Victory over Japan: 80th Anniversary

Adam Thompson Excerpts

Monday 21st July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)]

In February 1942, Singapore fell to the forces of the Japanese empire. Nearly 85,000 British, Indian, Australian and Malay soldiers were captured. One of those many thousands was Major Paul Robinson, a Sherwood Forester from Ilkeston. He was taken to join the hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war and civilians forced to build the Burma-Thailand railway. All the while, Major Robinson’s wife Hope waited at home without a single word about her husband.

In September 1944, 49 British prisoners of war were rescued by the Americans. Paul was sadly not among them, but two Foresters who knew him were and, on their return to England, his wife Hope interviewed them. The men believed that one day the war would be over, that they would be free and that fascism would be defeated. She reported what she had learned to the Ilkeston Miners’ Welfare and wrote a letter to the Daily Express.

What followed was extraordinary: in response, Hope received more than 5,000 letters from the families of soldiers far away, fellow distraught wives of prisoners of war, and those who just wished to express their sympathy and admiration. More than 2,000 of these letters are now preserved at Erewash Museum, in a permanent exhibition entitled “Letters of Hope”. Paul returned to Ilkeston in September 1945 and died there in 1997, aged 87. His wife passed away in 2008, but thanks to her daughter Penny, who donated the letters in 2015, they and their incredible stories are remembered.

I want to remember another Ilkeston man, Donald Rose, who died on 11 July this year. At 110, he was not only my most senior constituent; for just over six months, he was our nation’s most senior citizen. Donald was a veteran of the second world war. He fought fascists in the deserts of north Africa and in the invasion of Sicily. He landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-day and helped to liberate France from Nazi tyranny. He saw with his own eyes the gravest evil of all, when he entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and was met by 60,000 sick and starving prisoners and the bodies of 13,000, murdered and unburied. Donald Rose was a hero, and I know I speak for every one of my constituents when I say that we will all miss him and we will remember him.

Eighty years on, we must remember all those stories: the grandest deeds of courage and brilliance, the darkest acts of destruction and depravity, and the smallest expressions of love and hope. It has been an honour on this anniversary to share those stories with the House, and I hope that we will all continue to do so for many years to come.