VE Day often overshadows VJ Day, descendants of Second World War veterans have said during a screening of their wartime letters.
Passers-by paused to watch recordings of loved ones’ reading excerpts from the notes at the free installation to commemorate VJ Day.
One message, heard at the launch in central London on Tuesday, said: “I’ll think of you wherever you are, if it be near or far. I’ll think of you. We’ll meet again someday, when dreams come true.”
Another line, from a doctor in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, read: “Our dreams have finally come true. The nightmare is over.”
VJ Day on August 15 marks the anniversary of Japan’s surrender to the Allies following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, effectively ending the Second World War.
Veronica Silander’s father was an RAF airman and prisoner of war in Batavia, now Jakarta in Indonesia, and wrote his letter around two months after he was captured.
It was the first message Ms Silander’s mother had received from Maurice Read since he was taken and it included the line: “So once again, do not worry please. I am OK and intend to remain so.”
As the letters played on the large screens behind, Ms Silander told the PA news agency: “The youngsters need to know about (VJ Day), I think it’s often in the shadow of VE Day.
“I think probably 80 years, you know, even people like myself are not going to be around that had direct contact with somebody, so I think we should mark it.”
She added: “I think my mother must have been very distressed to know that he was still a prisoner when all the celebration was going on.”
Her father rarely spoke about the war but would say “when you woke up in the morning, you didn’t know who was going to be dead beside you”.
Ms Silander knows little more than that he trained in Auckland, New Zealand, and was captured two weeks after they were taken to Singapore by sea.
Families received leaflets telling them “do not ask the veterans about the war”, she said.
“I think they just wanted them to come home and forget about it,” she added.
John Sanderson served with the Royal Navy in the Far East between 1944 and 1946, and his letter to his fiance included the line “we’ll meet again someday, when dreams come true”.
His son, Brian Sanderson, told PA: “My father always said VJ Day was forgotten.”
He would tell his wife that while people were dancing on VE Day “I had kamikaze pilots coming down on me still”.
VJ Day was hardly marked until recently, Mr Sanderson said, adding that his parents did not often speak about the war.
“That’s the sad thing, is that we never asked them, they never spoke about it, and the stories have gone – I have no-one left from the Second World War,” he said.
The installation runs until Saturday at Outernet, near Tottenham Court Road station, and was organised in partnership with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
