A visit to Ratmalana SLAF museum prompts a book on Easter Sunday raid
The Easter Sunday Raid shook the fabric of Ceylon society in April 1942. It was, said Winston Churchill, the “turning point of the of the Japanese advance in the Second War”- to halt Japan in the Indian Ocean, failing which Japan’s global encirclement would have proceeded across the Mediterranean and beyond.
A lofty tome (of over 800 pages) now has been painstakingly put together, an exhaustively detailed account by Henrik Melder, edited by Dr. Hiran Jayewardene and Captain Gihan A. Fernando. Titled ‘Japanese Maritime Attack on Ceylon WW II’, the book is chock-a-block with illustrations.
Its genesis was when Melder, a Danish ex-military man came to our shores recently on the trail of long-dead Second War veterans who were his relatives. He amassed a slew of material on the Easter Sunday raid but had no intention of anything other than putting the material on the internet. Dr. Jayewardene and Capt. Fernando managed to convince him otherwise.
In Dr. Jayewardene’s memory, the historical episode was strangely vivid because of the tales his father told of the ill-fated ships the Prince of Wales and the Repulse as he had seen (sunk by the Japanese), and also because he grew up alongside the Race Course which was at the heart of the battle.
What Churchill called ‘the Most Dangerous Moment’ of the Second War springs to life in the book; and amongst the lesser-known aspects of the attack, says Dr. Jayewardene, are the Balloon Squadron deployed at Trincomalee and Colombo- that would have “greatly deterred the Hawaii-style low level attacks by the Japanese aircraft”.
Author Melder says that the book is intended for the younger generations who know little of that war. “It all started with a visit to the SLAF Museum in Ratmalane, (when) I saw the small exhibition they have about WW II and asked several friends what they knew about what happened down here.” He had to comb through “archives in the UK, USA, Japan etc. and that way… got a lot of input and stories. In the UK I got help from several historians and the same from Canada, from several organizations etc… I would also like to mention the BBC and the Imperial War Museum.”
Co-editor Captain Gihan A. Fernando added that the book contains details of the men and women of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) units based in Ceylon he knew personally.
A considerable amount of material having of course, vanished, the author and editors were glad of such accounts as Bevis Bawa’s own story – told “in inimitable style”- of serving in an anti-aircraft battery in Trincomalee.
‘Japanese Maritime Attack on Ceylon WW II’, will soon be on sale in leading bookshops.
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