Prince Philip: The War Years - Duke Of Edinburgh On Serving In WW2 • FULL 1995 INTERVIEW

your all highness the events marking the 50th anniversary of ve day have tended to overshadow the fact that the war wasn't yet over japan actually didn't surrender until august the 14th 1945. can you recall the events of that day um 14th well i can recall being in guam uh with two i was in destroyed welp and there was another one wager and we were escorting the commander-in-chief sir bruce fraser on a visit to admiral nimitz who was the commander-in-chief south south pacific area uh he was he sabres was going to give him the the night make him a knight of the of the bath and while we were there the first of the atomic bombs was dropped and that was about the sixth i think of october the sixth of august and almost immediately we sailed from guam to rejoin the big american fleet off japan of which the british pacific fleet formed one task group out of six i think and uh we hung about there until the second bomb was dropped and then it was announced that the japanese decided to cease hostilities they didn't actually surrender on the whatever it is what did you say the 14th and then a small party was formed of the commander of the fleet commander it was admiral halsey and sir bruce fraser and duke of york holzer was in the missouri and he had four destroyers and there were two of us it was just this little party of six destroys and two battleships went off to to uh uh japan and uh next day what it was we anchored in a sagami bay which was on just on the outskirts and we waited there oh for 24 hours and then this party went up into tokyo bay one of the extraordinary things that happened while we were in that bay waiting i mean it's quite quite a dramatic uh arrival you know you've been spent years fighting the japanese red summer and suddenly we're in japan you know it's most extraordinary but we heard over the fleet sort of broadcast uh the two royal marines had managed to escape believe it or not from a prisoner or war camp in japan and you wonder what an earth they were doing i suppose they heard the bombs go off and they thought well this is the time to move and they got down to the to this bay and they saw this fleet of ships with stars and stripes and and union jacks so they said well this must be friends so they struck their clothes off and swam out because they were intercepted by you know patrol boats and taken on board the flagship and everybody thought this was a great occasion anyway about 30 years later i was attending uh the annual conference or the annual reunion of the far east prisoners of war and i thought i'd tell this story to the assembled company in the middle of this thing they said they're here and the two blokes who were actually attending that thing but what sort of celebrations took place on hm as well there weren't any none of it no it was quite busy because we went on up into the bay and then uh there was quite a lot to do funnily enough i don't know why and then of course on the third of september everybody gathered we had to wait for two or three days well until then because there was a um a typhoon and general marshall couldn't get to tokyo and a lot of the representatives couldn't get there sorry you mentioned that the two bombs had already been dropped on japan at hiroshima and nagasaki do you think it actually took that to make the japanese surrender or do you think eventually they would have surrendered anyway well i think they would have surrendered anyway but i mean a lot later because even after the two bombs went off and if you read the the account you'll find that the uh there was no agreement about the imperial in the cabinet or the imperial council and it was only when the emperor virtually ordered them all to shut up and to accept the surrender and the terms that had been published at potsdam there but there was one other quite amusing incident that happened on the way uh up to to tokyo or to the um the other wager the the the rnvr doctor was a was a canadian and the captain the wager was a very jolly fellow called basha watkins thought he'd play a little practical joke on him and so he wrote out a signal which from the commander-in-chief saying report name rank and seniority of the senior canadian officer born you see and he sent it down to the to the to the doctor who came rushing up with the people of his sister he said i expected they want somebody to sign for canada and you know there aren't anybody here so they probably chose i imagine that's what it's for and eventually after they all had a great laugh and uh so it was all over to the to the captain's horror about an hour later a signal arrived from the duke of york saying report name rank and seniority senior canadian officer born and because he didn't know what to do so the first thing he did was he sent for this ship's bible and then he sent from the doctor and he put his hand on the bible he showed him the thing he said i swear this is true and then unfortunately uh well for him a canadian senior more senior canadian officer appeared but this canadian doctor in spite of that was invited over to to the kg to the missouri to witness the surrender and he thought he better bring back something to the or from the occasion so he picked up one of those expended flashlight bulbs which was then mounted by the ship's carpenter and a little thing and it stood on the mantelpiece well that was the allied the supreme commander was