The war in the Far East marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire far more so than the war in Europe. Yet the irony is that it was those from the Colonies and Dominions as well as from the home country that stopped the Japanese advance on the very border of India, and fought the Japanese Army back from whence it came. All this time my father, a Bombardier in a TA RA LAA battery, spent incarcerated as a POW having been captured in the chaos following the Fall of Singapore. After the long voyage out from the UK their ship was turned away from Singapore and they disembarked instead in the Dutch East Indies where they were very soon overrun and captured, managing at least to spike their Bofors guns beforehand.
Their captivity ended up in Japan where they were set to mining coal. I knew that the camp was administered by an HQ in Fukuoka on the Japanese island of Kyushu. It took the kindly and knowledgeable guidance of a fellow PPRuNer resident in Japan to discover that the camp was not on Kyushu at all, but on the neighbouring island of Honshu. He has located both the camp and the mine for me from the mass of Japanese records that are accessible online (providing you can understand the Japanese language of course). This highlights to me not only the power of the internet but in particular the comradeship of PPRuNe, of which I have been the most fortunate recipient. Following on advice from other PPRuNers I had already obtained his medals which I wear with pride every year on Remembrance Day
At war's end the camp administration came under Hiroshima anyway. The IJA was as beset by bureaucracy as any other army it seems. Sadly my father didn't make it, dying just four months before Japan's surrender. Other than a few local press cuttings pasted into a scrapbook by my grandfather I had little to go on, other than the location of his grave in the CWGC cemetery at Yokohama, which I and my family have visited. It is of course as meticulously maintained as one would expect.
I too will stand today in memory of him, of his comrades, and of all who fell in the 'Forgotten War'.