'Forgotten army' of POWs hold final remembrance service for fallen comrades
They are Britain's "Forgotten army" from the Second World War, former prisoners-of-war who spent three years in brutal Japanese camps after the fall of Malaya and Singapore.
brutal.
With no official memorial service to remember their fallen comrades, the survivors have for years held their own commemorations on V-J Day, which marks the end of the war in the Far East in 1945.
Today, the 65th anniversary of V-J Day, the ex-POWs will hold their final remembrance service because only a handful of the estimated 300 survivors still alive are able to attend. The rest, in their 80s and 90s, are too frail or too unwell.
Six of the survivors are expected to gather in Liverpool, along with more than 200 family, friends and other ex-servicemen and women, to remember the 30,000 who died in combat, in prison camps or when they were forced to build the Thai-Burma "Death" railway after Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942.
The survivors are the last of the 37,500 British troops who defied beatings and disease in the Japanese camps and returned home after Japan's surrender in 1945. More than 12,000 British troops died or were killed in the camps....
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
brutal.
With no official memorial service to remember their fallen comrades, the survivors have for years held their own commemorations on V-J Day, which marks the end of the war in the Far East in 1945.
Today, the 65th anniversary of V-J Day, the ex-POWs will hold their final remembrance service because only a handful of the estimated 300 survivors still alive are able to attend. The rest, in their 80s and 90s, are too frail or too unwell.
Six of the survivors are expected to gather in Liverpool, along with more than 200 family, friends and other ex-servicemen and women, to remember the 30,000 who died in combat, in prison camps or when they were forced to build the Thai-Burma "Death" railway after Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942.
The survivors are the last of the 37,500 British troops who defied beatings and disease in the Japanese camps and returned home after Japan's surrender in 1945. More than 12,000 British troops died or were killed in the camps....