The waves hit Khao Lak, Boxing Day 2004. (AP photo)

The terrible 15-metre tsunami wave triggered by this past October’s 7.7-magnitude quake off West Sumatra reduces most sixth-anniversary observations about the 2004 catastrophe nearly to irrelevance.

Then there were the merciless waves that so compounded the misery in Chile following February’s huge earthquake there. That tsunami set off alarms in 53 countries around the Pacific and the waves caused damage as far away as Japan and California.

Though “only” around 500 lives were lost on and around Mentawai Island on October 25, and another 500 in Chile, these are the fresh wounds.

By comparison, the shock of the Indian Ocean tsunami continues to rapidly fade, year after year, even with a quarter-million souls gone suddenly and forever.

Detail from ‘Untitled aka Boris’ by Robert Longo

More to the point, developments this year related to the 2004 disaster lean more toward farce than any virtue you might wish to take hold. Revelations of official lies about the death toll in India, more dodging of responsibility over the upkeep of warning systems and, worst of all, inane predictions of an imminent repetition of the event. There’s more!

Phuket Gazette photo

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the tsunami, Nation reporter Pongphon Sarnsamak shared a tale of two women who remain afraid to go anywhere near the shore.

Yupa Srisiri, 60, who lives in the most unfortunate of villages, Ban Nam Khem in Phang Nga, can’t forget her struggle to keep hold of her six-year-old nephew as the waves thrashed them, tearing the youngster from her grasp as their pickup truck rolled and rolled.

She found his body a month later, one of 800 dead from the same community. Yupa had lost one of her own three sons not long before before the tsunami struck, though the reason wasn’t given.

The sound of the wind frightens 46-year-old Saisunee Tongsakul, who lives in Ban Had Kamala on Phuket, and she told Pongphon, “There’s no way I can walk on the beach.”

The waves wrecked her house. She heard cries for help but could do no more than shout back, urging them in vain to swim.

“Every December 26 she has to seal all the family documents in plastic,” Pongphon wrote.

These cases are classified as post-traumatic stress disorder for reasons of medical and financial assistance. The boisterously named Thailand Centre of Excellence for Life Sciences has run genome scans on 3,000 blood specimens from tsunami survivors to try and find a causal link, and a treatment for the disorder. The results are being analysed at Japan’s Riken Centre for Genomic Medicine.

All the psychology aside, the victims’ fear is very real.

In August this year, one of the purported buttresses against fear of a recurrence was hauled dead from the water.

The Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) buoy had bobbed in the Andaman Sea 600 nautical miles northwest of Phuket since December 2006. This past August the Phuket Gazette reported that it was no longer functioning “because the Thai agency responsible for maintenance has not been able to replace its battery”. There’s more!

Continued from Part 1.

Strangers in a strange land, the Brits. No business being there, but these are the blokes they thought needed some help.

After one of those bitter winters, it would have been a nice warm day on May 12, 1937, when the XXth of Foot Lancashire Fusiliers in Tientsin trooped the colour and beat retreat to celebrate the coronation of King George VI. Lt Col RFH Massy-Westropp’s 1st Battalion was among the units engaged in the five days’ commemoration, which even included a “Ye olde English faire” set up at the Race Club Gardens.

On hand for the occasion with an extra hyphen if needed was Britain’s ambassador to China, Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen. It must have been just after the coronation festivities that the envoy was wounded when his car was machine-gunned by a Japanese fighter aircraft. He narrowly escaped being paralysed, but went on to other postings.

Sir Hughe’s misfortune might have been part of the Japanese bombing of Nankai University on July 29 to shut up the rabble-rousing students. The Japanese followed that up by occupying Tientsin the next day. They still couldn’t evict the Westerners.

On June 14, 1939, the Japanese blockaded the foreign concessions in what history has noted (in passing) as the Tientsin Incident, the latter word a euphemism for Britain’s most ignoble non-military defeat between the world wars.

The British authorities refused to hand over four Chinese, hiding within the British concession, who had assassinated a customs official accused of collaborating with the Japanese.

The British Concession bordered the French to the north, with the Japanese settlement on the far side of that, and to the south the area occupied by the Germans until World War I. The Russians were across the river. All the arriving troops passed through East Station, which neighboured small concessions for the Italians and, previously, the Austro-Hungarians.

While everyone leaving or entering the concession, including women, was publicly strip-searched by Japanese soldiers and food and fuel was blocked, the embarrassed Brits — unable to bring naval thunder in from Europe — bluffed and lied their way to a negotiated resolution. Then, on August 20, they handed over the four Chinese, whose heads were swiftly lopped off.

Just over a week later, Hitler’s tanks rolled into Poland.

It seems to me that, even if Dad had been stationed in Tientsin in August 1937, he must have in some form witnessed the Battle of Shanghai, as it came to be known. I always interpreted Dad’s description of his stay in China as being part of a “police action”, keeping the Chinese and Japanese troops away from one another, not that there was much hope of that. There’s more!

