Company Sergeant Major Charles Sharp

We had a small village as a post where we had a telephone line that rang out there and the main force was at a place called Waw and we used to go out patrolling and you were anywhere up to your ankles, up to your neck in water because the monsoons was on and to go to this island part we had to use boats first because it was far too deep and fast flowing to do anything else and then we had to march across to the village and so it was there that we fought our last battle. The Japanese broke in one night and shot up the small force we had there and then the whole battalion was called in and we charged through the bush and got rid of the Japanese that were there and that was the last fight, probably one of the last battles of the war there. That was in the August. So then a rumour went around that the war had ended and nobody really believed it knowing what the Japanese were and I can remember somebody saying yes it has finished because the Americans had dropped a bomb on Japan and nobody was going to believe that and two or three days later somebody said yes the war had definitely ended because the Americans had dropped another bomb on Japan and nobody believed that either knowing what the Japanese were and cause we did not know anything about the Atom bomb and then of course it did and then we had to keep going because there were a lot of Japanese groups coming across country who had no means or way of knowing that the war had ended and that the Emperor had stopped the war so we had to keep going for a little while.
So we found ourselves in Bangkok at a Palace that General Evans of 7^th Indian Division HQ and we found that there were something like 150,000 prisoner of war which must have been frightening for us when 22 of us turned up but anyway we settled down to guard the HQ and I was on guard when General Slim inspected the guard and I was also on duty one evening when a small convoy came down the road and I refused to let them in because it was a flag cars gate only and after a few words with the officer in charge he informed me he had Lady Mountbatten in the Limousine so I phoned up the duty officer in HQ and when I mentioned Lady Mountbatten he said let them in which I did. So we just went on there until such time as the battalion came in and started to take over and from there on I went home on leave. Then of course then I came back and we soldiered on in Thailand, we had Bangkok University as a barracks, D company, there was not enough room there, D company, I was on a station at the race course, they had a camp there. We landed up in the end helping war crimes people and we went up country, A company that was my company, we went up to a place called [Nacon Yanoc] and there they had a large ground there where we screened 3,000 Japanese a day into three groups, black, grey and white and the black and the grey they were either war criminals or had been a witness to war criminals and any whites they could be used for a work force or were eventually being sent back to Japan and eventually we landed up with 300 who we had in [Banran] Jail in Bangkok. It was rather a big civic prison with gun turrets around the walls and we had a scare one night when one of the sentries found blood flowing down the floor and we found that one of the old colonels there had cut his throat. Anyway he was rushed off to hospital and my company director went to see him in the morning and he was sitting up in bed quite alright and he offered my company director many apologies for the inconvenience that he had caused.