VJ DAY

VJ Day in New York

Today, Friday 15th August, celebrations will be held to mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, when Japan finally surrendered to the Americans, following the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th August respectively. These two bombs that changed the face of geo-politics forever still evince widely different, but equally appalled, reactions from just about anybody who has seen those recordings of the familiar but awful mushroom clouds. Some regard the bombings as an act of genocide; others accept that, on balance, they saved countless American lives, as the Japanese believed that surrender was a shameful act of national betrayal and fully intended to fight to the last man, and woman. That is until “Death, the destroyer of worlds” was visited upon them, in the memorable words of Robert Oppenheimer, the acknowledged ‘father’ of the atomic bomb.

The explosion of ‘Death, The Destroyer of Worlds’ over Hiroshima on 6th August 1945

Of course, the war in Europe had finished three months earlier, on the 8th May. There were scenes of wild celebration up and down the country, most particularly in Trafalgar Square, the Mall and outside Buckingham Palace – and indeed in many other towns and cities throughout Europe – as millions of people took to the streets in jubilant displays marking the end of six years of war.  

Churchill acknowledging the crowds in VE Day

But the joy was not shared by everyone, certainly not in the Murtagh household. There were about 350,000 British soldiers fighting the Japanese in the Far East and their war was far from over. My father was a tank commander in the 25th Dragoons stationed in Burma, in a campaign that was one of the longest fought by the British Army. Remote from the experience of those at home and often sidelined by the contemporary press, it became known as the Forgotten War. In common with most veterans of the Second World War, my father was extremely reticent about his experiences of front-line combat. What father would want to paint horrifying pictures for his children of bloody battle and wholesale slaughter? Yet he did once wryly admit that he and all his contemporaries reckoned that they belonged to the ‘Forgotten Army’. When Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten took up his role as Supreme Allied Commander of South-East Asia in 1943, he recognised his role was to galvanise an army facing defeat on all fronts. His plan involved tackling what he called the three ‘Ms’: morale, malaria, monsoons. In his first address to his troops, he said this:

“I hear you call yourselves the Forgotten Army. But let me tell you that you are not the Forgotten Army. In fact, nobody has ever heard of you!”

He knew that would tickle the mordant sense of humour of the average British Tommy, and he was right, especially when he vowed to change all that. “And so he did,” my father told me, “He had the ‘common touch’ and was able to communicate with the ordinary soldier. Things definitely improved once he appeared on the scene.”

Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander of South-East Asia. “He had the common touch,” my father said.

Slowly but inexorably, the tide of the campaign turned as the Japanese were driven from the jungles into the upper plains of Burma and when Mountbatten accepted the surrender of the Japanese forces at Rangoon, the war for my father was at last effectively over.

A tank of the 25th Dragoons

But this is not a potted history of the Burma Campaign, nor is it a personal story of one man in his tank, but it is what happened afterwards that intrigued me. VJ Day was celebrated more widely and more wildly in America than it was in the UK. This should have come as little surprise; to most Britons, rightly or wrongly, the war in the Pacific was regarded more as an ‘American thing’, whereas the war in Europe was right on their doorstep. Nonetheless, now hostilities had ceased in the Far East, there were hundreds of thousands of British servicemen, to say nothing of the millions from the colonies, who not unnaturally wanted to return home, having done their bit for King and Country…and Empire. It was a logistical nightmare.

The end of war did not – could not – lead to the immediate reunification of families and friends and for many servicemen it would take months, sometimes years, before they could be repatriated. For those who had served in the Far-East, the organisational and administrative hurdles to overcome were immense. At the outbreak of the war, Britain, under the terms of an old treaty, claimed the right to full occupation of Egypt. So, the country had become a battle area and a base, accommodating hundreds of thousands of troops. By the end of the war, Egypt was now a gigantic staging post. GHQ Middle East Command was lodged in Cairo with immense problems on their hands, having to process all the troops from India and Burma ready for repatriation; in short, there were a lot of soldiers hanging around with not a lot to do.

I was given an entertaining glimpse into the boring and frustrating world of the soon-to-be demobilised British troops holed up in Egypt waiting to go home when I was writing Tom Graveney’s biography. Lieutenant Graveney’s role in the Royal Artillery – he had only joined up in 1945 and had not actually seen active service - was to organise recreation sport for the troops. But that wasn’t his true role. In fact, that was just a cover for the stealthy recruitment for the regiment of talented sportsmen passing through the base. It goes without saying that his company pretty well cleaned up in all the competitions and most of the regimental silverware ended up in their mess. Tom never fully admitted as much, but it was clear that his promotion to captain at the tender age of 20 was expedited by a grateful and sports-mad commanding officer.

