....something not often seen...

[Voltigeur]

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Liberated POWs at Rangoon jail, 3 May 1945.
British prisoners at Rangoon jail, liberated by Slim’s Fourteenth Army early in 1945. These were the first victims of the terrible cruelties visited by the Japanese on PoWs who were able to tell their stories.
The British High Command decided to censor the most harrowing details, because many thousands more remained in enemy hands in Thailand, Malaya and Japan.
Almost every man found in Rangoon Jail was starving and suffering from all manner of diseases.
Major McLeod, a Canadian doctor who served with the Indian Medical Service, inspects one of his patients,
Corporal Usher, the man on crutches, had a leg amputated without anaesthetic when it became infected.
There were no drugs for prisoners, only relentless hard labour until many perished.
It was later discovered that the prisoners in Rangoon were in better conditions than those on the notorious ‘Burma Railway’


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How ‘the longest day’ - June 6, 1944, in Normandy (?)- ended for two desperately burned soldiers of the British Army.
They were almost certainly tank crewmen, who faced a terrible fate if they were hit by enemy fire. Sherman tanks were known with black humour as Ronsons or Tommy Cookers, because they ‘brewed up’ so readily.
The men who manned the tanks learned to jump for their lives the moment a shell struck - if they were lucky enough to be still able to do so.

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A face that knows the meaning of suffering, with only a pack to keep off the rays of the merciless sun. This was one of Orde Wingate’s Chindits in Burma, returned from a 1943 deep-penetration mission behind Japanese lines, which was among the epics of the war in the east.
They marched hundreds of miles, always hungry, often prey to tropical disease, knowing that if they were badly wounded they must be shot: there was no means of evacuating casualties, and no man could be left to the savagery of the Japanese.
The Chindits’ losses were fearful. But they raised the morale and prestige of Britain’s Army in Asia by proving that they could survive and fight in the jungle, on level terms with the enemy.