Burma, My Father and the Forgotten Army

I'm afraid my generation have a fixation with WWII,

and that's because we were brought up on

an unremitting diet of the stuff.

"Shiver me flippin' timbers, lads!

"Now's our chance to give these Nippon Noodle-Noshers

"a touch of the old commando crunch!"

My father fought in Burma.

And from what I know, the reality was rather different

from the adventures in the comics I read when I was six.

In December 1941, when Britain was fighting for its survival

against Nazi Germany,

a new empire in the East entered the war.

The British colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Burma

were all overrun by the Japanese in a brilliant campaign

threatening the crown jewel of the British Empire, India.

Churchill raised an army of a million men to fight back.

These men not only stopped the Japanese advance,

eventually, they defeated them, turning the tide of the war in East.

"By Shinto, the white pigs are too strong for us! Retreat!"

But unlike Captain Hurricane,

most of the men that fought in Burma were not white.

Elwyn Rhys Jones was a medical officer

with the Gold Coast Regiment.

And the men he served with were West Africans.

This is the story of that forgotten army.

If I mean to find out what happened, I haven't got much to go on.

There are a few photographs buried deep in a pile of family snaps.

They show men marching.

And men on ships.

Astonishingly, I have also discovered a few watercolours

painted by my father at the time.

They conjure up a tropical world of huts and tents

and lost temples in the jungle

and wartime casualties.

These are new.

But I am looking for something I remember rather better.

Ah! Now, OK.

Now, this is the photograph

that I distinctly remember from being a boy,

which shows my father newly qualified as a doctor, as it were,

sitting amongst a group of West Africans.

And I know it's a bit of cliche, but he never really talked about it.

I'd like to know a little bit more about this.

What did you do in the war exactly, Daddy?

And who are these West Africans with you?

What were they doing there?

And why do we so seldom hear about them?

My father died in 1989, but my mother, Gwyneth, is still alive.

Though she didn't meet Elwyn until after he came back from the war,

I'm hoping she can shed some light on what happened to him.

You say to people, "My father went to West Africa,"

and their eyes pop out of their head and they say, "What..?"

What was he doing in West Africa?

They were going to West Africa to take troops to Burma.

I've never been clear about whether...

he was actually involved in fighting.

He actually went with the men, so he told me, into battle.

But, you see, I've never heard that! I never knew!

Well, I must have asked him what did he do, and that's what he told me.

I needed more information.

And the War Office provided my father's record.

The identity card for the army in India.

And there he is, in a massive coat.

For some reason, not looking at the camera at all.

It's an extraordinary document.

Special knowledge or experience.

He's a casualty surgical officer at Cardiff Royal Infirmary.

And then the campaigns, er... Burma Three.

Burma Three?

These papers give me little more

than the bare facts of his military career.

I learned that he was called up towards the end of 1941

and after basic training near Leeds, was posted to West Africa,

where he served with the Gold Coast Regiment.

It was part of the 82nd West African Division,

so I've arranged to meet up with some white veterans

who went with them to Burma.

So let me lead you in this way.

-We're going to be in here.

-And...

Harry! I haven't seen you for a long time.

I'm afraid I can't see you, but...

Oh, dear! Maurice Ramsey.

Yes. I haven't seen you for 20 years or more, I suppose.

I should think it's 30 or 40.

Is it? Good gracious!

I hadn't a clue. I was a country boy.

I'd never lived in a big city or anything like that.

I'd never seen a black man.

To the best of my recollection, I'd never seen a black man.

That's the badge of the 82nd West African Division.

The division that my father was a member of, or assigned to.

In the battalion, there were about 1,200 men,

consisting of about 26 Europeans

and the rest, African troops.

I developed malaria in Burma.

And the medical officer might have been your father.

A regimental medical officer

was with the troops, essentially,

an integral part of the four companies that make up a battalion.

A very difficult job and a very traumatic job

because he would feel the full weight of all the casualties

with a number of trained African dressers.

Apart from one exception,

all of the officers in the West African divisions were white.

My father was one of three medical officers in his division.

He looked after 3,000 men.

And the vast majority of these were black Africans.

