My Grandparents’ War, review: Mark Rylance's determination to see both sides made for an extraordinary film

Mark Rylance explored his grandfather's experiences as a member of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps - (Channel 4 images must not be altered or manipulated in any way) Channel 4 Picture Publicity, Horse
Mark Rylance explored his grandfather's experiences as a member of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps - (Channel 4 images must not be altered or manipulated in any way) Channel 4 Picture Publicity, Horse

Mark Rylance’s grandfather survived one of the most notorious atrocities of the Second World War and spent four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. In the trailer for My Grandparents’ War (Channel 4), which revisited the scene, the actor was visibly upset.

“The horror of it is very difficult to talk about,” he said, in a voice choked with emotion. “Absolutely, absolutely horrific.”

Only at the end of the film did you discover that Rylance was not talking about his grandfather’s experiences, but the death toll visited upon the Japanese in the Allied bombings that precipitated the end of the war.

This latest instalment in the series was an extraordinary film. Rylance, a campaigner for Stop the War, was at such pains to be even-handed that at times he appeared almost overwhelmed by the plight of the Japanese.

Told of his grandfather’s last stand, taking a bullet wound to the stomach as 35 of his comrades were killed around him, Rylance said sadly, “The Japanese were about to lose a lot of men as well.” Learning of the brutal conditions in a prisoner-of-war camp, he shook his head in sorrow at the mention of a Japanese officer dying by suicide.

Osmond Skinner, Rylance’s grandfather, was an HSBC banker who became a member of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps as invasion loomed. With no military training, he was pitched into battle on Christmas Eve, 1941.

His platoon sergeant recorded afterwards: “I have seen films and pictures of warfare but never in all my life have I seen anything like the sights or heard such a noise as came from Stanley village that night…”

An injured Skinner was taken to a hospital at St Stephen’s College. There, on Christmas Day, he witnessed one of the most notorious massacres of the war. Japanese soldiers stormed the hospital and bayoneted the wounded in their beds. One man had his eyes gouged; other testimonies, not heard here, are of tongues cut out, ears severed, nurses raped and mutilated. Rylance said his grandfather had never spoken of these horrors, except to say he “had witnessed something that he would never forget”.

Osmond Skinner, left, with Mark Rylance's uncle Richard, grandmother Hazel and mother Anne - Credit: Channel 4
Osmond Skinner, left, with Mark Rylance's uncle Richard, grandmother Hazel and mother Anne Credit: Channel 4

The actor wanted to know how the Japanese could treat their enemy with such cruelty. An academic showed him pictures of burns victims from the Allied bombing campaign that claimed 300,000 lives before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It was this conversation that made Rylance angrier and more upset than we had seen him. The British and the Japanese armies were the pawns of Empire, he concluded, comparing Churchill to Emperor Hirohito.

His grandfather was a Christian, but he could not forgive the Japanese for what they did. “I don’t think he could even imagine human beings were capable of such a thing… But he was of a different age, you know.”

Rylance saw both sides as victims. But it’s easy to forgive when you weren’t there.