IT is pleasing that a plaque has been put up in King Square acknowledging the presence of American forces in Barry during the Second World War.

However, the statement announcing it by Jonathan Hicks was, I feel, a little over the top. He remarked: “I don’t think I have ever heard the Last Post played with such emotion.” First of all let us just look at the facts that brought on the emotion.

Fact is the American troops based in Barry were not fighting troops, they were supply workers – serving in Port Battalion 517. The American fighting troops in Britain arrived in Liverpool and Glasgow in large passenger ships.

Is not the Last Post as moving when it is played for the Barry soldiers, sailors and airmen who died in two world wars? Mrs Dehaney Stiff lost her three sons in the Merchant Navy in WW2, and Barry lost a greater proportion of its Merchant Seamen than any other British port.

In all that has been written in the last week about dressing up and playing soldiers, the words Merchant Navy did not appear once. Ah well, perhaps next week we could all dress up and play at being Merchant Seamen – but we can’t, can we? The Merchant Seamen walked out of their Barry houses in their civvies, sailed across the seas in them, and thousands of them died in them.

David Simpson High Street Barry