Operation Zipper was then well, they were thinking about it. Or the ones at the top knew a bit more about what was happening then we did, for all our purposes we were training to land in Japan, the mainland of Japan. But in the meantime the Americans developed the atomic bomb. We actually landed in Rangoon but the bomb had landed by this time. Rangoon being at the bottom of Burma. The British forces working from the top of India had worked there way down, and the few Japanese that were left, by the time we got there were starved and some of them could hardly walk. So there was no opposition. When we went on Operation Zipper they still called it that even though it didn’t materialize. We landed on the beaches of Burma ready to cut them off but it didn’t take much doing at all. They were glad to see somebody that would not kill them or take them prisoner.

So we formed a big camp - I don’t know were they got the wire from. Barbed wire on top, six foot high, and we put all the Japs that we found in there and they had separate place for the officers. By this time the officers had surrendered. Some of the Japanesehadn’t realised that the war had finished. They were still fighting all over the place. We had to be really careful. The officers were bundled into one corner of the enclosure.

Of course all the Japanese officers carried swords. Samurai swords were given to them when they obtained officer status. They were all very proud of their swords.We had a ceremony where they all had to pass n front of us, and hand over their swords to the senior officers. So a heap of swords built up, and once again we were called off to go somewhere else. I managed to get hold of a couple of swords and carried them all the way to this country. They were lovely swords complete with scabbards. I hid them amongst my kit as we weren’t officially supposed to take anything. They really had to turn a blind eye to anything like that. I carried them around with me all over.

We left Burma and went to Singapore, because there was a bit of a problem in Singapore at that time. It had been taken over by the British, but it was chaotic. There was a lot of trouble over there. We were down in the docks as a kind of restraining force to control the hundreds and thousands of Japanese prisoners that were floating around, and they were using them as labour down in the docks. We had the job of looking after them and putting them to work and all the rest of it. I still had my swords hidden I managed to keep them away from prying eyes. Everybody had something.

We were called out to Indonesia or Java I think it’s now called. The Japanese just on an island on its own - Dutch East Indies they called it because previous to the war it was a Dutch colony. All the people with the money were Dutch and all the locals were labourers working, so when the war finished the Japanese carried on in the island because half of them didn’t know the war was finished. They kept on shooting, and making nuisances of the selves. So the Dutch authorities called on the Polish government to go and give a hand to clear the island of the Japanese. But in the meantime the people that lived in Java had other ideas, they didn’t want the Dutch. The Dutch had ruled them with a rod of iron previous to the war, and they didn’t want anything to do with them. So they started fighting the Dutch. So you had the Japanese fighting the Dutch, the Dutch against the Japanese, so we were there, actually in the middle, we didn’t know who we were supposed to be fighting. The Japanese came to our side, batches of them wanted to fight on our side. They would get some food. They couldn’t care less who they were fighting for. Quite a few of them, for a short period of time, were with us defending positions against the Dutch and against the Japanese because there complete chaos .The government came to us and said that there shouldn’t be any British troops in Java. It was nothing to do with us. It was a civil war. So we pulled out of there and went back again on an aircraft carrier and we sailed all the way back to Calcutta.