general macarthur of course yeah he accepted the japanese surrender on the on the 22nd on the on the 2nd of september on the missouri what can you actually recall of that particular day we were painting ship you were painting you not you yourself i hope well not quite but i mean i was organizing it because we'd been at sea for quite a long time we thought we'd better look a bit smarter and there wasn't anything going on that day so we had everybody and i we have these sound reproduction equipment you know they were loud speakers yes and so we had them picking up the the commentary on the thing and i hung them over the side so the sailors that were slapping the paint on could listen to what was going on they could paint in time to the music perhaps well if it wasn't yeah well now you'd come a long way from your days as a prize-winning uh cadet at uh dartmouth college it sounds like i'd been to the royal show now i know that your grandfathers were both sailors your father was a soldier um but i believe you yourself really would have preferred to have joined the air force originally so why did you end up joining the navy preferred at that time it seemed to be i mean i just come out of school so i i do not prefer no i mean i think that if i'd left my own devices i think i probably would have signed up for the neighborhood but i was eventually persuaded by my uncle lord mountbatten then he might be more sensible to go into the into the navy did you have any regrets about joining the navy rather than the air force only in so far that if i joined the air force i wouldn't be here now not in if i joined in 1939. you would have been oh i would have been pushing up the daisies yeah now your old school master and the founder of gordenstein quote hahn wrote in your report and i quote here prince philip will make his mark in any profession where he'll have to prove himself in a full trial of strength was there any doubt in your mind that you would pursue a military career oh yes i mean it never occurred to me that i was it was only because the war broke out that i it seemed to be easier to join than be called up and uh so it was inevitable that i i mean i think it was inevitable that i was going to be in one of the services during the war i mean people of that age we just did but i mean before that it hadn't really occurred to me i had vaguely thought of what could i do bit difficult being stateless what sort of aspirations did you have why did it fall or does it mean yes a farmer i don't know i have to wait and see so your first ship was hms ramelise that's it what do you remember about that ship it was the first time we joined her in colombo and it was very hot i think remember we lived in fairly spartan conditions we had a mitchman lived in what was called a chest flat which was a a hole in the uh right down it had no outside scuttles or anything and there was no air conditioning and no sort of and we had a bathroom and just a space where we kept those chests you know sea chests with our kit in it it was so hot down there we didn't sleep down there we had camp beds on the upper deck the the um um funnily enough i met uh i met that chap would be in the school master in ramley's and then the other day were you treated as one of the boys well i was yes there weren't any girls in those days no no but i think you know what i mean i mean you were after all a prince being plunged amongst midshipmen no no the um but the navy was quite used to sort of curious people like that there wasn't and nobody stood on ceremony for the whole of 1940 actually funnily enough the captain of of ramley is a fellow called bailey groman and he made me what was called his doggy which was a sort of mitchman assistant and he did it because he'd been my grandfather's doggie so he must have had some stories to tell well i don't know he's long since yeah but for the whole of 1940 you were kept away from the heavy action did you accept that as a prince from a neutral country that there was no option well it didn't bother me very much because the the ships that i was serving in were out there anyway i mean somebody had to serve them so i mean um it it no it just so happened that i was perfectly content um i would have gone up i suppose i was yes i was moved out of moved out of ramley's when she went to the mediterranean i was moved out of kent when she went to the mediterranean and then i was went to shropshire and then when the italians invaded greece they sort of lifted the ban and i was sent to join valiant in alexandria what kind of ship was valiant well she was another first world war battleship but she'd been she'd been through a major refit just before the war and she instead of having six-inch batteries sort of she had 4.5 inch turrets which acted as anti-aircraft so they had six of these on each three of these on each side she was in the battle of jutland i think so what do you remember about her well quite a lot i suppose because we had six quite active months and i mean within two or three days of joining we went out and um there was a great bombardment of the of the italian um held port of bardia in north north in north africa and it was quite impressive uh a lot of 15-inch guns going off which i hadn't heard before and the whole i mean it made even big ships like that rock about a bit and then the italians had the frontry to shoot back so it's quite interesting to hear these things whistling over and landing in the water with a great splash