NO apology by a Japanese Prime Minister could soothe the anguished memories of the forgotten army which finally achieved victory 60 years ago.

Yesterday more than 50 veterans of the Far East, including the Duke of Edinburgh and a dozen prisoners of war, held a reunion to mark the surrender that marked the end of the Second World War, three months after the defeat of Hitler.

George Macdonald Fraser, author of the Flashman books, now 80 but then a lance-corporal in the Border Regiment fighting his way through Burma, said: “It’s not for the Japanese Prime Minister to apologise; it’s for the people who did it to apologise, and most are dead. You cannot apologise on behalf of someone else.”

Jack Chalker, 86, a Royal Artillery gunner, had risked execution by stealing paper to make drawings of life and death in the camps — of open wounds, of prisoners forced to hold boulders above their heads. Some are now on display in the Peace Museum in Kyoto.

“If the Japanese guards had found my sketches I would have been beheaded,” Mr Chalker said. “A Korean guard once did find them, but I escaped with a severe beating. After 60 years, my one disappointment is that the Japanese will still not include that period of their history in their schoolbooks.”

John Nunnely, a Burma veteran from the King’s African Rifles, brought to the reunion at the Imperial War Museum a splendid war trophy. The Union flag, peppered with moth holes as well as bullet holes, had been flying in Singapore when the city fell in 1942. It was lowered by Sergeant Yuchiyama, who triumphantly wrote the date of its capture all over it, and used it as a blanket as he fought through Malaya.

He was subsequently encountered by a patrol led by Captain Nunnely, who killed the Japanese, and used the flag to keep warm in his Burma foxhole. Recapturing the British flag, Mr Nunnely said, symbolised defeat at last turning to victory. It now resides in a safe.

It was not Mr Nunnely’s only killing of the Burma campaign. “We came across a wounded Japanese soldier,” Mr Nunnely recalls. “We couldn’t carry him, because we were too few. We couldn’t leave him behind, because he would then have reported our position to his superiors. So we had to kill him.”

Yet Mr Nunnely has acquired a mood of forgiveness, and is even an honorary member of Yuchiyama’s commando unit, the White Tigers. “I believe in reconciliation. You cannot keep hating for ever.”

Dame Vera Lynn recalled spending three months entertaining the troops in the Far East, and roughing it with them, going for weeks without a bath. She said: “The boys needed a morale booster. Some had not set eyes on a woman for nearly six years. They said to me: ‘When you get home, tell them we’re still here.”

Terry Chapman, a historian at the museum, said that many veterans still felt they were part of a forgotten army, and that the conditions they endured remained largely unrecognised. “Something like a quarter of our prisoners — more than 40,000 — died under the Japanese, compared with 4 per cent in German PoW camps, which gives an idea of the conditions they were under. A lot feel that the Japanese did not regret what they did; they just regretted not winning.”

James Leasor, who after the war became a prominent journalist and thriller writer, recalled how his patrol had entered a jungle clearing in Burma just after Japan had surrendered. “There was a rustling in the undergrowth, and out charged a bad-tempered water buffalo with a sign in English tied to its tail reading: ‘Is the war over?’ We shouted ‘Yes, it’s over,’ very loudly, whereupon a group of Japanese officers emerged, thanked us very much, and disappeared back into the jungle.”

Prince Philip, a first lieutenant on the destroyer HMS Whelp during the war, entertained the veterans with seafarers’ anecdotes, flanked on the platform by Countess Mountbatten of Burma, daughter of the Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East, and the 2nd Viscount Slim, son of Field Marshal Sir William Slim, commander of the Fourteenth Army.

At Southampton Queen Mary 2 sounded her whistle as officers and crew of the Cunard flagship received the freedom of the city. The original Queen Mary sounded a long whistle-blast to signal the end of the war 60 years ago yesterday.

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