Many soldiers were exposed to the sun

Taking cover … these three British soldiers in Singapore, displaying a flag captured from communist guerrillas in 1955, have their shirts on, but others in the far east in the mid-50s had little protection from the sun. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the fact that hundreds of thousands of servicemen worked routinely (and compulsorily) stripped to the waist in hot and sunny countries certainly into the 1960s and maybe longer (Report, 6 April). I was a national service soldier in Singapore in the mid-50s, where the standard working dress in military areas for all non-commissioned ranks was “bare buff” – in our case, shorts, no shirt, boots with socks rolled down, uniform beret on the head. Officers wore uniform tropical jackets, as did we when we went beyond the camp gate. I have had my share of minor pre-cancerous skin lesions, which my wife puts down to those years. Given all concerned were male, this mass exposure ought to show in the statistics. I wonder if it does?
Gerald Haigh
Bedworth, Warwickshire