CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Antiques Roadshow: VJ Day Special on BBC1: Poignant keepsakes of the Forgotten Army brought a lump to the throat…

Antiques Roadshow: VJ Day Special (BBC1) 

Rating:

The words are inscribed on war memorials across the country: ‘When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today.’

But few, perhaps, know the words are sometimes called the Kohima Prayer, named after a battle in a remote part of India in 1944, a turning point in the war against Japan.

Unlike Alamein or Arnhem, Kohima is not frequently remembered. 

Sadly, the courage and the sacrifice of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who defended it, the 14th Army, are often overlooked too.

No wonder they sometimes called themselves, with dry irony, the Forgotten Fourteenth.

But their story was marked with a mixture of solemnity and sentimentality as some of their descendants brought treasured keepsakes of the war in the Far East to the Antiques Roadshow: VJ Day Special.

‘It’s history in your hand,’ remarked historian Robert Tilney, as he inspected a Japanese officer’s shin gunto sword, a trophy from Kohima. ‘It’s a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck job.’

This episode traced the conflict chronologically, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. 

Unlike Alamein or Arnhem, Kohima is not frequently remembered. Sadly, the courage and the sacrifice of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who defended it, the 14th Army, are often overlooked too. But their story was marked  in the Far East to the Antiques Roadshow: VJ Day Special

This episode traced the conflict chronologically, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. The names are familiar but the horrors suffered by troops in the jungles of South-east Asia are beyond imagination. Pictured: WWII veteran Bill Redston with Fiona Bruce

Children and grandchildren of the survivors all repeated versions of the same line: ‘He never talked about it much.’ Pictured: Fiona Bruce with two guests whose father fought on opposing sides of The Battles of Kohima and Imphal in 1944 

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