VJ Day heroes remember those who paid ultimate sacrifice for freedom

“I can never forget it. I saw the boys coming out of the jungle, their bodies came out but their minds were still there.”

Breaking down in tears, his eyes bloodshot, Owen Filer’s powerful words stopped people in their tracks at the National Memorial ­Arboretum in Staffordshire on Friday.

They listened in awe as the 105-year-old, the joint-eldest of the 33 heroes to attend the VJ Day 80 Years On service, spoke to the Mirror on his way to recite the Kohima Epitaph.

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Recalling his time in India near the border with Burma, now Myanmar, he said: “ We must never forget. They’d been through hell, the PoWs on the railway. They were skeletons.

“They sent a lot of them to Australia to feed them up, get them fat. They wouldn’t send them home like that. They couldn’t converse normally because their minds were gone. They were in a bad state.

“I was on duty one day in Bombay [now Mumbai] and I found one walking down the street, and he was talking out loud to himself.”

Veteran Owen, from Cwmbran in South Wales, said he called out to the Brit who just kept walking.

He went on: “So I caught up with him and I steered him into a building and sat him down. I spoke with him, asked him about his regiment, and he’d been sent to Bombay to recuperate.

“He couldn’t remember where he’d come from, where he had to go back to. It’s history that should be remembered for ever.”

Owen was so determined to make us remember, he endured 27C heat and left his wheelchair to walk a painful 50 yards, with help from a serving soldier, to quote the Epitaph: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, ‘For your tomorrow we gave our today’.”

He was speaking in front of the Armed Services Memorial, on which 16,000 names are etched into the Portland stone. His fellow veterans listened, some in tears, some with lips trembling and others staring fiercely ahead.

Fellow veteran Herbert Pritchard, 100, a former Royal Marine from Wrexham, told how he is haunted by the state of the rescued PoWs he helped take home. He said he went up on HMS Newcastle’s deck the morning after they arrived in Australia and saw them all lined up.

He recalled: “There were about 50, all rags and bones.”

The few attendees still dry-cheeked at that point were brought to tears at the end of a two-minute silence, when eight Red Arrows streaked overhead trailing plumes of red, white and blue.

Geoffrey Mesure, 71, from Battersea, South West London, sat in the audience wearing his dad Alfred’s scarf, with a map of Burma printed on it for emergencies. He said: “It’s the only thing he had left after everything he collected was stolen by the dockers when he got home.”

George Durrant, 100, from West Sussex, served in the Intelligence Corps in Burma.

He said of the service: “It brought back lots of memories. We were the forgotten ones because we were so far away. But no longer. That’s nice.”

He did a reading at the ceremony beside his nine-year-old great-granddaughter Elspeth. She said: “Great-grandad never spoke about the war until a few years ago, I love hearing about when he found snakes in his boots.”

George added: “People always talk about how brave we were but few of us felt that way at the time. We just thought that we were there to do our duty. I speak to you now not as a hero but as someone who witnessed the price of freedom.

“We must look to the future and ensure that the next generation remember our sacrifices so that they can strive for a more peaceful future.”

The two last surviving veterans of the special forces Chindits, Charlie Richards, 104 and Sid Machin, 101, sat side by side during the ­ceremony. Actor Robert Lindsay said it was an honour to have them attend, and read out some of their memories of daring operations behind enemy lines in the jungles of Burma.

He read: “Being a Chindit was never easy. At one point, we went 10 days through the monsoon. We couldn’t get any food or ammunition, and the thought of home was the only thing getting us through.

“The Japanese were ruthless fighters. They didn’t think of life as we did. They saw it as an honour to be killed in action. As we neared the end of our time in Burma, death became an everyday occurrence.

“When we came back, it felt like people forgot what we did, and as time went on, the number of Chindits started to fall. You don’t
get together as a group because there isn’t a group to get together with, and so you too start to forget. But at long last, people are starting to remember what we did.”

In the afternoon, Charlie and Sid went over to The Chindit Memorial, in the peaceful shade of the Far East area of the arboretum, to lay a wreath to their lost colleagues.

Charlie was visibly moved when Last Post sounded, tears silently rolling down his cheeks. He raised his trembling hand in a salute and placed a wreath silently, before humming the final few notes of the haunting bugle call.