On the original Victory over Japan Day in 1945 one poem by a former Oxford student, Frank Thompson, was published in the Times. For the 50th Anniversary of D Day (in 1995), it was read before her late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II at the Sunset ceremony in Whitehall and broadcast by the BBC. The poem was an Epitaph for his friends who would die in the war.

A key line is: 

“Write on the stones no words of sadness, only the gladness due

That we (the fallen) who asked the most of living, 

knew how to give it (sacrifice life) too.”

As a Classicist, Thompson had been schooled on Horace’s line:

“Dulce et decorum est pro patria morir.”  

And during the war, Thompson would lament those of his friends from Oxford’s Boars Hill, Winchester, his old school, several of his fellow Oxford students and members of his officer cadet training unit who had been killed in the war.

On 26 April 1943, he told his soulmate, Iris Murdoch: "If I get through this European war, I want to go wherever the next phase takes place, China then on".

He prophetically foresaw the coming ascendancy of Asia declaring “India and China would count for more than Great Britain” in the future.

Having read Rebecca West’s book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about the History of Yugoslavia, he shared her view that ignorance of the Slavic countries was a cause of WW1 and a major contributory factor in the cause of WW2. He had hoped to play a part in redeeming this situation by writing about Slavs or Balkan people, their histories, lives and civilisation, even straight journalism.

During the war, he met many Polish, Russian, Greek and Yugoslav service men and women, before encountering the Bulgarian resistance fighters and commended their courage.  In his spare time from soldiering, he read widely, as he believed it was “The Arts that gave meaning and purpose to life.” He claimed “Russian novelists, however villainous , their characters, never forgot their humanity.”

At the age of 23, Thompson could speak nine European languages and his thoughts were to rescue occupied Europe, and the Balkans in particular, from Nazi tyranny. He foresaw a future European Commonwealth as "The only alternative to disaster." But on, 6 June 1945, D Day, Frank Thompson as a liaison officer with the Bulgarian resistance, having been captured, interrogated by the Gestapo and denied Prisoner of War status, was executed in Bulgaria.

Thompson had bid farewell to Murdoch before being parachuted into occupied Serbia, paraphrasing the line from Julius Caesar: “If we should meet again, why then we’ll smile, if not, then those that come after will live more happily in the world we all helped to make.”