beside you you suddenly realized that life was for real and you you were frightened obviously it was it was it was it was you know i don't know frightened it was just surprising you have time to think about fright when in a situation like that no not directly i i was i was more frightened on other occasions and then very soon after that we we were with the uh taking a convoy to malta and there was a tremendous attack on the whole fleet by uh german um dive bombers the stukas and they we i was watching i was actually in one of the turrets but i managed to get my head up through one of the 15-inch turrets wasn't doing much good in an air raid i managed to stick my head out and watched the bombers attacking these things attacking the illustrious the carrier and they did quite a lot of damage and then she had to be taken out of the mediterranean there was then that was quite but there was so much going on and there was so much shooting and some everybody was rushing about noises it wasn't a question of fright it was just you know amazement that anything like this could actually happen your role as searchlight operator in the battle of uh cape matapan and you were mentioning dispatches uh what can you remember of the battle itself well it was very long drawn out affair until we actually got to the point uh and the the the battalions were chased and attacked by swordfish and torpedo bombers and then they were attacked by the um cruisers and then they turned around and attacked the cruisers and so all this was going on for days and and one of the italian i think it was the polo was it was damaged and stopped and um two of her two other cruisers came back to her assistance during the night but unfortunately for them they were detected and and so the the uh battle fleet which was queen elizabeth valiant and got rid of the other one was the barum and the carrier uh courageous like no it wasn't the controversy was anyway oh anyway um we plowed on to where we thought these these um cruisers were going to be and valiant actually had a rather rudimentary radar and picked up these these um echoes which which was stationary and so he's assumed that's who they were but i got an indication what direction to to point the searchlights and they said well illuminate so i switched things on by especially a good chance i actually found a cruiser are you sure you're not being modest now well there was not much else to do the it was a very strange sensation because pitch dark you suddenly turned on these enormous searchlights huge things you see this beam shooting out a very calm night and and it picked up we were so close i mean we can't have been more than about 2 000 yards or something the beam wasn't big enough to to cover the whole cruiser and said somebody said train right or something because and there was another cruiser and with that everybody started shooting upon they didn't really need much illumination after that soon after the fall of of greece in april 1941 valiant was in action again at the battle of crete this time the luftwaffe had had a real field day can you tell me what happened well it was part of the i suppose people were trying to evacuate the the british troops from from crete the last ones to come out so we weren't particularly involved in that i mean we were milling around some just or you could secrete but some distance away and there was a general sort of usual confusion everybody was shooting and airplanes were flying about and we were we were i think it was then all no i think it was the day after matapan that we were hit by a two bombs one foreign one off how close in succession well it was one stick of bombs and they went sort of diagonally across the ship and one hit on the quarter deck and the other one just missed the forward but it the whole ship bent like that with the explosions and and actually bent sufficiently for some of the hatches down below to be jammed so several people rang up and said please can you get a tin opener we'd like to get out you know um but everybody was i mean it was you know usually people airplanes flying around people shooting everybody's shouting clouds with smoke and so panic as well no no no no no it is it was uh it was all fairly controlled but anti-aircraft i wasn't highly accurate and there was so much flying about that it was difficult to follow what was going on and we uh most all the damage was done to cruisers and destroyers really we didn't either we were lucky i think really to escape but how badly did it uh actually damage the ship i mean did you have no at crete we weren't damaged at all that this happened the morning after matapan yes but when these bombs hit did it really disable the vessel no absolutely not no it made no difference at all only one trap was killed and he was extremely unlucky i mean a big box was blown off a bulkhead and just hit him is it possible to recall any of the of the emotions that were felt uh when you were under attack [Laughter] no i don't think so i mean there's so much to do you know you're so occupied but you and everybody knows what they're doing it's very difficult you can't sort of sit back and say well what do i feel like today you know no no no i know it's a favorite question everyone is what does it feel like to do this what does it feel like to do that i mean how does it feel like to do this well i don't know i wonder whether i'll be asked in many many years time you can't actually train for this so can you oh yes