Time to remember our Forgotten Army

CHILDREN aren't often taught about the courage and sacrifice of British and Commonwealth soldiers who stopped Japan's invasion of India in 1944. BBC2's VJ Day 80: We Were There reminded us of the merciless savagery of the enemy. Decapitated heads were put on spikes, prisoners were beaten to death, emaciated PoW slave labourers, looking like living corpses, were forced to build the Thai-Burma death railway.

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Robin Rowland, ex British India Army, recalled Japanese soldiers bayoneting 31 British soldiers in a field hospital.

The Battle of Britain and El Alamein are part of our collective memory.

Yet the battles of Kohima and Imphal - "the Stalingrad of the East" - were some of the fiercest and most decisive of the war.

Winning them, at a huge cost, turned the tide of the eastern conflict before the A-bombs dropped. The surviving men of the 14th Army called themselves the Forgotten Army. Few ever spoke about the horrors they endured. Even decades later, words did not come easily.

BBC1's Antiques Roadshow: VJ Day Special reminded us of their story through mementos passed down the generations. Poignant keepsakes ranged from a chess set carved with a penknife by Jack Jennings, the last death railway survivor, to a Japanese officer's ceremonial shin gunto sword, acquired at Kohima.

Historian Robert Tilney called it, "history in your hand...a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck job".

The heirlooms brought the past to life, but the words, carved in stone in a Kohima war cemetery said it all: "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today."