed up brilliantly by its tagline: “400,000 men couldn’t get home, so home came for them.”

Dunkirk re-creates the historic evacuation in which military and civilian ships swarmed across the Channel to France to rescue stranded troops, dodging German bombs and machine-gun fire.

Around 340,000 soldiers were lifted in Operation Dynamo as Winston Churchill mobilised nearly 1,000 vessels. Some 70,000 Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, which tells the story of a man who became a POW in such a camp, but he pulled out in favour of a theatre project – where he ended up meeting his wife.

“Steven gave me four hours to choose. I chose the theatre, and I met my wife!” he said.

Mark’s great friend, the late actor Jimmy Gardner, pictured left, was also a likely inspiration for Mark when he was researching the Dunkirk role.

During the Second World War, Jimmy – who died aged 86 in 2010 – served in the RAF with No 10 Squadron. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal after completing 30 sorties as a rear gunner of a Halifax aircraft.

Mark wrote an obituary in which he said: “The survivor of two shipwrecks and innumerable escapades on land… his life was the stuff of legend.” soldiers were captured or killed. The film’s stars – including Harry Styles, Tom Hardy and Mark Rylance – were humbled to meet veterans at the star-studded premiere in London last week.

But it seems that many of the actors had already been inspired by tales of their own ancestors.

From survivors of the brutal Japanese prisoner of war camps and RAF aces downed over France in the Second World War, to family men who shrugged off their exemption to volunteer in the First World War, here we reveal the heroes in their family trees.

injuries. He was awarded a campaign medal for his bravery – made all the more poignant as he was a volunteer rather than a conscript. As a 37-year-old married man, he would have been exempt. After the war, Elijah lived with wife Maggie Daniels, nee...