you could do yes in fact there's an awful lot of simulated training goes on particularly now and the simulator there were simulators during the war so if you went into a the anti-aircraft school for instance you had all the noises and all the sort of so you got used to it your uncle lord louis mountbatten lost his ship uh hms kelly in the battle of crete uh was that a major blow for the navy's morale well an awful lot of ships were lost yeah it wasn't the only one but but particularly with lordly on board high profile no i don't think so i didn't i think if anybody was lost it was but it was a completely different atmosphere in those days because people accepted that sort of loss it was it was part of the fortunes of war i mean we didn't we didn't all have counsellors rushing around every time let somebody let off a gun you know you're all right i'm sure you haven't got some gasoline phobia he just got on with it he i saw him when he came back to to uh alexandre because he was picked up and uh he um i always remember because he had been swimming about for quite a long time in in water with his eyes sort of bright orange well sort of not orange sort of red no no no from the oil in the water but everybody got back to work again very quickly did being involved in in the battles of uh matapan and crete change your outlook on life i mean young men are notorious for thinking oh well it'll never happen to me but in fact it did happen to you no no i mean i think we all took it as being part of the business what were you doing fighting if you weren't going to fight coming through any kind of military action must galvanize spirits though i mean um whether great feelings of camaraderie with with the tension perhaps waiting for the next encounter that's terribly difficult to know i mean once you were in the the routine you're always going out on some operation coming in again and i think the the having followed the the the events that led up to matapan before we went to see um knowing that we were going to get involved or hoping to get involved it was a you know people said well i don't want to be a hero you know but it was all it was all rather sort of childish but i mean people just got on with it and by the time you appear to have built up a reputation as a man of action who who didn't really stand on ceremony um your journey home to the uk by a coal-fired ship troop to droop ship for instance do you remember the chinese stokers going on strike jumping ship at puerto rico yeah what happened they went on strike and left and then they called it there weren't very many passengers on board as a matter of fact i think there were three rn mitchell men and one merchant navy apprentice we'd we'd managed to tranship at durban and we hoped to get home quicker in fact we we didn't really but we pulled in at uh puerto rico to refuel and so we we were asked to volunteer so i went down and did some cold trimming i got a certificate from the p from the uh um canadian pacific uh saying that i had qualified as a cold trimmer but i've lost it needless to say hard work that was quite hard workers lost a few pounds in weight now i really like it yeah why did they go on strike in the first place i wasn't paying much attention we went then went on to newport news and um where i managed to the three of us managed to hire a car and drive up to washington which is quite funny we were in white uniforms and drove back through the pouring rain and had a flat tower just before we got to to back to newport news because trying to change the tire in the rain in white uniform left us looking pretty scruffy what did you do in washington i just walked around and had a look and when you were there what was the the american attitude towards you british naval officers i mean there was no covering it up you're in uniform yes but i think there were so many uniforms and washington's very cosmopolitan place i don't think anybody noticed frankly well in 1942 you joined hms wallis for convoy duty off the east coast of britain a very very different role altogether having been in action so much in the mediterranean was this a bit of an anti-climax for you oh lord no i mean the north the north sea was it was a very active place e-boat alley i think it was called well that's off the norfolk south coast yes but we used to start with convoys uh in the fourth of fourth at methyl and then take them down to shear ness and we'd spend a night in chernus and pick up another one and take it back here but they only they advanced at about six knots on average and as the tide was five knots it wasn't really freshly we didn't get anywhere very fast and then at night there were usually alarms about e-boat attacks so we had to rush around and fire star shell and we only i don't think we really had a a serious encounter with e-boats i mean i think i saw one the whole time i was there was it frustrating for you then having been in so much action in the military it seemed no absolutely no not at all no no i mean you much near after that's very close to the french and german coast they could the aircraft could fly out very easily and did and there was bombing over the over this country they came over the whole time there were e-boats coming out no we it was much more in the front line within a few months you were promoted to first of all i was first of all i was promoted to the lieutenant because i joined as a sub-lieutenant and then after i'd been a lieutenant for whatever it was