How and why were these Africans and my father thrown together

to fight the Japanese in the jungles of Asia?

I've come to where father's regiment was raised in Ghana.

When he came here in 1943,

this was a British colony called the Gold Coast.

The idea that Britain is on its own in 1940, of course, is a myth.

It might have been on its own in Europe, but it had a vast empire.

It was an empire which was constructed on race.

White superiors, black inferiors.

And I don't think many people questioned that.

I mean, they thought of it

as part of the wallpaper of the modern world.

West Africa becomes more important in wartime

because the empire would be mobilised

to protect itself, as well as Britain.

This was a huge military power on a global scale

scattered around the world with garrisons,

and, of course, manpower, to fight the war.

Well, following the service record,

disembarked, West Africa, tenth of the fifth '43,

and then posted to the 37th General Hospital for duty,

which is here.

My father had just qualified as a doctor in Cardiff.

And despite a course in London,

he can't have had much first-hand experience of tropical diseases.

Dr Stephen Addae runs a clinic in Accra.

He's spent a lifetime working in tropical medicine.

He's also made a study of the West African divisions

and their part in WWII.

The usual battle with malaria.

Yes. Those with resistance shake it off very easily,

but it does kill, particularly young people.

But for the British Army, for an army in battle,

malaria was a problem because people became unfit to fight.

Because they did not have any resistance to malaria whatsoever.

But when the West African troops reached Burma,

they went with them, they took along with them

their resistance against malaria.

And that's one of the reasons they were sent to Burma,

because they could handle the terrain

and the environment better than the British soldiers.

I read from a surgeon, he said

when you considered going into the jungle,

a doctor felt 50% defeated already.

Yes, that's right.

The Burmese jungle was one of the worst theatres of war

during the last war.

In the heat and the humidity and so on,

it is a breeding ground of bacteria of various sorts.

So when it came to surgery,

it wasn't just a question of operating on a war casualty.

By developing infection,

by developing other post-operative problems and so on, the person dies.

My father arrived here

and he would have a big learning curve

to come up to speed on tropical medicine.

Actually, his station would have a clutch of people around him.

Male nurses, medical orderlies,

stretcher-bearers.

They were the mainstay.

Medical orderlies could be so good

that when the medical officer came from England,

the medical orderly trained him

to be able to handle the local conditions.

My father retained a great affection for his team.

He must have come to rely on

the training and experience of these men surrounding him.

But I wonder if there are any still alive in Accra

who might have memories of this war, or of him.

The British High Commission in Ghana

have organised a special dinner for Gold Coast veterans.

-How old are you now, Freddie?

-I'm 91 years.

-91 years old?

-Correct! I was born in 1922.

-OK.

-He was very young at the time.

-Yes.

He was 24, I think, when he started.

One of the veterans, Kofi Nortey,

served as a medical orderly in my father's regiment.

This is a photograph of my father.

Did you?

Yeah, Dr Jones.

He worked in the military hospital here.

That was the medical officer for your brigade.

Yes. He looks a little bit like you,

but he had a very broad face.

Yes. He did, yeah.

He was the man who wouldn't tolerate rubbish.

He didn't tolerate rubbish.

You can't argue with him.

No.

He was a little bit harsh.

-Harsh.

-Harsh. Was he? OK.

Well, that's slightly how I remember him, too.

He could be quite strict.

It's a remarkable experience to meet these gentlemen.

To meet these old men, most of them in their nineties, who...

..who seem...I mean, they're just wonderful men.

Kofi, in particular, was such a wonderful, gentle soul.

He worked at that hospital as a medical orderly under my father.

But, um...

it is extraordinary to meet that tangible link with the past.

Men like Kofi, Stephen and my father

were brought together by events taking place

10,000 miles away in another part of the empire.

"The enemy swept down to central Burma along the road to Mandalay."

We just need to cast our minds back to 1942

to realise the enormity of what had happened.

All of a sudden, the Japanese had destroyed British control of Burma.

By May, the Japanese had reached right up into the borders of India,

the great jewel in the crown.

And the feeling of threat

that was engendered in India was intense.

