Gone but not Forgotten - a Personal Tribute on VJ-Day plus 75

 "We were dragged out by the hair to go to work, beaten with bamboo poles and mocked at.  We toiled, half-naked in the cold, unfriendly rain of Upper Thailand.  We had no time to wash and if we did it meant Cholera.  By day we never saw our bed spaces (on long platforms of those bleak hundred metre huts). Our comrades died, we could not honour them even at the graveside because we were still working.  The spirit of the jungle hovered over this Valley of the Shadow of Death ... and we lay and starved, suffered, hoped and prayed."

The above is an extract from "A Japanese Holiday", broadcast to London from the Far East on 12th September, 1945 by Padre John Noel Duckworth (1912-1980), chaplain to 2nd Bn. Cambridgeshire Regiment. 

NMA - Terry Waite chats to veterans beside
the track - opening of FEPOW memorial
15th August 2005

The phrase that I have emboldened appears on a plaque beside a stretch of track preserved at the National Memorial Arboretum 'in memory of those who worked on the Burma/Siam railway and those who sacrificed their lives in its construction.'  

The suffering those men went through is unimaginable; only those who were there could truly know what it was like.

Duckworth's essay had already stated, "The lowest daily death rate came down to 17 only as late as September 1943, when the weather improved and things began to get a little better."  For me, that improvement came too late.  My uncle, Charles William James Sturgeon, died of malaria on 21st August and lays in Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery.  A painter and decorator by trade, he had enlisted some three-and-a-half years earlier in the Royal Norfolk Regiment and was one of the 80,000 or so British, Indian and Australian troops who became prisoners of war at the fall of Singapore on 15th February 1942.  This was the greatest ever surrender of British-led forces and was described by Churchill as "the worst disaster in British military history".

Charlie and his sisters on the beach at
Great Yarmouth - embarkation leave,
September or October 1941

Charles - always known as Charlie - became a prisoner of war just two days after his 24th birthday.  He was the third child and only son of my grandparents and, while all three siblings were very close, I sense that there was a special bond between him and my mother who were born little more than a year apart.

Whether by accident or design, it was on the fifth anniversary of his death that my parents were married.  As I grew up, a similarity was noticed between early pictures of me and those that my mother had preserved of her brother.  I have no doubt that this resemblance meant that looking at me regularly renewed and intensified her grief at his loss.  I cannot remember a time when I wasn't aware of Charlie and the fact that he had died in the war.  Even in death, he was just as much part of the family as my father's many siblings, all of whom were still alive.

Later in life, I knew as a colleague a man who had survived the war in the Far East.  I had first met him on Remembrance Day, and recognised that the medals he was wearing included the Pacific Star.  Like me, he was a lay minister in the church; while he never spoke of his wartime experiences, it was noticeable that, if he introduced a 'time of silent prayer', Arthur would spend most of it gently listing the topics that should be prayed for in what, when it came, was a very short period of actual silence.  Rightly or wrongly, I understood this to indicate his great reluctance to entertain silence and believed this to be a product of those dark days forty-odd years earlier.

On this anniversary it is good to spare a thought for all whose lives have been affected, directly or indirectly, by the war that ended seventy-five years ago today.