i did about three or four months the then first attempt left and the captain was was left with really a choice of getting a new first attempt or moving me up into the slot so he decided to move me up into the slot and got a substitute instead so that was very good were you uh was this part of your desire were you very ambitious no i didn't i was i was i was quite surprised i suppose and pleased oh yes now there was some friendly rivalry with um a young officer an australian called mike parker later to become your equity how did this rivalry manifest itself it didn't was he not on it he was on a ship called lauderdale hms lauderdale i didn't know him at that time i only met him in in in in the um in australia when when we were in the same flotilla he was in uh um whirlwind and i was it well and i was in welp we were in the same the 27th flotilla but i mean we saw a lot of each other after that because uh he was one of the ships that was in in hong kong and we got to know each other and played squash good mates yeah yeah i read that as a young naval officer you were you were pretty much a perfectionist is that the case but what a stickler for perfection i don't think so not not particularly i mean you know i think everybody tried their best to make the best of the job we had very good people some might see the navy as a rather solitary life for a 21 year old bachelor separated from his family as friends by war and thousands of miles how how did you stay in touch with events back home well by letter i don't know else um who did you write to or well my grandmother i suppose most of the time because my mother was in in athens my father was in monte carlo my sisters were in germany and an aunt was in sweden and so i mean there wasn't that i i suppose in the the late duchess of kent who was a cousin of mine who lived here i suppose she was the nearest relation i had in this country other than my grandmother who i was going to stay with and you got lit letters from the young princess elizabeth too i believe perhaps at that time uh yeah so often on do they mean very much to you in those days well yes i mean everybody was glad to get a letter yeah you had been a guest uh of the royal family at windsor um what what kind of wartime leaders were the king and queen in those days what were their great strengths that you had picked up and seen but i only saw them off duty anyway when they came down to windsor for a weekend that's as much as i ever did i spent christmas there once so i never saw them in in that light i mean they were they were sort of hosts on those occasions and it was very much a sort of family party and exactly as it might have been anywhere else i i wasn't involved in the what i'd like to call it official activities and i i never saw them functioning as it were in their specific or doing any of their particular duties we've seen great archive material of them walking over ruins in the east end and oh sure but i mean i wasn't around well i was but i mean not when they were there i mean i was not very far from here on leave from recycle and i was actually having a bath rather comfortably and my uncle's flat in the top well little house he hadn't chest the stream i was lying there thinking this is not suspended and wondering what i was going to do that evening when a doodlebug went past the window and and it and it landed just not very far away back there and i would cramp made you get out of the bath pretty quick and dry well i reckon it was too late by this i just stayed in the bath during the spring of 1944 your new ship hms whelp was being built in newcastle you spent some time around the shipyard waiting for the completion of work uh well was that duty very frustrating waiting for your ship it wasn't so frustrating what you had to do a ship while it's being built they send a certain number of people in advance the the the chief engineer and the first attempt who's the executive officer the administrative officer on a head to in a sense to supervise the the final fitting out and there are all sorts of little things they say where would you like this piece of kit where would you like that and how would you like this arranged and and you had to stores were coming in you had to say that the thing was a combination of work together with the builders which is horthold leslie and hepburn and uh for the navy if you know what i mean for all the sort of internal naval arrangements then you had to write things like standing orders and look and see who you were going to get and then people drifted in all the times who had to accommodate them and it was a sort of administrative business simply getting the ship ready for commissioning and you were living at that time in a boarding house no in a hotel and it was called gordon hotel somewhere rather it comes from sort of a residential hotel i think there is yeah which probably gave you the an insight into the man in the street as it were the man in the street live in a hotel well if you would like to put it that way i mean we had lots of men in the street off the street in the navy i mean most of the ships in most of the men in wallets came from liverpool and a lot of the ones in whelp came from south wales but you don't understand if you if you serve if you're in the services you meet people from from all walks of life i mean it's you just live with them you know it's not they're all the only difference is that people have different responsibilities so you're glad