Dad’s War: The Prequel, follows from “Dad was the ‘D’ in D-Day”. Here he’s in China during the Sino-Japanese War of the late 1930s and, by way of warning, some of the photos are pretty grim. This post is split in two parts.

The Lancashire Fusiliers had already been in business for 245 years by the time my father, Wilfred Anthony Dorsey, joined the ranks at the end of March 1933.

As recorded at the Regimental Museum in Bury, they’d been throwing British muscle around since 1688, when they were known as “Peyton’s Own” and went on to do Battle at the Boyne. Regrouped as the 20th Fuseliers, they laid seige to Limerick and captured Athlone, held Gibraltar during the 15 Years War and tackled Bonny Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden, fought in the Seven Years’ War, then on the Plains of Abraham to secure Canada for Britain, and then further south to lose America to the Americans, with General Burgoyne’s 20th Foot captured at Saratoga and imprisoned for five fruitless years.

All of this took place before the 20th’s first recruitment in Lancashire, in 1797, but with the northerners on board, they met Napoleon, victoriously at the Battle of Maida. There followed the 1812 war with America, the Peninsula War, the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny.

On July 1, 1881, the regiment became the 20th Lancashire Fusiliers. The next big fight came in 1898, relieving Khartoum, and that was followed by the Boer War and World War I, with its dreadful Gallipoli fiasco, where the Fusiliers earned “six Victoria Crosses before breakfast”.

The regiment makes a large deal of the fact that JRR Tolkien, the author of “The Lord of the Rings”, served in its ranks, though it could care less that Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the movie trilogy, hails from Burnley, my original hometown in Lancashire. But the main crowing is about James Wolfe and the Duke of Wellington (Arthur Wellesley), its former commanders, neither one a northerner.

None of these chaps ever served in China either, like my father did.

I am far from the first person to wonder why so little is commonly known about the Chinese episode in British military history, but it’s been suggested that the story is so complicated that retelling it is daunting. Perhaps it’s also too shameful.

The UK Army was in China because of British greed, plain and simple. Colonialism was all about sucking foreign countries dry before they knew what hit them, and inevitably there were backlashes that had to be tamed with the weight of heavy arms.

In the late 19th century the British controlled treaty-yielded “concessions” in Tientsin (now known as Tianjin), Shanghai and Wei Hai Wei. The last was abandoned in 1931, the others in 1940 when the Japanese made their defence too costly. Hong Kong, of course, had its own fabled drama with Britain that dragged on until 1997.

When young men signed up for a stint in the army, most of them were heading someplace a lot warmer than England — the Middle East, India, Africa, Singapore or China.

My father enlisted in the 1st Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers on March 30, 1933, underwent two years’ training at Catterick and Colchester, during part of which time he was evidently in the transport service.

And then, on either November 12 or December 12, 1935, depending on the source, the entire battalion boarded HMT (Hired Military Transport) Dorsetshire at Southampton and sailed off into the Atlantic. The photo of the ship here comes from S/Sgt George Albert Davies’ page at Lancs-Fusiliers.co.uk.

The HMT Dorsetshire, I discover, is not to be confused with the HMS Dorsetshire, which had a hand in sinking the German battleship Bismarck in 1941 and was itself sent to the bottom by Japanese dive bombers off Ceylon the following year.

The steam ship and troop carrier my father was on became a hospital ship during World War II but was still taking British soldiers to the Far East as late as 1953, the year before it was scrapped.

In the course of six weeks Dad and his mates rounded Gibraltar, crossed the Mediterranean and threaded the Suez Canal from Port Said. There were calls at Aden, Colombo, Singapore and Hong Kong before reaching, on January 20, 1936, Shanghai — or as Dad always referred to it, “Shang-guy”. The photo below of the disembarking is from this page on the Fuseliers alumni website.

It would appear from the few records we have that they docked at Shanghai, but other accounts, both British and American, have troops landing elsewhere, on the shore of the Gulf of Chihli (now Zhili) and moving by train inland to Tientsin and Peking. Many Yanks stepped off the boat at Chinwangtao (Qinhuangdao) and had a six-hour, 167-mile journey on the Peking-Mukden Railroad southwest to Tientsin.

But many troops were indeed stationed in Shang-guy. The port city had long had a Shanghai Volunteer Corps, but even by 1932, when the Japanese troops rolled in, it only had 1,500 British, American and French men guarding the foreign settlements. The Japanese shoved, but the volunteers managed to hold them back — until Pearl Harbor changed everything. There’s more!

I was, of course, a close, personal friend of Walter Cronkite, who died on Friday in New York at the age of 142.

He was the reason I went into print journalism, in fact. I appeared alongside him on three occasions as co-anchor of the CBS Evening News and he never let my face appear on camera. I quit in disgust and got a real journalism job — at a newspaper.

Was Cronkite just being a beeyotch? He was a nice guy, really, but I pissed him off by reminding him several times during broadcast planning sessions, “Ed Murrow would never do that.”

He’d cry like a baby.