WHEN Phil Kaiserman arrived in Vietnam in 1945, so began a life-long love affair with the country that he will revisit later this year for the first time in 60 years.

On August 29, Phil, from Radcliffe, will fly to Paris and then on to Hanoi under the Big Lottery Fund's Heroes Return, a programme helping veterans of the Second World War revisit battlegrounds around the world as part of the 60th anniversary of VE and VJ day.

"I am returning to pay my respects to the people of Vietnam," said Phil, "because of what I was involved in there during the Second World War."

Phil's commitment to former French Indochina and its people is not in doubt. Over the years he has helped raise more than £1 million to build a hospital in Saigon, the British Friendship Hospital. He is a veteran of the Peace in Vietnam campaign, as well as a voluntary archivist of the country's labour movement.

His return will be a highly emotion journey as Phil believes that he and his brothers-in-arms, under the orders of the Britain's Labour government of 1945, helped destroy a beautiful country by allowing it to be torn apart by wars, first with the French and then with the Americans.

He said: "I was posted to Saigon in October 1945 with RAF Commando Unit 3209. Our war was part of a secret history that nobody talks about.

"In effect, I believe we were helping the occupying French forces to suppress the local population and ensure that Vietnam would remain a French colony."

After the end of the war and until 1955, France fought hard to regain their former territories in the region, but with a poorly organised army and little determination among the troops, their efforts soon collapsed. The French were finally defeated at Dien Bien Phu in May, 1954 by the communist general Vo Nguyen Giap.

The French troops withdrew, leaving a buffer zone separating the north and south and set up elections in order to form a government in the south. The communist regime set up its headquarters in Hanoi under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Many North Vietnamese left the country and fled south where the self-proclaimed president, Ngo Dinh Diem had formed the Republic of Vietnam.

Between 1955 and 1960, the north Vietnamese, with the assistance of the southern communist Vietcong, tried to take over the government in south Vietnam, and in November 1963, President Diem was overthrown and executed .

The following year, the north began a massive drive to conquer the whole country aided by China and Russia. Fearing a communist takeover of the entire region, the United States grew more and more wary of the progress of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong. Communism had become the evil menace in America and, with the expansion of Soviet rule into Eastern Europe, Korea and Cuba, the Americans were bent on stopping communism from spreading any further, leading to a devastating war which lasted until 1975.

Phil of Grosvenor Street, believes the British government sponsored actions in 1945 let down the Vietnamese and ultimately led to the war with the USA.

In a bid to make amends, he has published memories of his time in Vietnam, Saigon '45: With the Japs in Vietnam offers a detail account of the French politics and military brutality that brought the Vietnamese people to their knees.

He writes: "By publishing this pamphlet, I hope that in some small way I have paid my debt to the Vietnamese people.

"As the time I spent in Saigon was during a very important period of British history which has not been given the publicity it should have had, I intend to deal with it here so as to ensure that to a small extent I can make amends for the part I played in the traumatic events that were to follow."

Copies of Saigon'45 by Phil Kaiserman are priced £1 (plus 25p p&p) and can be ordered by writing to him at P Kaiserman, c/o Working Class Movement Library, 51 The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WX. All proceeds from the pamphlet will be donated equally to the British Friendship Hospital in Vietnam and the International Youth Village.