that you were in the services then oh yeah it gave you a greater insight perhaps to well i didn't i didn't do it without end in view but that is what you get at the end of it you get to know people of every kind of background which you wouldn't everybody which you wouldn't necessarily have done had you not been in the services yeah you could say that by now italy had surrendered why when are we now d-day was a couple of months away uh from a military perspective did you feel the tide had turned in the allies favor but it obviously hadn't been i mean yes it had were you aware of it oh yes we knew exactly we were in uh because we just commissioned the whole of the 27th attila most yes most of it except for one that had got damaged or were all up in scarpa flow and we were the only inhabitants of scarpa flow during the invasion because we literally all just been commissioned and as soon as the invasion had taken place and and the war was moving into europe in fact the naval war in in europe virtually ended i mean the the the u-boats are more or less well they were still being chased but i mean since they were not as effective as they had been um and everybody's eyes or at least our eyes were on the far east because the war was still going on so we all set off and went through the mediterranean and and went to salon where the the ships that were going to form the british pacific fleet joined together and then went out jointly to by fremantle and around the sydney and a proportion of ships stayed in trinketly in the east indies as the east indies fleet working with the with the burma in the sense as part of the burma war so what was the state of the pacific war at this time well it was the allies had begun to get on top oh it's quite bloody well the allies weren't it was the americans there weren't anybody else and they got on very severely on top they were they'd retaken most of the islands which the japanese had occupied at some stage during the war they'd worked them right back and by when we arrived they were just invading okinawa and um we only got in uh to the to the invasion of iwo jima and uh but that was almost entirely an air war i mean it was the carriers flying off um aircraft for interdiction bombing and generally supporting the americans on on on a flank because you've got to remember that the there were two fleets well there was one fleet in the mediterranean depending in the pacific uh it was either called the fifth fleet if it was commanded by i think admiral spruce and it became the third fleet it was commanded by admiral halsey but it consisted i think of four or five i can't remember exactly how many uh carrier task groups and each group had four or five carriers in it and each group had four or five carriers and three battleships and five cruisers and about 30 destroyers all arranged in a sort of circle circles and the british pacific fleet was was one of the one of those and on a slightly smaller scale we only had four carriers and two battleships but otherwise and they operated on the flank as it were what kind of nation uh naval nation was japan well she had a really i suppose i don't know i had quite an effective fleet uh had enormous ships but by that time there was really virtually no i mean all the major battles had been fought the the americans and they were mostly inter uh carrier battles very few intership battles and uh there were a few internship battles but most of the major japanese units had actually been sunk by them so that when the fighting moved up into japanese home waters i mean there was no surface opposition at all in case if they suck their nose out they would have had about 600 airplanes it was ahead of them so i think they kept their heads down did you come across any kamikaze pilots yeah no pilots or kamikaze activities we saw quite a lot of that uh they um it was once what happened was one of the destroyers was always put as what call plane guard in the middle of this circle and the carriers on the on the next circle out as it were and the trap in the middle uh if any airplane crashed or fell overboard and you rushed up and picked up the pilot but we were we were in the middle one day and we had a american liaison office on board and um naval officer and uh kamikaze hit i think it was the indefatigable or an implacable controversial right where the island meets the flight deck and there was a terrific cramp and bits went up and smoke all over the place and the american turned white and said oh god she's gone and anyway so we watched this we're not very far away watching this through binoculars the smoke cleared and the bits fell into the sea and the next thing that happened was that about 20 sailors came out with brooms and swept the rubbish out of the side and he couldn't believe his eyes because what he didn't realize was at least i don't think he realized that the british carriers had armored flight decks they had sort of four inches of armor whereas the american carriers had wooden flight decks and whenever a kamikaze hit one of those it went straight through the flight deck and exploded in the hangar and then of course it set fire to the bloody thing and there was a frightful ship and they caused lost the ship and he they were absolutely amazed to discover that a one of these carriers could be hit by coming to cars in the most vulnerable place and nothing happened i mean there was a lot it burnt a bit of the the uh and then illustrious had the most extraordinary