Friday 6 June 2014

Baby Boomers


It's a big day in Normandy today, and probably the last one that any survivors of D-Day will be able to attend. The service is being held at Bayeux - that place where the tapestry of the earlier invasion in the opposite direction is housed.

I visited the beaches of Dunkirk when I was a kid on his way to Switzerland for a school holiday, but the significance of the 50 miles of coastline was not so drummed into us as it is with the schoolchildren of today.

Also, any mention of the invasion was through a very British perspective, and all but ignored the thousands of U.S. and Canadian lives lost at places other than Sword Beach. The Germans will be there today as well, which is a fairly recent consideration.

I remember seeing the rusting remains of military vehicles which still sparsely littered the area in front of the town, but since it was only 20 years since the event had taken place, this is hardly surprising. 20 years seemed like a long time back then, but now - of course - well, you old bloggers know the feeling.

Us Baby-Boomers got off so lightly. We didn't even get involved with Vietnam, and even now the U.S. National Guard are posted all over the world to the worst hot-spots on the planet, as are the British Territorials who used to play at being soldiers at weekends. Many of them must have joined up thinking it would be like the Home Guard - waiting for an invasion which never came.

We didn't even get any bombs dropped on us, but I remember seeing - right up until the late 1960s -massive craters in central London, where 50,000 civilians, auxiliary workers, Fire-Watch, Home Guard and off-duty military lost their lives during the night-raids.

There was a 90 year-old veteran on the radio the other day, saying that WW2 was the only war in modern history that was justified, which is how I have viewed it since I was very young.

'The War To End All Wars' was a shockingly stupid waste of life, and both German and British troops spent many years in muddy trenches, wondering why they were shooting at each other every day except Christmas. The prime beneficiary of WW1 was Adolf Hitler, as it paved the way for him to create a new nation from the moral and financial ruin of defeat.

H.I.'s father landed on Dunkirk beach in the second wave, and since they were mainly employed with bringing in equipment and supplies for the first invaders, they were heavily laden with back-packs which often equalled the body-weight of the soldiers carrying them.

He told her that he had to watch many of his comrades sink under the water to drown before they ever reached the shore, and he was lucky to have made it into the shallows, bullets or no bullets.

My father was shot down in a Wellington bomber and was the only man on board - the rear-gunner - when it ploughed into a field in Kent, all the others having bailed out.

Like I say, we were very lucky to have been born in the late forties and early 50s.

14 comments:

  1. I'm afraid I have no heroic stories of my own father. He was commissioned very late in the war, to act as an Army Accountant, to find-out where all the missing supplies were going. He did find quite a few supply-lines to black market traders; who were all then suitably prosecuted.

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    1. I think they were suitably executed, weren't they? The Third Man, etc.

      Heroes come in all forms, and even the ones which get shot at don't always seek glory! During the Falklands conflict, one officer received the George Cross, simply because he went raving mad through stress and charged a machine-gun post with his bayonet. They had to acknowledge this act in the best light possible, for the sake of his family.

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    2. That was a posthumous award, obviously.

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  2. My father was in the Hone Guard. He said it was just like Dad's Army.
    Joseph Beuys was a rear gunner in the German Army and was saved by lard and felt in the snow when they crashed.

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    1. I loved that story about the British gallery cleaners throwing away the Beuys sculpture of smelly lard at about 8.00 in the morning, because they thought it was rubbish.

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    2. The cleaners at the Slade cleaned the blackboards early the morning after Beuys had lectured there. These were going to be kept ...

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    3. yeh, like sort of, like a lot of Beuys's work was on blackboards.

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  3. Tom, I was twelve on D Day and I remember it well. Looking back on it all I marvel that my parents were able to keep most of the wartime worries from me (my brother was at Dunkirk and also at D Day). To me it was all rather exciting - lots of aeroplanes going over at night (I lived in Lincolnshire, where there wee a lot of airfields). They must have been worried sick but I never remember them showing it.

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    1. Wonderful, Weave. Write down your memories - you're next to go.

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  4. I watched it on TV with tears in my eyes. For all those veterans and the ones who didn't make it - we owe them everything.

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    1. Plus the 20,000 French citizens who we shelled to death.

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  5. My dad told about the night before my uncle shipped out. He called my mom, collect. Mom sat on the steps and the two of them talked for two hours. Dad told himself "He may never come back, don't think about the bill." They never got a bill. Dad wondered if it was the kindness of an operator, or perhaps army policy for a "free" call home. In any event, little kindnesses. My uncle did come home, and bought me a tricycle.

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    1. What a good story. If he had been charged for the bill, you may not have got your tricycle.

      The words, "Thank you for using A.T. and T." Still ring in my ears, because they lead to the biggest phone bill I ever got. $800 for 14 days, in a Days Inn hotel.

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