"Tropic patchwork. Races, creeds, countries by the dozen.

"But crossing over to fight in Burma, negroes get together,

"proudly say, we're all West Africans."

My father and the others from Britain

were there to defend the empire.

But why did men like Kofi join up to fight a white man's war?

Many people who were recruited into the army in West Africa

don't necessarily know about THE war.

Let alone the causes.

This is employment.

It's going to pay a wage and give you a uniform and feed you.

So in a sense, they have no sense of allegiance to an empire.

If they have an allegiance, it's one that they originally had

with a chief, and then they transfer it

in some sort of way and partially to a white British officer.

HORN BEEPS

Recruiting was only the first step.

These young men needed to be made into

soldiers good enough to face the Japanese in the jungles of Burma.

I'm on my way to meet veteran Joshua Ennin at his home in Accra.

Joshua - who turns 90 this year -

joined the 81st West African Division in 1942.

-Very nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you, too.

Thank you for having me at your house, to be able to meet you...

It's a pleasure, yes.

My training, basic training - they give you training how to shoot,

how to march and all sort of things. You do everything.

Acrobatics. You have to scale on the wall with your rifle. So many things.

Was that a tough time in basic training?

The first few months was very, very tough.

It was to the time, to the clock.

5:30am, the bugler goes, "Bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom-bom-bom."

You have your rifle, your boots, you're fully dressed,

you have your haversack, your big pack, your ammunition pouch,

you know, you carry your mortar and your ammunition in your pouch

and with your rifle, you'll have to...you know, scale a rope.

This sort of jungle warfare was very, very tough.

And I can tell you, honestly, one of our chaps ran away,

but I was so determined, I was so determined, I stayed on.

I always tell people that my going in the army has made me what I am today.

Joshua told me how the West African divisions,

including my father, were taken for intensive training.

For Joshua, this was to take nearly six months.

Here, in central Ghana,

the modern equivalents are still going through it today.

ALL: One, two, three, one!

It was a sort of thought in Whitehall that Africans lived in jungles.

In truth, most of the recruits were born, bred and grew up in grasslands.

And so, the jungle was a completely new thing to them.

SERGEANT SHOUTS

ALL: One, two, three, one!

Before World War II, the West African regiments

were primarily a local militia used to help maintain order and patrol the borders.

But High Command believed that what the West Africans lacked

in battle experience was made up by their willingness to follow orders.

And, perhaps, more importantly, their tradition of head carrying

gave them a unique ability to transport supplies through

the difficult jungle of Burma.

ALL: Left, right, left, right...

The fighting in wars often takes place

in the most awful conditions - in this case, in the deepest jungle.

Jungle which had been assumed to have been too impenetrable

for anybody to fight in, and so, what happened?

The Japanese took advantage of that fact and it became a jungle fight.

And that meant that suddenly the British Army were forced to

completely rethink and work out a whole training system

for fighting back in the deepest and most difficult of terrains - the jungle.

We're on ambush training

and now we're approaching a sort of clearing in the jungle, I think.

To be honest, I'm not sure what's going on at all!

But I imagine that was pretty much what war was like as well.

Where you're walking there, you don't talk.

No, so maintaining a sort of silence was always...

So we use hand signals, but see, they are talking.

So differently as they approach, the people know they are coming.

They are prepared for them.

GUNFIRE

GUNFIRE CONTINUES

There, they are there, you can't see them.

We can't see them.

Look ahead. Look ahead.

We can't see them at all, we're effectively dead.

Look at one there. Look at one there.

These are not lucky and their blood hasn't touched you.

You stay on the ground.

Then crawl to safety.

Veteran Stephen Mingle remembers the brutality of his jungle training.

The jungle training was all about warfare.

Guns are being shot at certain heights

and you crawl under the gunfire with your big pack and everything

behind your back. If you raise up your head, you will die.

But we lost two soldiers who raised up their heads

and they received gunshot wounds and died.

NEWSREEL: Born fit, toughened by the toughest climate in the world,

their muscles are still not strung taut enough to face jungle warfare.

Veteran Joshua Ennin completed his jungle training in the summer of 1943.