experience i i wasn't on board but i heard about it afterwards they had sticking out in front of the compass platform you know where the command stood which sticks out in front of the the island they had a big aerial radar area was sort of cheese thing you know about what about six foot across and about that deep and this aerial going around inside and the kamikaze attacked them and the tip of its wing went through the the uh radar dish in front of them so you can imagine what it must be like standing on the bridge and they crashed into the sea beside them and and nothing happened to anybody quite terrifying but bruce fraser was actually on board an american battleship i think it was but just before the bpf arrived out there and he was up on the on the command platform when the kamikaze hit and he had a general lumsden ron marine standing next to him who was killed outright and several other people were badly wounded on the bridge and and admiral fraser absolutely didn't have a scratch most extraordinary were there feelings of of envy as uh europe celebrated victory over the germans and looked forward to peace while the job in fact in the pacific still had to be completed no no no certainly not envy i think um relief i mean we're all delighted that it was over in europe i mean don't forget that everybody on board had friend families and friends at home so they were absolutely delighted that it was over you know they they didn't have to worry about their wives or parents or girlfriends did you take any time to celebrate ve day did you have time we would see we were coming south because we'd been running for the best part of i suppose now where was it about 12 months and so we were sent down with one other destroyer and illustrious back to australia for a refit in in melbourne and we were there from the uh i suppose the end of april till when we sailed with the duke of york on something like the 20 no end of uh when would it be an end yes end of april beginning of june and we left end of july so we had about six weeks out there and uh there was a certain amount of celebration in australia but of course by the time we arrived there it was all over and and everybody was much more in that at that time much more concerned with the war in the pacific you talked about friends and family and this sort of thing was princess elizabeth able to communicate in her letters uh the relief that britain felt i in life of me can't remember what she wrote in her letters but they were numerous obviously no not particularly she was quite busy too dude yes exactly do you think the veterans of the far east are given enough credit for for the way they uh conducted themselves in wartime by whom or are they overshadowed in fact by by european forces well speak for yourself well you say by historians i really meant not that i'm a great story is what history you read i mean if you read an account of the war in the far east they get full credit for what they did some people obviously were more interested in the in the war in europe and some people were interested in the war in the far east i think um i mean everybody had their nose the grindstone in the sense you didn't stand around discussing things um as if you were attending an editorial conference or something you you mentioned australia and the australians um with the benefit of hindsight how would you assess the performance of the of the allied fighting fighting forces in in the pacific oh they well they they of course were been at it very much longer in the pacific i mean they were fighting in in borneo and then the solomons and both their navy the ships and soldiers and they had a very very rough time and they were fighting under extremely difficult conditions tropical conditions jungle conditions and they acquitted themselves brilliantly uh and the new zealand is also in in in the solomons it it was it was a very very difficult war against the japanese and and i they did extremely well there was no one there and there were of course several uh australian ships were part of the british pacific fleet as well how did the warriors shape your character no i do who were the major influences on your life during these years oh my god i suppose um that's very difficult question to answer the first captain in wallace was a fellow called teddy hayward lonsdale who was a who was a great character and i i was very fond of him and he had a he'd been in the navy then went out and came back again and was it was it was a great i mean he was a great gentleman and leader and and i think had a very considerable influence over the way people behaved on board um i suppose i mean all the sort of people you've served with had an influence on you you know whether they were the captains captain norfolk for instance was a well he was a commander them uh had an influence the captain um and then friends other person attends because you've got to know that so i got to know mike parker but i mean there were there were seven or eight of us all first attempts in the same fertility we got it was a sort of first tennis club you know we all got to know each other and we all had the same jobs of all the ships you sailed in does one particular one stand out as being your favorite well what do you mean during the war or at all yes during the war uh well i had i suppose i spent longer in wealth than any other and i was first 10 second in command in the sense from beginning to end so yes that was probably and it