The Second Map – VJ Day podcast to air never-before-heard archival recordings and new testimonies from last remaining veterans

Marking the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, The History Podcast: The Second Map is a powerful new three-part series from BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. It tells the story of Britain’s war against Japan through remarkable first-hand accounts from soldiers and civilians, including Japanese voices.

AT2

Why is 80 years such an important anniversary?

80 years after the end of the war against Japan, there are so few people left who were there and witnesses to it. This is almost the last moment to record their experiences in their voice. It is also a part of our war story that has not been as well documented, which makes the recording of these testimonies so important. I was lucky to interview people who are now in their late 90s. The oldest person I spoke to was 104.

Why do you think we have forgotten these stories?

There are many reasons why these stories have been overlooked. The war on the Asian front was a long way away. As Peter Knight from the series says, it was a “far away war, not our war. We had bombs falling on our head. That was the here and now.” Yet it would be a war that would go on to touch him and his family. But there are other reasons too – it is a less straightforward narrative than Britain’s war with the Nazis. The war with Japan was about two imperial powers fighting over territory and valuable resources. For Britain, the early losses of some of its key colonies to Japanese forces was humiliating, which makes remembrance harder. Yet there were impressive later victories, principally fought by the Fourteenth Army, which was made up of nearly a million soldiers – the vast majority from India and other parts of Britain’s empire. But even at the time the head of South East Asian Command joked they were a “forgotten army.” The wars on the Asian Front were fought in jungles, in extreme weather conditions, and prisoners of war and civilian internees were kept in appalling circumstances in Japanese camps – these are traumatic memories to speak of. And the war with Japan ended with the surprise atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is a more morally ambiguous ending than the war with Europe.

What do you want listeners to take away from this series?

While making the series so many people said they didn’t know what VJ Day was, or that Britain was at war with Japan. It was seen as an American war. Yet on the same day as Pearl Harbor, British territories across South East Asia were also attacked. It was a war that touched so many families in Britain as well as those who were once part of its empire. World War Two is so bound up in Britain’s national story, but the narrative we know is the war against the Nazis. I hope that listeners – through hearing these remarkable first-hand accounts – of soldiers, civilians and prisoners of war – will also think of the other war, fought faraway, in all its complexity.

Meet some of the contributors
Captain Yavar Abbas

Kavita interviewed 104-year-old Yavar Abbas in person, at his home in West London.

Born in British India, Yavar Abbas was one of the 2.5 million Indians who served alongside British forces during the Second World War, many of them fighting on the Asian front. For men like Yavar, the decision to enlist carried an existential weight – to fight in a war for freedom, alongside an imperial power that still denied that very freedom to its colonial subjects. He decided to join up – and became a combat cameraman with the Fourteenth Army.

Yavar: “I didn’t want Hitler to win, I did not want Nazism and fascism to win. I had to choose and hope that if I joined the army after the end of the war, as they had been promising, I would get independence.”

“I’m the same age as my fellow army officer, the late Captain Sir Tom Moore, who died recently in a blaze of glory. We both served on the same front at the same time with the same Fourteenth Indian army, the forgotten one.”

Yavar, on Hiroshima: “I saw the wasteland and people in all kinds of terrible state with their skins coming out. Those who died were the fortunate ones. I think it was a crime against humanity to have dropped the bombs. It haunts me. I mean, I couldn’t believe that human beings could do this to each other. Hiroshima was a terrible experience.”

Margie Caldicott and Shelagh Brown

Kavita and the team visited Margie Caldicott at home. Margie shared never-before-broadcast audio recordings which her mother, Shelagh Brown, had recorded before her death.

In her Chichester home, Margie Caldicott keeps an extensive archive of her mother Shelagh Brown, who was taken as a prisoner of war alongside her own mother (Margie’s grandmother). While interned, Shelagh and the other women in the camp started a vocal orchestra, an act of resilience under brutal conditions. Shelagh’s mother died in the camp.

Shelagh: “They were quite dreadful, the way they would slap people and make us stand for a long time to be counted in the sun. And we were kept short of drugs and things for sickness.”

“The first concert we performed in the shelter in the middle of the camp and we had to sit down, we weren’t strong enough to stand. And apparently it was very moving…If only people at home could hear and know what we were doing they just wouldn’t believe it.”