70 years later, he is still remarkably fit

and he's agreed to travel back to Burma with me

to share his experiences of the campaign.

While my father and the 82nd Division remained behind,

still training in Africa, Joshua and the 81st

were assembled at Lagos in Nigeria and sent off to war.

News got around that we're moving tomorrow, for Burma, India,

to fight the Japanese, and those who were frightened ran away.

How did you feel as you set off?

I felt that it was an adventure in my life.

I didn't have any responsibility.

I know what I wanted, I've joined the army to go to war and do my best.

And morale was good, on the whole, do you think?

The morale was perfect. Comradeship.

-Comradeship was strong?

-Very strong.

Whether you were Nigerian or not, it was very, very strong.

We went as a family. We behaved like a family.

The journey from West Africa to Burma takes us 26 hours,

but for Joshua and the 81st West African Division, it took six weeks.

They sailed around Cape Hope and across the Indian Ocean.

In September 1943, Joshua disembarked in Bombay

and travelled across the subcontinent by train to a military camp

in a place called Chittagong, where he was held for three months.

The country that Joshua and my father were preparing to fight for

had been part of the British Empire since 1886.

It had taken the British 60 years to conquer Burma.

They forced the last Burmese king into exile

and made Burma into a province of Imperial India.

The colonial regime quickly left its mark on the entire place -

even here, at Burma's most sacred site,

the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon.

2,600 years old - you almost can't look up at the main pagoda

because the five tonnes of gold leaf and gold plate

reflects so much sunlight that it literally dazzles you.

This is the largest and most precious symbol of the whole of Burma.

But the British are pretty good at symbols as well,

so when they first invaded, they set up a military headquarters in this place.

By the end the 19th century,

the British Empire had reshaped the capital of Rangoon in its own image.

This abandoned building, the Secretariat,

was built as the great colonial seat of power in Burma.

I've come here to meet Thant Myint-U

to find out what the Burmese felt about their country becoming

a battle ground between the Japanese and British empires.

Here, the colonial regime was very much born as military occupation.

In the 1880s and the 1890s, there was an enormous resistance

to British rule that was put down at the cost of thousands of lives,

hundreds on the British side, thousands on the Burmese side.

It was very clear that Burma was seen strategically as the country

that was going to protect India's eastern flank, and as a possible

back door to China as well as a place to make profits in its own right.

So, the Japanese march into Rangoon.

What was the attitude of the Burmese population?

A core of Burmese nationalists who had turned to the Japanese,

who came in with the Japanese during that invasion,

were very excited at the prospect that the British Empire was falling

and there was a chance for independence, so thousands of people

rallied to this new Burma Nationalist Army that was set up by the Japanese.

In 1940, Yangon... Rangoon was part of a huge industrial supply line.

So, the Japanese were coming here for two main reasons.

The first was to try and stop

American supplies getting to their long-term enemies, the Chinese,

with whom they'd been fighting a war since the early 1930s,

and the second was to get hold of oil - oil and rubber.

And these industrial products were what they came to this

largely agricultural country to fight a huge battle over.

As an island empire, Japan desperately needed

more resources to wage war.

And by June 1942, the Japanese held all of Burma

and were sitting right on the border

of the richest possession of the British Empire - India.

The following December, the British tried to strengthen their position

by counter-attacking the Japanese in Arakan -

a mountainous jungle territory that ran along the Bay of Bengal

from southern Burma up into India.

But their campaign ended in humiliating defeat.

A year later they tried again

and this time the 81st West Africans were sent in, too.

This is Bagan and about 150 miles due west of here

is where Joshua first entered the jungle

to try and regain this country for the British Empire.

Here we are.

Come and meet some of the people.

Hello. How do you do? Fine. My name is Joshua. Yes.

'When Lance Corporal Ennin arrived in Burma,

'a meeting like this would have been highly unlikely.

'Many of the people living in the country sided with the Japanese.'

Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you for your help.

So the army never went near the villages?

No, we always camped so many miles away from the villages.

But occasionally you would see Burmese people?

Well, we would see them occasionally

when they would pass by with their bullock trucks.

And what did they... Generally, they kept out of your way?

