Remembering Wigan men who served in the 'forgotten army'

In total around 228 men from the borough are thought to have died in the campaign against the Japanese in South East Asia, with 91 of them succumbing in the brutal conditions of prisoner of war camps.

Their sacrifices are being commemorated three quarters of a century after VJ Day, which marks the official end of the six-year conflict between 1939 and 1945.

Victory in Japan Day is not as well remembered as VE Day which marks the cessation of hostilities in Europe, and in the subsequent decades afterwards the British troops who went to South East Asia were sometimes referred to as combatants in the “forgotten army”.

To mark the 75th anniversary, local historian Rev David Long from Standish has spoken of the Wigan death toll from the campaigns on the other side of the world and the experiences the men went through.

He said: “Almost half of the total number of British casualties were in the prisoner of war camps.

“They were very cruelly treated and an awful lot didn’t come home, especially those employed in building the Burma-Siam railway. They were basically used as slave labour.

“However, for all that the number of workers from that region who were conscripted, used in the same way and died was far bigger.

“The prisoners of war were taken in Singapore. The troops landed in ships and were taken almost straight into captivity. The Japanese advance was so rapid and efficient they hardly had chance to fight. It was a military disaster.

“Then there was the actual campaign in the jungle. They conquered Rangoon and not long after that the atomic bomb was used and that was the end of it.

“They were called the forgotten army. It was the longest single campaign of the war, they were in the jungle from 1942 to 1945.

“There are lots of American movies about the war in the Pacific and them storming the islands one by one, pushing the Japanese back, but not so much about the British campaign pushing them back by land from India across Burma.”

Altogether around 16,000 Allied prisoners of war died in camps during World War Two, though that figure is dwarfed by the 90,000 labourers from South East Asia, mainly from Malaysia, who also lost their lives.

One of the local casualties was Sgt. James Hunter, of the Royal Artillery, who is commemorated on a family gravestone in Wigan Cemetery.

He died in 1943 and his final resting place is not known, but he is also commemorated on the Singapore Memorial.

For Rev Long keeping the memory of the conflict in South East Asia alive and marking VJ Day has a personal dimension as his father-in-law Capt. Leslie Duffield served in the Royal Artillery there.

He said: “He never really spoke about the war. At one time I ran a charity bookshop in town and occasionally I would get books about the Burma conflict come in.

“Towards the end of his life those books acted as a stimulus and he was a bit more open, although he didn’t go into much detail and more or less just said he was there.

“He did keep his uniform, though, and we found a collection of photographs after he had died. He was a very private man and didn’t encourage us to go rooting through his stuff, but his wife wanted some photos of him around after his death.

“He came back on the same transport as some of the prisoners of war and I think that made a deep impression on him, the suffering they went through.

Photographs from the time show clearly that the men in the camps weren’t well nourished at all, and maybe that put my father-in-law’s war into perspective for him.”