Margie: “When it was VE Day 75 our village outside Chichester put bunting up and there was lots of celebration and people dressed up red, white and blue. And so when it came to VJ Day, I got out the bunting and I put photos on the garage, of granny and grandpa, and mummy outside our house, and nobody asked me why I’d done that. Nobody, none of my neighbours.”

Maurice Naylor

Kavita interviewed Maurice Naylor’s daughters, Anne and Liz. The team also drew on a 2013 archive recording made for Witness History, much of which has never been broadcast.

Maurice Naylor was a gunner in the 18th Infantry, from Manchester. He was deployed to Singapore when Japan invaded in 1942. He would be one of around 130,000 British, Indian, Malayan and Commonwealth soldiers to be taken by Japan as prisoners of war following the fall of Malaya and Singapore. He would go on to work on the infamous Thai-Burma railway – known as the ‘death railway’ – a story which would later be dramatized in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Once he retired, he took a trip back to celebrate his retirement, and he decided he owed it to the men who had died to tell their stories.

Maurice: “I didn’t talk about being a prisoner until I retired at the age of sixty-one.”

“I had chronic diarrhoea most of the time when I was a prisoner but that wasn’t considered bad enough normally to stop me going out on a working party, although you might want to go to the toilet 10, 12, 20 times a day. I had to put up with that. It was a nightmare. And if we didn’t do [the work] properly, then it was the Japanese guard – they’d just beat you on the head, shout at you.”

Maurice’s daughter Liz, reflecting on his retirement trip to Thailand: : “He went back with his brother who had been in the war, but in the European war. They went back with both their wives on a holiday to celebrate his retirement. I mean, he said he stood in the graveyard in Kanchanaburi, which is the nearest town to the bridge, and saw all these rows and rows of graves, and thought that he owed it to those men to tell the story of what had happened.”

Captain Gian Singh and Charanjit Singh

Kavita interviewed Gian Singh’s son, Charanjit. Captain Gian Singh is permanently remembered at a war memorial near Hyde Park alongside other recipients of the Victoria Cross.

Captain Gian Singh won the Victoria Cross for his bravery in a battle in Burma. He never spoke about his war experience publicly, even to his son, Charanjit, who only learned about what happened from some of Gian’s officers.

Charanjit: “I wasn’t aware until very late stages of my life, that India played a big, big part and my dad was one of them. He was a military man. He was a sergeant major in the house. We were scared of him. We were very well-disciplined by him. We didn’t have the courage to talk to him or ask him about things or have a friendly conversation with him. We never had that. Today you know whenever anybody mentioned about my dad, I get emotional. I wish I had more time with him or even, I had time with him, wish I… Had more conversation. I wish he’s here and I can grab hold of him and, you know, and just say to him, Dad, I love you, or whatever.”

“It’s always about Europe. They always talk about the Second World War in Europe. That’s what I’m saying. They never talk about that part of the world. They should be talking about it. Those forgotten soldiers, forgotten souls, you know, they should have been given more credit for what they went through.”

Peter Knight and Tony Knight

Peter Knight was interviewed in person for this series, in the presence of his son Tony.

Peter Knight, 98, has a detailed memory of that time. His recollections give this series its name. As a schoolboy in his living room in London, he kept a large map of Northern Europe, meticulously charting the war’s progress. As the conflict expanded, he added a ‘second map’, this time of Asia and the Pacific. He would end up in the Navy on his way to fight Japan towards the end of the war

Tony Knight, Peter’s son, is now delving into his own family’s wartime history. His father-in-law also spent years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, a traumatic experience he never spoke of during his lifetime. [Please note, both Tony’s father Peter, and his father-in-law, are mentioned here. These are two different people].

Peter Knight: “We didn’t openly say it, but there was a feeling that that’s not our war. The here and now was us being bombed. That was our war. It was such a long way away. It didn’t mean much to us at all. I wonder sometimes if that ever changed – that attitude. It was always them out there.”

Tony Knight: “I never spoke to my father-in-law about his experiences. It wasn’t really a topic for over dinner or anything of that nature. He was sent on a troop ship to fight the Japanese. By the time the troop ship arrived at its destination in Singapore, Singapore had been lost and the ship was simply taken under Japanese control. So he shot a single round in anger and went straight

“He had nightmares. Yes. When he first returned. I don’t. Don’t think we ever went away. And nor indeed did the malaria that he caught.”