Yes and we were also... They were asked to keep out of our way.

And you were asked to keep out of their way?

-Their way, that's right.

-Why?

Because we were afraid there might be some informants

amongst them who might inform the Japanese about our movements.

Today, this region is called the Rakhine State

and there's been serious fighting between Buddhists and Muslims

and we can't film exactly where Joshua went.

But we can get to the jungle on the other side of this mountain range,

which is very similar terrain to where he faced the Japanese.

We are what we call the lead attack.

Where we are going to pass to attack the Japanese.

There were cliffs covered in jungle and rivers running through them?

Running through, yes. And these dogs. What do you call this?

Hyena? Are they hyena?

They are dogs, they are all over the place, and very short, short snakes.

Arakan was a remote, difficult to access region.

It was jungle, it was mountain, climate, disease.

There were very, very few routes, and troops who were thrown into it

had to overcome not just the Japanese, but this extraordinary terrain.

Well, we would have the observation men look at the place,

survey the area.

They would give us instructions once they had surveyed

and they had information about the enemies, their location.

They would give us instructions and we would plan our movement routes.

And that was all the platoons setting off individually with

instructions coming from signallers saying, "You're going to have

"to go around that, round that hill there, around the jungle there,

"come up that cliff and prepare yourselves

-"because the enemy are on the other side."

-That's right.

'Men who lived in up-country villages,

'who had worked the land...'

Many West Africans were infantry soldiers,

but even these fighting men

had to carry all of their equipment through dense and hilly terrain.

For private Alfred Xshirife these gruelling marches in the humid

jungles proved too much.

'This is a patrol just setting out.

'The men are often out on reconnaissance for five days

'and nights on end.'

In the jungles of Arakan, Joshua and the 81st, alongside two

Indian divisions, encountered the Japanese for the first time.

The fighting was brutal and often hand-to-hand.

At one point the Japanese overran an Allied field hospital

and murdered 35 unarmed medical staff and their patients.

It was a bruising initiation for the West Africans,

but despite heavy casualties on both sides, for the first time,

the Allied forces overcame their ferocious enemy.

The Japanese fled, leaving 5,000 dead in the field,

but the Japanese were not about to accept defeat.

A month later they launched a full-scale invasion of India.

While Joshua and his comrades held Arakan,

the mass of Japanese troops struck further north,

attacking from central Burma the Indian towns of Imphal and Kohima.

'A garrison of British and Indian infantry dug in

'and held on to a hill position overlooking the town.'

It's important to understand Arakan, Imphal

and Kohima as a single campaign.

It was part of a single Japanese strategy

to break into India and topple the Raj.

The joint battles of Imphal

and Kohima were the turning point of the war in the Far East.

They've been likened to the battle of Stalingrad

and the battle of El Alamein and Midway

as significant turning points in the Second World War.

'For 13 days the garrison held out against a force

'three times its strength.'

For the first time, the Japanese were defeated in large numbers

and were forced out of India.

'Patrols went out to make contact with the enemy

'and soon the battle was joined.'

This was the first major Japanese defeat of the war.

General William Slim, commander of the 14th Army, decided to

pursue the retreating Japanese and attempt to retake Burma.

While the main force pushed down the centre of the country

towards the plains, the West African mission was to clear

the Japanese 28th Army out of the jungles of Arakan.

The Japanese soldier was probably the most ferocious

fighting animal that any British soldier

has ever had the misfortune to fight.

He handed his life in this world and his afterlife to the Emperor.

He sent nail clippings and quantities of his hair back

to his family to demonstrate that his life was now

in the hands of the Emperor.

Ultimately, the soldier's responsibility as a Samurai

was to die.

They would leave snipers in trees

and ambushes all over the place.

They were fiercely determined

and they would continue on until they died.

By the time my father and the 82nd Division arrived here

in December 1944, Joshua had been in the jungle for almost a year.

And while his fighting was coming to an end,

my father's was just beginning.

Walking in this countryside, my father's watercolours come alive.

I realise that I'm seeing the same landscapes that he painted

all those years ago.

