They made our world safe and still stand tall

A PHOTO montage to mark the 75th anniversary of VJ Day featured 11 veterans alongside images of themselves from their time in service.

The lineup included Prince Philip and was broadcast on screens across the country including one in Piccadilly Circus.

John Hutchin, 96, was among the heroes when aged 20 his regiment, the 1st Battalion South Staffordshire, was dropped 200 miles behind enemy lines.

It was the start of a horrific ordeal that would see him left for dead after being wounded and forced to walk alone for days through jungle in Burma.

He said: “At night, you slept where you fell. No ground sheets, no bedding…we all had malaria, not at the beginning, but at the end I had heavy dysentery.”

It would see John, of Tenterden, Kent, engaged in fearsome handto-hand combat to defend the Chindit stronghold at Henu.

He said: “We also knew, as soldiers, that you either get killed, wounded and carry on walking or, if you’re too bad, you’re left behind. You can’t jeopardise the focus of the column to the objective by dealing with one man.”

John, originally from Newport, was assigned to Brigadier Orde Wingate’s “Chindits” Long Range Penetration Group and his mission was to disrupt supply lines and create havoc for Japanese forces.

It was one of the most brutal assaults of the Second World War, with Wingate’s men carrying half their body weight in kit while, on one occasion, climbing a peak, as they slowly starved due to a lack of air-dropped food supplies.

In an attack, which killed a friend, John was left with a shrapnel neck wound. The injury was considered great enough to slow down his company and he was left alone roadside, with a few days’ rations and a handful of rounds.

John broke down in tears as he recalled his ordeal in a BBC interview. He began a week-long odyssey, crawling and stumbling in dense jungle aware that his every step could alert a Japanese soldier.

“It’s not horrendous the day you’re left,” he said. “The fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth day, when you’re on your own, that’s when you start getting a bit hazy. My only nightmare now is being left. When I went in I was 11st, I was now 8st 4lb. A skeleton. I had no energy, I had no fight, I had no spark.

“So the rule was before we went in: if you were killed, you are dead. Because your purpose in there is to kill or be killed.

“If you were walking wounded you carried on. If none of these things were possible and it impeded the advance of these 80 men, you were left.

“I was left with four days’ rations and ammunition. I lay in a chong (ditch) with water in it and I couldn’t move.

“And I found I had a spark. I wasn’t dead, I ain’t immobile and I got up. After four days and four nights I marched alone until I reached our men.

“I shall never ever forget any one of these men and I am delighted to have had the honour to be called a Chindit.”

The Duke of Edinburgh was on board HMS Whelp in Tokyo Bay for the signing of the Japanese surrender.

Philip began his naval career in 1939, at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, before joining the battleship HMS Ramillies in 1940 in Colombo as a midshipman.

In 1941, he served on the HMS Valiant in Alexandria, rising through the ranks and in 1942 becoming one of the youngest officers to be named First Lieutenant in the Royal Navy.

The Duke’s military career spanned 80 years as he also became the longest-serving consort in British history.