Time does not ease old comrades' anger

Veterans' protest: Emperor Akihito's visit to Britain is dogged by events of the war, which veterans cannot forgive or forget

ARTHUR TITHERINGTON was just a bewildered 20-year-old when Japanese troops overran Singapore but his memories still fire him up to heights of oratory of which Tony Blair would be proud.

Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, yesterday Mr Titherington's well- chosen words of anger were aimed at him.

"Why do I remember, Mr Blair?" he asked. "Is it because when I came out of a Singapore hospital as a 20-year-old youth, I saw a woman having to watch as her young baby was bayonetted to death by two Japanese soldiers?

"Or perhaps it is because of the older woman I saw who had to stand and watch as her husband was cut to ribbons by a sword-weilding soldier."

"What would you have done as a 20-year-old, Mr Blair. And it was just the beginning."

Mr Titherington and his comrades from the Japanese Labour Camps Survivors Association were angry. They wanted to explain why they could not simply forgive and forget, why they needed an apology and compensation when, so far, all they have had are personal expressions of sorrow and a single payment of pounds 76.50.

More than 50,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner by the Japanese but by the end of the war, one-third of them had died, compared with one in 25 taken by the Germans.

Yesterday, as they urged the public to join them in turning their backs on Emperor Akihito, a few of them told their stories of supreme hardship, or torture and starvation building the Thai-Burma railway or the Bridge on the River Kwai.

"Sixteen thousand British soldiers died," said Sidney Tavender, 80, who saw friend after friend die along what has come to be called the Death Railway. "We were burying people every day. We worked from dawn til dusk. If you were lucky, you got one cup of rice in the morning and - if you made it back to the camp - you got another. If a dog, or a rat or a monkey ran through the camp, it was dead - in the pot.

"In between, there were beatings and torture. We were literally their slaves. You knew that every day could be your last."

The veterans are particularly angry at the recent discovery that the British government wrote a clause into the 1951 San Francisco peace treaty allowing for it to return for more compensation if other countries were given more. But, secretly, in 1955 it was agreed not to.

Worse, in the mid-1980s, Ronald Reagan gave $20,000 to Japanese living in America who were interned during the war.

But not only the PoWs turned out yesterday. Joan Bulley of the Association of British Civilian Internees Far East Region, one of thousands of ex- patriate civilians interned by the Japanese, described how whole families were locked up in appalling conditions for years.

"Two months after the war, my father died from tuberculosis," she said. "He never really recovered from being in the camp.

"In 1956, my mother received pounds 48.50 in three instalments. She got no widows' pension and, as a result, she never owned a place of her own."