'The 81st West African Division had already fought the Japs in 1943

'and the arrival of the 82nd Division in 1944 meant

'double trouble for the enemy.'

There's an entry in the service record which says,

"Entered concessional area."

I had no idea what that meant,

but it means he enters the war,

the battle area.

I don't know why I found that so chilling when I first read it...

..but it's just that there's something sort of

euphemistically army speak about it, something bureaucratic.

This is the Burmese hill jungle and it's oddly autumnal

because it's the dry season, which was also the fighting season.

GRIFF GRUNTS

Sometimes the going was pretty difficult.

There's a diary entry from March 3rd, from the regiment,

which says that they had to cut every inch of the way, and another

which says that one day they managed to move about 500 yards.

But on average, the aim was to get

about eight miles in one day.

At this stage of the campaign, the whole war became totally mobile.

There was no sense of a front line.

All the units were moving south.

The entire division covered over 300 miles

over the next nine months.

This tactic was helped by a new strategy

developed by General Slim that exploited Allied aerial superiority.

When his troops were attacked by the Japanese,

they would form a large defensive box, like a Roman legion,

stand their ground and wait to be supplied by air.

Sometimes they would have to hold out for days, or even weeks.

By all accounts...

..the night wasn't a particularly restful time.

For one thing, the Japanese had a habit

of attacking at night...

..and most of the regimental diaries...

..are full of just references to "jitters".

Just the one word jitters.

And what it really meant was that the Japanese,

under cover of night, would approach

right where they thought the West Africans

were camped out

and try to get them to give themselves away.

My father told me of a terrifying time

when he was left alone in the jungle at night, looking after casualties.

I've also found evidence in the regimental diaries

that puts him right in the middle of a fierce battle.

By 1945, his division had cleared their enemy out of half of Arakan.

But the Japanese were fighting a bitter rear-guard action.

When the 82nd moved to block their retreat at a place called

the An Road, my father's brigade were completely surrounded.

"The enemy brought up more artillery and they brought up

"tanks, more mortars. They let Two Brigade have it."

That's the Second Brigade, that's the brigade my father was in.

"All attempts to gain the road were met by unyielding enemy resistance.

"The Japanese responded with continuous counter attacks

"and jitter parties. Some of the shelling caused heavy casualties in

"the brigade headquarters staff, aggravating the situation'.

Stephen Mingle was a radio operator in the thick of the fighting.

We were surrounded and we couldn't go forward or backward.

They were shelling us! They killed so many of us.

We lost so many officers.

My brigadier, Brigadier WD Weston, has his whole jaw shattered.

Some of my friends were killed.

Hamma, Akuku Falfa and some others were all killed.

The brigade priest who buried most of the soldiers...

..the following day, he was also killed.

I was also wounded when a shell fell.

I felt something in my stomach and my neck here.

When I raised my battle dress

I saw my intestines coming out.

I was calling for God to save us, that's all.

Completely cut off, my father and his medical team had no

access to the usual airlifts that took the gravely injured

to the base hospitals that could save their lives.

'I'm meeting with Tom Hammond, an ex Royal Marine Commando

'and army medic in Iraq and Afghanistan, to try and find out

'what my father would have faced in the middle of this battle.'

Tell me essentially what his job was under those circumstances is, then?

It would be, let's just get a semi-secure position.

He might have had a Jeep, a little bit of tentage,

a few boxes of supplies and the guys would be brought back

to that position.

In those circumstances, what sort of wounds are you

getting from being shelled?

Massive, high-velocity injuries. So, you know,

arms and legs can get taken off.

Penetrating injuries from the shrapnel

are going to sever arteries, huge, catastrophic bleeding.

You've then got head injuries and chest injuries

and major organs get damaged.

You're in a real tricky spot.

What my mother told me was the worst thing that he felt

he had to do during the war

was say, "Leave him, take HIM."

But under these circumstances, they're unable to pass on

the really severely wounded to surgeons further back.

They have to try and deal with them there and then.

They're going to be overwhelmed, so at that point he's going to make

the really difficult decision that your mum talks about to

prioritise who he can actually give some benefit, you know, to.

