The last of the Forgotten Army
The Second World War officially ended 75 years ago, on ‘Victory over Japan Day’ – but many still had work to do. Joe Shute speaks to the few who remain
Medals pinned to his chest and flanked by his two daughters, veteran Harold Dix will today be among the last survivors of the Forgotten Army to pay tribute at the national commemorations for VJ Day.
The 94-year-old former paratrooper from the 6th Airborne Division still has countless memories – and scars – of the war in the Far East. But one date in particular sticks out in his mind: March 25 1946.
Long after the Second World War had finished with the surrender of Japan on August 15 1945, Dix and his fellow soldiers were still fighting out in the Far East. On patrol that day deep in the jungle in Java (Indonesia), suddenly his unit was ambushed and, in his words, “all hell broke out”.
Of the eight men on patrol, two were killed, and three more wounded. Dix says only the officers emerged unscathed. He was blasted with shrapnel, which would remain in his arm for years.
Speaking to The Telegraph ahead of the service, he said that today he would be remembering “all the ones who didn’t come back” – and all the soldiers who campaigned in the Far East only to discover, when they eventually returned home, that their exploits had largely been forgotten.
For many in Europe, the Second World War came to a close on May 8 1945, with the announcement of Victory in Europe. Revellers thronged the streets and danced in the fountains of Trafalgar Square, while King George VI and Winston Churchill delivered triumphant speeches hailing the defeat of the Nazis.
News of Japan’s surrender the following August brought similar scenes, but while Britain erupted in national jubilation again, thousands remained out in the Far East. These troops on the other side of the world – and, in particular, the Fourteenth Army in Burma, which has long been regarded as the “Forgotten Army” – slowly dwindled out of the public imagination.
As they fought against the Japanese in distant lands and, in the years that followed, against various other insurgencies, a weary public back home preferred to forget all about the men still laying down their lives on foreign soil and focus instead on the long process of rebuilding the nation.
Dix, who originally comes from Stoke-on-trent, was posted to the Far
Wally Newman, above, found his country changed when he returned in August 1947
East in early 1945 and recalls being in India when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, prompting the Japanese surrender. “We thought then the war was over,” he says. But it would be two more years before he made it home.
More than a million soldiers from across the Commonwealth took part in the war in the Far East against Japan, although today their numbers have been reduced to just a few. Around 40 veterans are expected to attend today’s 75th anniversary commemorations at the National Memorial Arboretum, which will be led by the Prince of Wales and Boris Johnson. Those few men are the last witnesses to the brutal closing chapters of the Second World War and their testimonies a history that will soon be lost.
The fighting in the Far East was often hand-to-hand combat in the jungle against a determined and wellorganised enemy. Malaria, dysentery and a chronic shortage of supplies wracked the British troops. In Malaya (now Malaysia), Dix recalls drinking rainwater treated with chlorine tablets as their only source of hydration.
Such privations aside, troops also lived in constant fear of capture by
Harold Dix thought the war was over, but it would be two years before he was home, too the Japanese. Tens of thousands of British troops endured the brutalities of the Japanese prisoner of war camps, nearly a quarter of whom died in captivity. Subsisting on provisions that amounted to less than a cup of filthy rice each day, men were starved and worked to death. Photographs of the camps show British soldiers reduced to skeletons. Thomas Doherty is another of the Far East veterans who will be in attendance today. The 97-year-old from South Yorkshire was a Petty Officer radar mechanic on HMS Assistance, and on VJ Day was anchored at Manus Island, near Papua New Guinea.
His memories of the day itself are happy ones, swimming in the harbour and playing football with locals. Afterwards, though, the ship docked in Singapore where Doherty attended the war crimes tribunal of one of the Japanese officers who had presided over a prisoner of war camp.
“They read out these appalling crimes of torture and execution of prisoners,” he recalls. “And he just stood there with no expression on his face whatsoever.”
Some 330 trials were organised by the British military in Asia. Of these, 131 were conducted in Singapore. Of the nearly 6,000 prosecuted for war crimes, 1,000 were executed. “I never found out what happened to this man,” Doherty says. “But he was probably taken outside and shot.”
Other Japanese prisoners were brought to work on his ship in harbour and he admits to being unable to forgive his enemy. “I remember one of the ship’s company giving cigarettes to the prisoners,” he says. “My feeling about that was I would sooner kick their backsides than give them a cigarette.”
The cruelty for many of the Far East veterans is just as they had a glimmer of hope that the war might be coming to an end and they could return to their families, they suddenly found themselves being posted to the other side of the world.
So it was for Wally Newman, a Stoker 1st Class on minesweeper HMS Moon. In 1942, the then
‘They read out these appalling crimes of torture and execution’
16-year-old from north London had lied about his age in order to be accepted as a naval cadet and was soon posted overseas. Already with one brother serving as a sergeant in the Yorkshire Regiment and another a bombardier in the Royal Artillery in Egypt, Newman says he had resented being left at home.
After years of continuous service – and surviving countless skirmishes with the enemy in the Mediterranean Sea – Newman found himself aboard the minesweeper off the island of Malta when the D-day landings took place in June 1944. “The buzz was going around we were going home,” he says. “Then the very next day, we got orders to leave for the Far East.”
In 1944, one of his brothers was killed in the Battle of Anzio and that same year his mother died. “When she received the War Office telegram announcing his death, it broke my mother’s heart,” he says. “We think she developed cancer soon after that.”
Despite this personal torment, he found himself sweeping mines from Bombay, Ceylon and along the Burma coast to Malaysia. He arrived in Singapore where he remembers watching
Lord Louis Mountbatten, supreme allied commander for South East Asia, addressing the crowds, and being selected to take part in a parade. On VJ Day itself, his ship was in harbour in Hong Kong, having just returned from a minesweeping trip. A King George V-class British battleship was moored in the same harbour and as part of the celebrations, its captain was invited aboard. Newman recalls being tasked with performing the traditional naval greeting of piping him aboard, but using the brass end of a firehose rather than a whistle. The order was soon given to “splice the mainbrace” (the naval term for distributing the rum rations). “We had a couple of days’ enjoyment before we went back to it,” he recalls. “The war was over, but there was still a hell of a lot to do.”
It would be two more years, in August 1947, before he finally returned home. He did so to discover his country – and family – profoundly changed, and admits it was a struggle to readjust to civilian life. His father had remarried following his mother’s death, and Newman’s bedroom had been given over to the daughter of his new wife. He was instead given the box room of their council house in Wood Green, north London, and told that when his stepbrother returned from the Navy, the pair would have to share the single bed.
Eventually, he struck up a romance with a childhood friend he had exchanged letters with during his time in the Navy and moved into her family’s house.
Today, he admits he and his fellow Far East veterans still harbour a grudge about the extent to which their sacrifice has been overshadowed by history. “It did become an actual forgotten army as far as I was concerned,” he says.
It is, of course, far too late for many, but ceremonies like those today at least show the VJ Day veterans that are still alive that a nation remembers their sacrifice. And that is all the men of the Forgotten Army have ever asked.