Tomorrow Friday 15th August, 2025 will see the Commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of VJ (victory over Japan) Day.
In May this year we had the 80th commemoration of VE Day (Victory over Europe), and it is clear that many people believed on that date in 1945, World War II had come to end.
But it hadn’t.
While victory celebrations took place all over the United Kingdom and in Europe, the war raged on in the Far East, and many were unaware of the continued atrocities being handed out by the Japanese on their captives in Singapore, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.
Their appalling ill-treatment of the prisoners they held for three and a half years would continue until 15th August 1945, when the Japanese finally surrendered following the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the Americans.
It has been pointed out recently that had those bombs not been dropped, there are millions of people around the world who would not be here today.
I am one of them.
And as tragic as those actions were for those involved, they finally brought the Japanese to their knees and surrender came. This ended years of indescribable physical and mental suffering, starvation, deprivation, degredation, and inhumane cruelty by their captors for thousands of young servicemen taken when Singapore fell in February 1942, and for the countless civilians, men, women and children also captured and interred, and the women sent to work in brothals.
The Japanese government have never paid compensation, nor more importantly, apologised for their inhumane treatment of the military and civilian prisoners they held.
Now 80 years on most of the FEPOW’s have passed away, many of them taking the memories of their gruesome wartime experiences to their graves. Too traumatised to talk about it and therefore receiving no relief from the mental torture they had carried with them through their lives.
Although it’s not possible to know or begin to understand the atrocities the FEPOW’s endured, from personal experience I can tell you the thousands of men, women and children who suffered at the hands of the Japanese never recovered, and neither did they receive any kind of physical or mental help following repatriation to the UK.
So please, tomorrow on 15th August, 2025, as we did in May for VE Day, STOP, even if only briefly to remember the thousands of courageous human beings, who suffered so much for three and a half years at the hands of the Japanese. Those who never came home to their loved ones, and those who did, but whose suffering continued to the end of their lives.
Each and everyone of them deserves our respect and gratitude for their service to this country and the war effort.
Known as ‘The Forgotten Army’ we must ensure their memory lives on forever.
“Lest we Forget”
Granny FlapjaX
GRANNY FLAPJAX 