So, for example, if twelve guys come in one go,

he can't deal with 12 guys all at one time,

so he will look at the patients and triage them

and say, "You are beyond my help."

Had that guy come in on his own...

God, OK, because what I thought, what I thought, was that

actually this was all about,

"Shall we take him back to the hospital or just leave him?"

What he's talking about is an action like this,

where, effectively, he's only got limited resources

and he has to work out who he can help.

He almost plays God, you know, because there'll be legs

hanging off, he'll have to tie arteries off.

The guy who had his jaw shot off, that's an horrific injury.

His airway's going to be compromised. Where are you going to go with him?

And if you put all your efforts into that one guy, everybody else suffers.

So he's now doing surgery with shells going off,

mortars coming in and a constant stream of casualties.

He'd be under fire.

I genuinely think I've had a different point of view there

on what...on why people didn't talk.

Hmm.

After almost three weeks of desperate fighting,

the 82nd West African Division was relieved by Nigerian

and Ghurkha regiments and the Japanese were pushed back.

ARTILLERY THUNDERS

That horrific-sounding battle for the An Road was by no means

the end of it.

The West Africans seem to have continued to have been engaged

in a series of encounters with a pretty desperate Japanese force

throughout April and into May.

But by then, the war in the jungle

was effectively over because they had captured the Arakan.

The Allied victory in Burma was a massive blow to the Japanese,

but they showed no sign of surrender.

Slim's army of a million men now faced a brutal campaign to clear

the Japanese out of Malaya

and Singapore before invading Japan itself.

On the 6th of August 1945,

the Americans dropped the Atom Bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

On the 9th, they dropped another on the city of Nagasaki.

Six days later the Japanese surrendered.

MARTIAL MUSIC

'So, at last, on behalf of His Majesty the King

'and the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire,

'the Supreme Commander

'saluted the magnificent achievements of West Africa.'

So the news spread out.

Everybody heard that now the Japanese had given up

and that they've surrendered and so we've won.

And what did you feel?

We felt so proud and happy.

When we became victorious and we won the war,

I was so happy that we'd been able to conquer the Japanese.

The enemy is no more so we shall all have our liberty and freedom.

It's been hailed as the greatest British feat of arms of the entire

Second World War and a triumph for General Slim and his strategies,

which it was.

But a lot of people are completely unaware

that a huge amount of the fighting was done by Indian,

Ghurkha and African troops.

But what about Burma?

70,000 men were killed or wounded in this war

to win back Burma for the Empire,

but it wasn't destined to stay in British hands for very long.

Were the British welcomed back into to Burma?

I think that a lot of people were very glad to see

the back of the Japanese, but at the same time the war had

sort of ignited this extreme nationalist feeling, and I think

that once the Burmese had a taste, even if it was a nominal taste,

of independence, it was going to be very hard to turn the clock back.

For the Empire, Burma had been seen as little more than

a province of India.

And with end of the Raj imminent, she had lost much of her value.

Burma in 1945 was in ruins.

Almost every city and town in the country other than Rangoon

was flattened by the war,

and so I think the Labour Government in 1946 took a very

hard look at this country, saw that it no longer had the strategic value

it had, saw that there were nationalists agitating

for the British to leave

and in the end the choice was to quit Burma early.

At the end of war the British Empire handed over power to Aung San,

the leader of the Burmese Independence Army.

He had fought with the Japanese during the war,

but changed sides in the last year.

Shortly afterwards he and half his cabinet

were assassinated by dissidents in this building.

Today his daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi,

is hailed as the champion of democracy in Burma.

One can say in some ways this is a place where

World War Two never ended.

The British armed many of the minorities of this country

to fight against the Japanese, which they did very ably.

The Japanese armed the Burmese nationalists who later on

took over the government of this country.

The civil war led to the emergence of a very strong Burmese Army,

which then took over in 1962.

So much of Burma's subsequent history of the last 70 years

was shaped by the battlefields that were created

in the early 1940s here.

Thousands of the men who died in the jungle were buried there,

but they commemorated in a war cemetery in Yangon.

There are recorded the names of the 27,000 soldiers

of many races united in service to the British Crown

who gave their lives in Burma and Assam.

