As November approaches we will be urged again “not to forget” sacrifices made during the world wars.
This would be a more powerful appeal if ongoing efforts had not immediately been made to ensure the true facts were quickly forgotten.
During the Second World War the Merchant Navy kept the country supplied during its greatest peril.
Brave sailors who often paid with their lives in U-boat attacks included hundreds of Chinese sailors who had settled and established families in British port cities such as Liverpool, due to processes linked to past British imperial activity in Asia.
Everyone since who has lived a privileged life in Britain owes these sailors.
Yet at the end of the war many hundreds of Chinese sailors were forcibly rounded up and deported by British authorities.
This action was perpetrated for brazenly racist reasons, and the truth was suppressed; even the sailors’ own wives and children were wrongly told that their husbands and fathers had deserted them.
The men were never seen again and never acknowledged in official remembrance.
No British government has ever apologised for this terrible crime.
Most recently in spring 2021 an apology was denied by the Johnson government which at the same time commissioned the preposterous Sewell Report, with its ridiculous denial that racism was a problem in this country.
The Prime Minister at the time has also published a book claiming posh leaders like him and not such brave ordinary working people saved the country in the Second World War.
It would be nice for once this November if we all ignored government-sponsored claptrap and remembered the truth.
G Kent,
via email