Renya Mutaguchi

Renya Mutaguchi gave an interview in the 1960s for a BBC documentary, but it was never broadcast. Kavita and the team found it in the BBC Archives.

Mutaguchi was an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. He took part in the invasion of Singapore following its fall to Japanese forces and later played a leading role in the Battle of Imphal. In the recording, he describes how his troops seized Rangoon in 1942 before advancing northward to occupy the rest of the country, and how later at Imphal the British had learnt from their mistakes.

Renya: “This attack was a result of the British forces’ lack of awareness – it’s really their lack of awareness that caused them trouble.”

“The British counterattack was so fierce that they made a break in our defence… So that’s one reason why the operation in Imphal went so poorly.”

Ursula Graham Bower

Kavita found an interview that Ursula had given to Cambridge University in 1985 at the age of 71. She died three years later.

In 1944, at the age of 28, Ursula found herself on the front line. She had been living among the Naga people, a tribal community in the Indian jungle near the Burmese (now Myanmar) border. She talks about her unusual life where she learnt their language, danced, and cooked with them, and together they began gathering intelligence for the British miles behind the front line. When Japanese forces entered British India in March 1944, they suddenly found themselves on the front line. The actions of the Nagas and Ursula, who appears to be the first woman to lead a combat unit during the Second World War, were crucial in helping to repel the invasion. Yet their extraordinary contribution remains largely unknown.

Ursula: “I sent a cable saying, ‘Going forward to look for the enemy. Kindly send rifles and ammunition soonest.’ I got back to find boxes of rifles lying on the floor of my hut and boxes of grenades, and 150 pounds of gunpowder. Well, I never thought that a box of grenades could look beautiful, but it did.”

“The Nagas were completely loyal to the British and there were, I don’t know how many deeds of heroism, men gave their lives in the Naga country.”

Peter Blyth and Nicky Blyth

Kavita travels to Yorkshire to interview 98-year-old veteran Peter Blyth, in the presence of his daughter Nicky Blyth.

Peter Blyth was in the intelligence corps in India. During their interview, Peter shows Nicky items from a battered suitcase and his war days. He rarely talked about that time. His daughter Nicky had never seen the suitcase before.

Nicky: “I’ve never noticed it before. Behind the chair where it was kept. Never been mentioned before.”

Peter: “Well, that’s a war medal. and that was my rank. Captain Peter Eden Blyth. National Service and Territorial Army…Pride doesn’t come into it. It’s a fact of life.”

Academic contributors

Dr Diya Gupta, researches the Second World War at City St George’s, University of London.
Dr Vikki Hawkins, Curator, World War Two Galleries, Imperial War Museum.
Professor Yoshikuni Igarashi, Distinguished Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.
Dr Peter Johnston, Military Historian and Narrative Director, Imperial War Museum.
Professor Lucy Noakes, Essex University, studies Britain’s cultural memory and the war. President of the Royal Historical Association.

Credits

Creator, Writer and Presenter: Kavita Puri
Series Producer: Ellie House
Script Editor: Ant Adeane
Sound designer: James Beard
Series Editor: Matt Willis
Production Coordinators: Sabine Scherek, Maria Ogundele
Commissioners for Radio 4 and The World Service: Dan Clarke, Jon Zilkha
Original music: Felix Taylor
Archive Curator: Tariq Hussain
Voice actor: Dai Tabuchi
Translators: Hannah Kilcoyne, Sumire Hori

Follow for more

Dr Diya Gupta, researches the Second World War at City St George’s, University of London.
Dr Vikki Hawkins, Curator, World War Two Galleries, Imperial War Museum.
Professor Yoshikuni Igarashi, Distinguished Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.
Dr Peter Johnston, Military Historian and Narrative Director, Imperial War Museum.
Professor Lucy Noakes, Essex University, studies Britain’s cultural memory and the war. President of the Royal Historical Association.

Credits

Creator, Writer and Presenter: Kavita Puri
Series Producer: Ellie House
Script Editor: Ant Adeane
Sound designer: James Beard
Series Editor: Matt Willis
Production Coordinators: Sabine Scherek, Maria Ogundele
Commissioners for Radio 4 and The World Service: Dan Clarke, Jon Zilkha
Original music: Felix Taylor
Archive Curator: Tariq Hussain
Voice actor: Dai Tabuchi
Translators: Hannah Kilcoyne, Sumire Hori

Follow for more