He survived brutal slavery on the Burma-Thailand “death railway”, helped thousands of fellow former prisoners of war win pensions and benefits and now, at the age of 93, Steve Cairns will play a key role when a national memorial to all survivors of the “forgotten war” is unveiled.

Mr Cairns, of North Petherton, near Bridgwater, a former bombardier in the Royal Artillery, will read the Far East PoW’s Prayer when a plaque is unveiled to military and civilian survivors at a ceremony at the Pier Head in Liverpool on Saturday.

The Second World War campaign in the Far East is sometimes known as the “forgotten war” because, in the decades immediately after it, films and books tended to concentrate on the experiences of servicemen and servicewomen in Europe.

More than 50,000 British Forces were captured between the fall of Hong Kong in December 1941, the fall of Singapore in February and finally the Netherlands East Indies in March 1942. Many were used as a slave labour force and one in four died due to untreated disease, neglect and brutality.

When the war was finally won, more than 37,500 British Forces and more than 2,000 civilians returned to Britain from captivity. Of these, more than 20,000 servicemen and more than 1,000 civilian internees disembarked on the pierhead at Liverpool in just eight weeks from October 8 to December 10, 1945. Many of the servicemen had started their journey to the Far East from the city.

Mr Cairns was one. A gun fitter on convoys, he was in Durban in 1940 when he got a signal to join a ship heading for Singapore.

“We got there in the middle of an air raid, and only then realised we were at war with Japan, because everything was hush-hush,” he recalls.

“I was seconded to a regiment and in three days was in action, was wounded, and taken to the Alexander Hospital. They took a bullet out of my thigh and transferred me to a convalescent hospital.

“Twenty-four hours after I left the original hospital, the Japanese attacked it and massacred the patients and doctors.

“I was the senior NCO at the convalescent hospital when the Japanese attacked. They threw grenades in, killing a couple of orderlies and told me: ‘If you don’t surrender we will shell the hospital and destroy everyone.’

“Everyone had to move outside and sit cross-legged on the ground. A padre and a surgeon started to remonstrate with the Japanese officer about the Geneva Convention and to my horror, and I had nightmares about this, he just pulled his revolver out and shot them both. I had to testify on this to a War Crimes Tribunal.

“I was taken off into captivity and worked to help build the Burma-Siam railway and, like others, went down with all sorts of tropical diseases and got knocked about a bit by the Japanese.”

Transferred to another camp, he worked on trucks and smuggled a vehicle battery in for the PoWs’ radio team. He was suspected and subjected to solitary confinement and brutal beatings which deprived him of the chance to have children.

He was the last PoW to return to England. Arriving at Southampton at 4am on Christmas Eve, 1945, he was immediately taken by ambulance to Liverpool, where the city’s School of Tropical Medicine was beginning its still-continuing work to help returnees. He founded a Far East Prisoners of War Club, which grew into a national federation. He was its national welfare officer from 1947, helping thousands win disability pensions, and was awarded the MBE and OBE for services to Far East PoWs. He is still national welfare consultant.

“We lost 12,462 UK soldiers in the camps but I have no bitterness left in my heart today. The people who caused the war were of my generation, not those living their lives today.”

The idea for the plaque came from the Researching Far East Prisoner of War History Group.

Meg Parkes, whose own father was held in Java and Japan, is chairman of the group. She said: “This memorial is significant because it pays tribute to the survivors of war, not to the war dead. For many of these men, the struggle to survive simply continued once they were back home. For some that struggle proved too much, for others it continued for years – even for the rest of their lives.”