After five years, my father came home from WW2

One of the things I never asked my father was when he heard of the surrender by Japan on August 14, 1945, which ended World War II, when he was serving in North East India. Although he was an architect, he also served as an officer in the Royal Engineers, running the railhead at Dimapur in Nagaland, India. It was a front known as the forgotten war. (Japan surrendered on August 14, with the formal announcement by Emperor Hirohito the next day.)

The fierce fighting – and it was really fierce – that halted the Japanese advance into India culminated in Kohima, the next town up the road from the Dimapur railhead, heading into Burma. A famous fight across the width of a tennis court – the Commissioner’s Tennis Court – in April and June 1944 marked the beginning of a Japanese retreat. It is a lesser-known version of how Japanese forces were halted on the  Kokoda Track.

That tennis court was the Burma front’s equivalent to the Iorobaiwa Ridge on the New Guinea front.

The Tennis Court battle likely saved the life of Colin James Sandeman, at the cost of many others on both sides. But like many veterans, the war was not a subject he talked about.

Even after the war, the family was not reunited- my mother had settled on the Sussex coast in the town of Worthing. In later years, she would regale us kids with stories of fighter planes dodging above the rooftops, swooping up from the English Channel.

But my father had to go back to his job on the other side of London for two more years.

So seven years apart. It is a testimony to the faith and grit of both of them. 

A decade later, after a time in an orphanage, my twin Peter and I were added to Colin and Mary Sandeman’s family. 

History served this generation a tough deal. The Great Depression meant my parents’ wedding was put off to pay the fare for his older brother Wallace back to the UK – he had been doing it tough in the back blocks of South Australia. And then war.

My dad took his Christianity seriously. In his time in India, he carried a book, “Everyman a Bible Student”, around India from dusty plains to the mountains and into Nagaland. He founded little Bible study groups wherever he went.

I recall with incredulity that he took his Christianity seriously enough to care for two kids who carried the blood of his enemy in their veins after his return home.

He learned Urdu to communicate with the troops. Many years later, his old sergeant got in touch with him. And having become a cobbler, he wanted to make dad a pair of shoes, which is why a pair of dark red indian shoes hang in my dining room. My twin had the kukri – a fearsome knife used by Gurkhas – that came home. (I just checked, it is legal to own them.) But I have a reminder of a more significant sword – Every Man a Bible Student in its wartime edition.

When he welcomed the last of the blended family, Peter and me, into the family, our race did not seem a big deal. No deal at all.

Well, not to him.

The Australian Government chose to apply the White Australia policy when my family decided to come down under – Dad’s older brother was back in SA in a soldier settlement on Kangaroo Island – my uncle got another tough deal, with not very farmable land in Parndana in the centre of the Island.

It took the playground racism of high school to make Peter and me racially aware – a nickname, “Tokyo Joe”, for my brother and a stone hurled at me. Or maybe it was my anti-war badge that offended.

But Tom Playford’s state government lobbied for us. I don’t know what effect my mother’s broadside letter, “They are all God’s children”, had.

Kind, gentle and musical, my father led the choir at church (ironically, a church that an earlier Tom Playford had founded). He put the war behind him.

I have a vivid memory of Dad strolling down the hill on King William Street towards Adelaide’s River Torrens, the day Peter and I (I dragged my twin into it) held a student strike of high school students. 

He was always a supporter, even with the bewildering things I got up to.

As the 80th anniversary prompted me to write this memoir, I checked to see if there were any images of Dimapur during World War II. And indeed, there is a video on the Imperial War Museum site. And just as the video starts, a tall, thin, moustachioed figure flickers across the frame. It could be him.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060038319

Correction: Kukri knives are used by Gurkhas, not Sikhs, as stated in the previous version.