EXACTLY 70 years after Japan surrendered in the Second World War, two Witney men remembered their brother who died in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

At a VJ Day service led by the Rev WJD Down at the war memorial on Church Green in Witney, Alan and Gordon Clack sombrely laid a wreath for their fallen brother Arthur Clack.

He died aged 23 in 1942 after being starved and mistreated.

Gunner Clack was part of the ill-fated 18th Infantry Division that was meant to be heading for the Middle East but instead was sent to a Singapore just as it was about to fall to the Japanese.

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The unit was caught up in the bloody week-long Battle of Singapore, which resulted in Lieutenant-General Arthur Ernest Percival, commander of the Singapore garrison, surrendering to the Imperial Japanese Army Gunner Clack was soon captured and taken to a notoriously brutal prisoner-of-war camp called Fukuoka 17, where is it believed he was forced to work in a coal mine.

Younger brother Gordon, who was 10 years old at the time, said his mother Florence Clack (nee Amor) wrote to Arthur “religiously” but there was no response.

It was only after VJ Day the family found out what they had dreaded the most, that he had died of malnutrition, dysentery and ill treatment at the hands of the Japanese, along with thousands of other American, British and Australian troops.

Alan, 80, said: “I remember when news came through of my brother dying.

“My mother was sat at the dining room table just breaking her heart. I didn’t understand why they were doing any of it really.”

Gordon, 85, added: “What’s worst, after he died, my mother’s letters all came back unopened in parcels.”

The camp commandant Asao Fukuhara was later executed for war crimes.

Before serving in the Far East, Gunner Clack was at Dunkirk when the British and French forces made their retreat across the English Channel in the face of a terrible Nazi onslaught.

The service was attended by members of the Witney branch of the Royal British Legion, Witney town mayor Jim King and other councillors and the ‘Canal Zoners’ – veterans who served in the British Army during the Suez crisis in the 1950s.