Captain Tom Graveney acknowledges applause for yet another century on the sun-baked mud from the Suez Canal that provided the base for the matting wicket. “My goodness!” he said, “There’s nothing to me.”

He gave me a picture of his daily routine. He would rise at 6am, have breakfast then march his company up and down for about half-an-hour. Then it would be sport for the rest of the day; squash, tennis, basketball, hockey, football…and of course cricket. He played for the Army, Egypt and the Combined Services. He reckoned the standard was fairly high; there were plenty of talented cricketers passing through with time on their hands.

The pitches were on matting. They used to dig up the mud from the Suez Canal and lay down a strip and roll it. It baked hard in the sun and rolled out like a billiard table and when the matting was laid down, wickets of pace and true bounce were produced. He enjoyed batting on mats. Once he got used to the bounce, he found that the ball came onto the bat nicely.

I asked him about life in the Army. Surely it wasn’t all playtime? Yes, it was, he maintained, just like one big holiday and he loved it. They slept under canvass, but the facilities and amenities were good. They even had carpets in their tents. “But to be fair,” he admitted, “I hadn’t seen active service and as I was only 20, I wasn’t under any domestic pressure to return home. Many others were not so lucky.” It was not until 1947 that he was posted back to the UK. There he had to make a choice; forge a career in the Army or resign his commission and accept professional terms to play cricket for Gloucestershire. Well, we all know how that turned out.

WJust as well that Tom Graveney turned down a career in the Army

What of my father? He was a good footballer, but being Irish, he had never played cricket, and it would have been doubtful that he would have caught the keen eye of Captain Graveney. In fact, he had jumped the queue. He was granted ‘compassionate leave’ and his repatriation had been hastened on account of ‘domestic imperative’. I never did discover the reason until after his death. It was something he never spoke about.

Knowing his background, I can fully understand the sense of crisis back in the Murtagh household, but I cannot imagine that the situation, sad as it was, had not been replicated in millions of homes torn apart by the ravages of war worldwide. My mother had bidden farewell to my father when he was posted overseas to India and Burma. We

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know that the war was to last six years but at the time nobody had a clue as to the length of its duration. Nor would my mother have had any realistic expectation that she would ever see him again. In his prolonged absence, she had an ill-advised affair with either a Canadian airman or a US army officer, depending on whose rumour you believe. None blamed her for this, certainly nobody in the family who learnt about it, after both their deaths. This was wartime. It must have been a strange, febrile and upsetting period of anybody’s life. The upshot was that my mother had fallen pregnant. That might have been accepted, albeit reluctantly, in some households, but both sides of the family, the Murtaghs and the Cassidys, were staunch Irish Catholics, and the shame and the social stigma would have been simply unbearable in the church circles in which they moved. As the eldest son (well, he wasn’t, he was the second eldest; the eldest was away training for the priesthood), my father was rushed home to deal with the crisis.

So how was crisis averted, shame avoided? By the simple expedience of brushing the whole affair under the carpet. Abortion was of course anathema, so the child, a girl, was spirited away by the Catholic Church and throughout the extended family nothing was ever spoken about what had happened. As I said, I had no idea until my sister confided in me in the months following the deaths of both parents. She is older than me, by fifteen years, so she was a young girl when all this was happening. She suspected something was amiss when she was, without explanation, shunted off to relatives for one of her school holidays. Later, she uncovered the truth. She is a bit of a Miss Marple, my sister, and nothing escapes her attention, but she resolved to keep the secret to herself until both parents were dead. Presumably, both husband and wife repaired their relationship because they were indissolubly bound until death separated them some sixty years later. Just as well, I reckoned, or else I would not be here writing this.

The story has a happy ending. After much deliberation, my sister and I resolved to try to track down our long-lost half-sister. It took some doing. The Catholic Church is byzantine in its practices, and we were met with wall after wall of silence, but with the aid of a private investigator, we found her, alive and well, living, would you believe it, in London, not far from where I grew up. She is now very much part of the family.

It is an extraordinary story but one no doubt common to countless families displaced and torn apart in times of war. But I would just have loved to have been a fly on the wall, or the canvas flap of the tent, as Captain Graveney eyed my father up and down. “You say, Murtagh, you’re no cricketer but you can play football, and it is my experience that usually if you can play one you can play the other. Right, you’re in the team, no ifs or buts. Who knows, one day you might even have a son who will play county cricket. Dismissed!”