"I was born to Welsh parents in Wallasey in 1926. I joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers in April 1943 and served continuously until 1969, when I transferred to the Royal Army Pay Corps towards the end of my service.

I did my reserve training in South Wales before going over to Normandy in August 1944. I was seen off by the Germans a few weeks later, returned to the UK where I spent some months in Newtown in a holding battalion. On a noticeboard in company office one day there was a request for volunteers to go on a special job to the Far East, so I put my name down and reported to the London District Assembly Centre in 1945.

So off we went to Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was then, up to Darwin in Northern Australia, over to New Guinea and ending up in Manila in the Philippines where we were attached to the American Army. We were given the job of documenting prisoners of war who'd been held by the Japanese for three and a half years.

What would happen is that we would get a signal or phone call that there were 200 more ex POWs coming in and no matter what time of the day or night it was, we were there. We would line them up or sit them down, depending on what they were capable of, take their number, rank, name, next of kin, address and they would be given a billet and a good meal.

By this time their health had improved quite dramatically from what they were when they came out of the camps, because the American army had fed them well - maybe too well. They were given tins of peaches and things like that and after three years on just rice their tummies revolted, but they got through it.

We would then send off signals to the UK to say Sergeant Jones or Private Roberts is alive and well and we'd get a few replies back to say that Sergeant' Jones' family had been killed by the buzz bombs. To give that news to a soldier who was looking forward to going home was quite dreadful. We'd leave it for the officers to do because they were better equipped to do it.

Another sad thing was that many were very poorly, so they'd be sent to the local military hospital and one or two of them died, after all that time. They were so badly gone, they just faded away.

We weren't there all that long, just three months, but I want to think that we did a little bit to lift their spirits. One of the lads luckily enough had taken a newspaper with him from England, and this was devoured - it was passed, round and was almost in bits when everyone had finished with it.

It was a very rewarding job and I was never sorry I'd volunteered for it.

We left at the end of November 1945 to come home with the last batch. We came across the Pacific on an American Liberty ship called the General Brewster and landed in San Francisco and went to Angel Island, across the Bay from Alcatraz, which was a huge American camp. There they made all of us very welcome, especially the ex-POWs. We went up to Seattle, then Vancouver before travelling across Canada by train and coming home on the Queen Elizabeth.

My lasting memory was catching the train at Paddington station and in the compartment was one of the POWs with whom I'd struck up a friendship. He lived in Shrewsbury, and he said 'Taff - (I am a Taff really!) I hope my wife's waiting for me, I hope she does know I'm coming.'

We pulled into Shrewsbury station. He asked me to hold onto his samurai sword and opened the door, and amazingly, right opposite was this lady. I've never, ever seen such happiness on a lady's face, not even on my wife's face when she saw me coming home - it was as though she was aglow, and they just got hold of each other. The guard was blowing the whistle so I said 'hang on', held the train back, got his kit out and off I went.

I've never seen him since but it was such a perfect end to a long journey. I'd do it all again. I'd always volunteer for anything.

I've got other memories of the war, some very painful, but none like that. I'm glad we did it, went to war, even though we left a good few friends behind in Europe and all over the world. I don't want anyone to ever forget it. We've just had this terrible bombing in London and as a boy I was in the blitz of Liverpool. But they never beat us, any of them."