The Gold Coast Regiment.

Sergeant Major Awuni Kanjarga.

At the end of the war, General Slim, the commander of the Allied army

in Burma, personally thanked the West African soldiers

for their service.

-The whole of the regiment was lined up.

-Yes.

General Slim came.

He came to congratulate for all the things we've done

and then they were not going to let us down.

That whatever happens,

when we get back, we are going to be fully compensated.

Joshua and his comrades returned to the Gold Coast in August 1945.

But what should have been a joyous occasion was touched by tragedy.

The British authorities had failed to inform

the waiting families of any deaths.

We had to march with our regimental band from the harbour

to the camp, and these women were just waving.

When they saw me they would come and say,

"What's happened to my brother?"

This was the first time that their families realised that their...

their boys were not coming back?

Yes, so you would just pass my friend and she would say,

"Oh, come now, Joshua, what happened to so-and-so, Napoleon?"

And I would say, "Well, I'm sorry, Napoleon didn't make it."

Some of us wept.

That was the time that some of us also felt that emotion...

After the war, Joshua Ennin went to university in Britain.

When he graduated he came home to Ghana

and became a senior civil servant.

While most European soldiers were returning to civilian life,

the 82nd West African Division was kept in Burma for nearly

a year after the war finished, mopping up pockets of Japanese

who refused to accept their country's surrender.

In the summer of 1946 my father was still with them.

He accompanied them on their journey back to the Gold Coast.

HE KNOCKS

-Come in!

-Thank you very much.

For stretcher-bearer Kofi Nortey coming home was bittersweet.

For veterans like Kofi, life after the war was very difficult.

Inflation had driven up prices and jobs were scarce.

After playing their part in the Allied victory,

veterans felt they deserved better.

And they hadn't forgotten the promises made to them

by General Slim.

On February the 28th 1948,

Kofi and hundreds of the ex-servicemen

gathered in the capital

to voice their grievances.

Veteran Stephen Mingle had been shipped home

early in 1945 after being seriously injured in the battle for An Road.

When he recovered, he joined the Gold Coast Police

and he was on the other side of the barricades

under the command of the British Head of Police,

Superintendent Imray.

I was one of the men sent to the crossroads.

And a police officer called Imray came to stop them.

They insisted on sending the petition to the Governor.

When he asked them to return, the ex-soldiers refused to go.

Imray got annoyed, snatched the rifle from one of the policeman

and shot!

He shot.

HE IMITATES GUNSHOTS

He killed three people that day.

My own officer.

He shot the three men dead.

-He just took the gun and shot them.

-Yes.

Just dead, dead.

The soldiers returned and any vehicle

they meet with a white man,

they overturned the vehicle.

For the next week, rioters rampaged through the city,

destroying white-owned businesses.

When order was finally restored, a special commission was set up

to investigate the causes of the unrest.

Their conclusions led to radical change.

If the veterans' march of early 1948 had gone off peacefully,

we wouldn't be talking about it.

The fact that it was fired on makes it a catalyst,

and therefore we can see it as one of those critical events in Africa.

Those fatal shots, if you like, that rang out in Accra...

..and thereafter, the course of history of the Gold Coast,

the future Ghana is transformed.

Less than ten years later,

in 1957, the Gold Coast became Ghana,

the first African colony to leave the British Empire.

When my father returned to the family home here in Wales

in 1946, he came back to a different Britain.

The empire that he'd been sent half way across the planet to defend

was disintegrating.

Within a decade, India, Burma and West Africa had gained independence.

A Labour Government had come to power, introducing a radical

social plan which would transform my father's world.

Elwyn would spend the rest of his life working as an NHS doctor.

It isn't really possible for me to say

whether the war changed him, but it must have affected him.

It was something that I think defined his generation.

They had throughout their life, he had, a sort of sense of moral duty,

which now, I sort of...I envy.

I don't think he would have wanted to make a fuss about it.

He was ordinary. He...he liked being ordinary.

He relished, when he got back, a simple, ordinary,

secure family life.

And having seen what he went through, I suppose...

I can understand that a lot more clearly.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd