Fury of PoWs after new leader of BNP visits shrine to Japanese war criminals who killed Allied troops in Second World War

Adam Walker, the new leader of the BNP, who is set to visit the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo

The new leader of the BNP has been accused of insulting Britain’s war dead by visiting a shrine that honours Japanese war criminals responsible for the deaths of thousands of Allied troops and civilians during the Second World War.

Adam Walker’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo has outraged veterans’ associations and former soldiers who worked in horrifying conditions as slave labourers on the bridge over the River Kwai.

Mr Walker, 45, who took over from Nick Griffin last week as chairman of the far-right British National Party, is himself a former soldier.

On its website, the BNP claims to be a ‘patriotic’ party that recognises the ‘huge sacrifice’ of British servicemen and women, yet the Yasukuni Shrine is the most potent symbol of Japan’s militaristic past.

Among those it honours are 14 Japanese military commanders and politicians judged by international tribunals to have committed the most heinous war crimes.

Last night, veterans expressed horror at his decision to visit there.

Robert Hucklesby, 93, spent nearly four years in Japanese prisoner- of-war camps and was forced to work on the River Kwai railway line linking Thailand and Burma.

Taken prisoner in Singapore in February 1942 and transported for hundreds of miles in a cattle truck, he weighed only 7st when he emerged from captivity, after surviving on a diet of rice and watery stew.

Mr Hucklesby, who was a sapper in the Royal Engineers, said: ‘The guards were brutal and hit us with their rifle butts for the slightest misdemeanour.

‘I am not a vindictive man but I do not have the authority to forgive and forget when so many of my comrades were so badly treated and thousands lie in war graves.’

Another veteran, John Giddings, 91, chairman of the Burma Star Association, who fought the Japanese while serving with the RAF on the Indian- Burmese border, said: ‘Mr Walker should have known better. He should have kept away from Yasukuni. Visiting the shrine is not something any British citizen should do.’

Mr Walker, from Spennymoor, Co Durham, married a Japanese woman, Chie Shinoda, in 2001. He says he speaks the language fluently after living in the country for several years in the 1990s.

He visited the controversial shrine in August 2010, on the eve of the 65th anniversary of America’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was there at the invitation of extremist group Nippon Issuikai.

The shrine honours war criminals who kept British prisoners of war, like these above in brutal slavery

Father-of-two Mr Walker served as a tank crewman in the King’s Royal Hussars before retraining as a teacher – a profession from which he was banned for life in 2013 after being found guilty of hurling insults at three boys and slashing their bike tyres with a knife.

Last year he tried to exploit his military background to win votes by posing for photographs in regimental beret and blazer as the Queen lay a wreath at the Cenotaph.

A BNP spokesman said last night: ‘Adam visited the shrine as a mark of respect to the Japanese people as a whole and as a small contribution to reconciliation between our two great countries.

‘He does not condone war crimes, whether past or present. He sees no contradiction, as a former soldier, in honouring innocents and enemies who died in war and his mind and prayers were focused on the vast majority of those commemorated, not the minority of war criminals.’

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FGS!!!!!!!