A PLAQUE in memory of Allied prisoners of war is to be put up in the former Dorset military hospital which treated them during and after the Second World War.

The site is now Guys Marsh Young Offender Institution in Shaftesbury and a ceremony for the plaque will be performed there on February 7.

The memorial has been commissioned thanks to the efforts of Derek Julian, a former principal officer of Guys Marsh who has also successfully campaigned to get a memorial for American Rangers who died in Lyme Bay during the war to be added to Weymouth's seafront memorial.

Mr Julian said: "It is an historical site which deserves recognition particularly for the work it did with former prisoners of war of the Japanese. They came to Dorset in a dreadful state, suffering hellish nightmares of their treatment by the Japanese, and the hospital did its best to help them recover."

British, American and Russian troops were treated at the hospital after being Japanese prisoners of war and many were deeply disturbed psychologically and ill physically.

It was an advanced hospital for its time which carried out pioneering hip operations and it also used the new wonder drug of the time, Streptomycin, which saved many lives.

Among representatives attending the plaque ceremony will be ones from the Russian Embassy, the Royal British Legion and various Far East service organisations.

Mr Julian, who was in the Army in the 1950s, served in the Far East and Korea before joining the prison service where his duties included a spell as acting governor of Holloway Prison.

He has written the memorial for Guys Marsh which includes information that a 600-bed military hospital was built on the site in 1938.

The facilities were used by British and American forces during 1939-1945 while in 1945 Mr Julian said psychologically distressed casualties including prisoners of war from Japanese camps "suffering from considerable mental anguish, returned from purgatory to be nursed towards recovery in this hospital".

He also notes that a Russian soldier who had been in a German prisoner of war camp, died at Guys Marsh and was buried in Shaftesbury cemetery on February 6, 1945.