Ten years ago, the Imperial War Museum asked me to collect together interviews from their sound archive of veterans of the First World War. Over the next eighteen months I listened to hundreds of taped interviews, poignant testimonies from brave men and women who had lived through this horrific experience. I edited these accounts, covering all ranks from Generals to Private soldiers, and this resulted in Forgotten Voices of the Great War.

The book went straight into the Sunday Times Top Ten and stayed there for many weeks. I think people liked the fact that it was not a chronological, authored history of the conflict, but one based entirely on the words of those who had actually been there. This, I think, brought the book to life. Many had never spoken about the war before, and this made these interviews at times extremely emotional.

One of my great pleasures was to meet a number of these remarkable veterans, often in their small room in a residential home. Surrounding them were pictures of them in their prime, a reminder that they were not always old men and that they had been put through tests of courage and strength in the most appalling of circumstances, unimaginable to us today.
The great characteristic of all of them was that of defiance. They all believed that they would win. Defeat was unthinkable. They did not feel they were fighting for King and Country, but for their friends around them. Many felt guilty that they had survived, when their closest friends had not.  For some, the experience of the war overshadowed their lives to the extent that the years afterwards had little meaning. Many spoke of the dark nights, when it would all return to them, and how it was impossible to explain their feelings to those who had not also been there.

Two lines come back to me from these veterans. I asked one about Passchendaele, and he replied: ‘Passchendaele was like hell with the lid off.’ I then asked another, who was at the time 104 years old, whether he had had lice and he replied, ‘Oh no no, they had me.’

The one question I would never ask is whether they had killed someone. When anyone asks a soldier this, his reply should be, ‘I can only tell you if you’ve done it yourself. And if you have, you know not to ask.’

Two years later, I turned my attention to the veterans of the next great conflict, for Forgotten Voices of the Second World War. This was a very different war, not fought in trenches and one which involved millions of civilians. It was therefore important to capture not just the stories of the military but the often untold lives of those on the home front.

As a child, I’d always been haunted by one particular photograph of a Japanese prisoner of war, Jack Sharpe, sitting on his bed at Changi. More like a skeleton than a human being. By some amazing good fortune, I met this man at a reunion. He had been captured at Singapore in December 1941, when he weighed eleven stone. Somehow, he had survived four years of horrific treatment and terrifying illnesses, and at the time the picture was taken he weighed just four stone.

Forgotten Voices of the Second World War is dedicated to the late Jack Sharpe, whose courage and tenacity in the face of the enemy overcame the most appalling of circumstances. His spirit, and the spirit of so many like him, is embodied in this book.

Max Arthur is an acclaimed historian and author. See The Telegraph from 12-18th November for more from Forgotten Voices.

Compiling and editing Forgotten Voices of Burma was a new experience for me; I was already the author of some fourteen books and have contributed to several more, but this book, published by Ebury last month, was very different. This would not be my book, but a story told in the words of the men and women who fought in the long and difficult Burma campaign, taken from recordings in the Sound Archive of the Imperial War Museum. There was so much material in this remarkable archive that I was spoilt for choice; selecting which of the fascinating first-hand accounts to use was a major challenge in itself. The next task was then to weave the tapestry of a little-known campaign spanning nearly four years. But I had to stay out of it. It is their story, not mine; and what a story.

Listening to these accounts in the Sound Archive day after day, I sometimes found myself so engrossed by what I was hearing that my fingers stopped typing into my lap-top. There were tales of battles fought in appalling conditions at Kohima and Imphal, of terrifying missions by the Chindits, and of the long advance to Rangoon. I was astounded by the ferocity of the close fighting on the tennis court of the District Commissioner’s bungalow at Kohima; and the courage of those who took part, cut off from reinforcements for days. I was deeply affected by accounts from those who saw and heard the wounded massacred in the field hospital in the Arakan; as well as officers telling how they had to administer lethal doses of morphine to their own mortally wounded men to prevent them falling in to Japanese hands.

This coming Sunday, millions of people will be remembering those who have fought for their country by wearing a red poppy, attending a church service or simply observing two minutes’ silence at 11am. And although the poppy sprang from the bloody fields of Flanders, today it represents all those who have fought in many far-flung corners of the world, and even if we are separated from them by the passage of history we do our best to remember that they were individual men and women who were afraid but faced their own dangers with amazing fortitude and courage. I hope that Forgotten Voices of Burma is a fitting tribute to these men and women who fought in this ‘forgotten’ campaign and will help them to be remembered too.

Julian Thompson

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