VJ Day: Armed Forces charities fear support for veterans will dwindle after Second World War passes from living history

Armed forces charities fear public support for veterans will dwindle when the last surviving Second World War personnel die, as the nation gears up for the final big goodbye.

Ahead of events to mark Victory over Japan (VJ) Day, the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a major charity leader has called for continued support for younger veterans.

As the ranks of those who fought in the Second World War thin each year, 2020 is set to be the last major occasion when veterans of that conflict and the public can engage directly.

However, Air Vice-Marshal Chris Elliot, Chief Executive of the RAF Benevolent Fund, said the idea that all military veterans were old was just wrong and increased efforts should be made to support younger generations.

The charity she heads supports serving and former personnel of all ages with emotional, financial and practical help, she told the Telegraph.

“The Royal Air Force has been on operations for the last 30-plus years," she said.

“We’ve got men and women who want to continue their service, but who have difficulties with disabled children. We’ve been able to adapt homes so mum and dad can continue to serve and come back to a place that’s safe and secure and supported by the fund."

The RAF Benevolent Fund is not just for older veterans "who sadly won’t be with us much longer,” Ms Elliot said. Younger veterans are often overlooked by society, she believes.

“There’s a romance about Spitfires, Hurricanes and Lancaster's [but] we’ve got to characterise the debt that we all owe our younger veterans. People still go out and give their all to do their duty for us.

“People are still sacrificing their normal family life today, maybe not in the same harsh conditions in terms of volume they were back in the Far East, but it’s still there."

Ms Elliot said the military charity sector should prepare for financial hardship among younger veterans, caused by Covid-19 job losses and the recession.

“There will be more economic hardship with some of our veterans for the next two or three years. All the benevolent funds and other military charities are just gearing up to understand what that new bow wave of beneficiaries might look like.

“This wouldn't be an older veteran, we’ll see younger veterans in economic hardship.”

Her comments come as polling by the RAF Benevolent Fund has shown only a quarter of young people in Britain are aware of the significance of Victory over Japan Day.

The service charity says few of the 18 to 24 year olds interviewed knew what the ‘VJ’ in VJ Day stood for.

Ms Elliot said that whilst fighting continued in the Far East for some weeks after Hitler’s defeat, the war in Europe is much more widely remembered.

“There's a sense more people know about the veterans and history of the D Day landings.

“But what happened in the Far East – that forgotten war – was a significant part of World War Two that I don't think we talk about,” she told the Telegraph.

Ms Elliot said it was important to remember sacrifices had still been made after hostilities ended in Europe in May 1945.

“These people are still with us,” she said.

“Their experiences are still here and we just had to go out and find them, not just so that we can get help to them if they need it, but actually to respect the folks and keep the stories alive.”

The poll commissioned by the fund asked 2,135 UK adults aged 18 to 65 the question: ‘Do you know what the VJ stands for in VJ Day?’.

Just over half of all respondents answered correctly but only 25.1 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds got it right. Awareness steadily increased as age brackets rose, with 80.2 per cent of 55 to 65 year olds knowing the answer.

She said her fund’s Join The Search, Change A Life campaign hoped to find veterans living in hardship who may be unaware help is available.

“A lot of veterans think help is for someone else,” she said. They “refuse to put themselves in the bracket” of needing help.

Meanwhile, former diplomats have used the occasion of VJ Day to warn against “re-writing history” to suit today’s geopolitical agendas.

In a VJ Day webinar hosted by the Royal United Services Institute, a defence and security think tank, a former Chief Historian at the Foreign Office said “controversial references to wartime events” often appear during times of global insecurity.

Gill Bennett said: “It’s happening a lot all round the world. When there is regional instability and global insecurity…it’s always a time at which wartime events are brought out [and] used politically.

“We’re seeing a lot in Eastern Europe and in relations with Russia. It is a symptom of wider global insecurity.”

Sir David Warren, the UK’s former Ambassador to Japan, agreed. He said too much could be read into past events and that we had to “remember history”.

Referring to calls from some quarters for a return to the formal UK-Japan alliance at the beginning of the last century, he said that arrangement was highly contingent and based more on a desire to “restrict or to restrain imperial ambitions” from China and Russia.

“There’s a certain re-writing of history about the UK-Japanese alliance, which was an important statement from both an existing empire and an aspirational empire.

“It is seriously disputable that it represented a fundamental convergence of strategic interests as proper Palmerstonian diplomats would recognise.

“It’s very dangerous for us to go back into this sentimental attachment to something from an age of empire which has now, happily, gone.”