took me all the way from scarpa flow to tokyo and behind your final job in the war on hms whelp was to was to transport prisoners of war yes what sort of condition were they in well to get it straight what we did was in the days when we were waiting for marshall to arrive in tokyo uh bruce face had organized for the light freight carriers to fly off their aircraft and come into tokyo to collect prisoners of war he got that agreed that they would be evacuated even before the surrender so we spent a few days close in shore collecting boat loads of they were in fact naval prisoners and fed them out to the light fleet carriers which were quite because it's enormous place tokyo bay which were anchored somewhere away well that was very emotional of course because these people were naval officers of naval people they weren't officers initially they hadn't been in a naval atmosphere for three or four years or sometimes longer they were emaciated and they sat down in the mess they were suddenly in an atmosphere which they recognized you know they were back in the mess and the people our ship's company recognized that they were also fellow sailors and so we gave them a cup of tea but i mean it was extraordinary sensation because they just sat there and and both sides i mean our own and them i mean just tears pouring down their cheeks i mean they they just drank their tea they they they really couldn't speak it was most extraordinary sensation and it and it caused the um i mean it affected everybody and mind you once that was over you know you collected another lot and it was it was not quite so it affected quite so much the second time but we only we did it what for about two days i suppose can you understand the the feelings of these men nowadays when they still find it impossible to forgive and forget oh yes i mean i i i think that it's it's i think it's very silly of people to say that that these individual people should should somehow rather be reconciled to their captors in any way and their tormentors i think it's it's unreasonable i mean it it i think there's the reconciliation means a lot of other things but it doesn't mean that each individual or somebody has simply got to forget and pretend that it never happened or pretend that they that they were desperately affected by the by the experience i can well understand that i mean it's interesting that in that it didn't happen with with the germans because in in point of fact the prisoners were in a sense reasonably well treated they were treated they they had contact with the red cross they were not exploited they were not victimized in any way they weren't tortured they weren't starved they were they weren't you know sent to forced labor they were treated by as as prisoners of war under the geneva convention well this didn't happen into by the japanese and i can quite understand why those people i i say it's unreasonable to expect them to to to forget it and pretend somehow i didn't happen so what will your memories be but i wasn't prisoners i didn't know in a sense it didn't i i can't speak i mean i can speak for them in the sense that i can i can understand to a certain extent what they feel but it i don't feel like reconciliation is a problem as far as i'm concerned i was quite funny when we went to the first time we went to to japan on a state visit in the 70s or 60s i think it wasn't people said first visit to tokyo and i said yes so what will your memories be on vj day any any specific thing i mean you were very graphic about those prisoners of war well i mean that's one thing and of course being in tokyo bay with the surrender ceremony taking place in the battleship which was what 200 yards were and you could see what was going on with a pair of binoculars and and then they they beat retreat and and they you could you could hear going on on the quarter deck actually the beat retreat was it was in the um king george v that was admiral rawlings it was second in command and that was everybody moved over there i wasn't on board but you could hear it going on but that that and then by that time of course a lot of other ships had come in we were only in there on our own to begin with must have been a very impressive site well it was a great relief i mean it was it was that wonderful feeling that uh and i remember because from there we went on to to hong kong and the most extraordinary sensation when we sailed we suddenly rose we didn't have to darken ship anymore we didn't have to close all the scuttles we didn't have to turn the lights out and not only that we actually stopped in the south china sea and piped hands to bathe you know we imagined doing that during in the mediterranean during when the heat was on you couldn't do anything like that so you suddenly all these little things built up to to suddenly feeling that life was different you've got the most extraordinary memory thank you very much thank you

Channel: Forces News

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Keywords: Forces News, Forces TV, British Armed Forces, British, Forces, military, serving, military personnel, Ministry of Defence, British defence, British military, Prince Philip, The War Years, World War Two, WWII, WW2, Second World War, royal, royalty, royals, royal family, Duke of Edinburgh, interview, Richard Astbury, BFBS, Philip Mountbatten, history, archive, 1995, 1990s

Id: pX5UNcFUNN4

Length: 48min 1sec (2881 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021