A selection of students and staff gathered at the flagpole to keep the national silence at 11am and Anaiya in Year 9 movingly played The Last Post and Reveille (click here to view).

A prerecorded assembly was shown just after which was recorded by Year 12 students with Mrs Thompson. It focussed on the Fourteenth Army, or forgotten army, which was one of the main fighting forces in the Far East. This was the largest Commonwealth army ever assembled, composed of troops from South Asia, Africa and British, Burmese and Gurkha units, the personnel came from nearly 20 countries. 85% of the Fourteenth Army was from pre-partition India. By 1945 the British Indian Army was the largest volunteer force in history, made up of 2.5 million men and women. By VJ Day the War claimed the lives of 87,000 of these volunteers in the largest British land campaign of the Second World War where there was continuous fighting for nearly four years.

The assembly included the experiences of those fighting as well as those who were held in Japanese Prisoner of War Camps. These included Barbara Sowerby, Richard Pelzer, John Harlow, Yavar Abbas and Michael Kofi Adjivon.

As the assembly came to an end the epitaph in the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery on the battlefield of Kohima was read out: 'When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say, For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today'. Then in accordance with our TGS tradition the assembly closed with the exhortation being said in French, Spanish, Japanese, German and English.