Tell them ...for your tomorrow we gave our today

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

- BY LUCY THORNTON

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

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.

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."