H.I.'s father was at the D-Day landings and jumped out of the landing craft - in which he had spent 24 uncomfortable hours - into deep water, laden down with heavy equipment on his back. He watched many of his comrades drown before going ashore, then faced relentless machine-gun fire and strafing on the beach. H.I.'s mother was pregnant with her at the time, and suffered a nervous breakdown, not knowing whether or not her husband had survived for about 3 months after the event.
My father was a rear-gunner in RAF Bomber Command who survived a crash-landing on British soil, the only one left in the aircraft when it hit the ground. He went on to survive being poisoned by a German spy working in his office in Whitehall, London.
My generation had it so easy.
Indeed we did. My father was a Messerschmidt pilot. He protected bombers destroying Coventry. The bombers ditched excess bombs on my English grandfathers farm in Critch. My father was shot down, and ironically had to work on my grandfathers farm. He met my mum there, and here I am. How anyone came out of the d-day landings sane is beyond me. Horrendous, and lezving the landing craft.... I can't imagine. Flying a fighter was pretty tough too. I'm glad to garden.
ReplyDeleteThat is a really interesting story Gary. How strange to have relatives on both sides.
DeleteAh wait - I have just worked it out. Your grandfather was not your grandfather until your father married your mother and you came into existence. I can be slow sometimes.
DeleteHaha......ping!
DeleteJust as an add on, my uncle Horst was an ss officer. He was killed aged twenty. I have his bible.
I wonder if he was allowed to have a bible.
DeleteHighly unlikely. For myself, I like to think he was questioning his life. Guess I will never know.
DeleteI wonder what your grandfather thought when his daughter decided that your father was the one. What a history, Gary!
DeleteBea, they disowned her. My parents ended up buying a hotel in Bournemouth. I waz born in the front room. My grandparents would never have anything to do with dad, but my mum was eventually allowed to visit.
Delete'Waz'..sorry, I am not a chav. 'Was'
DeleteI thought you had a Liverpool accent.
DeleteWe have had it easy but our feet were kept firmly on the ground in the 1950s.
ReplyDeleteYes, but we were children and knew no different.
ReplyDeleteYes agreed but looking back it was a good grounding.
DeleteRationing was not a bad thing. We have too much choice of shit now. It could get worse.
DeleteGlobal rationing would be a life saver, quite lierally.
DeleteI think it should be an international crime to deal in food as a commodity when there are starving people in the world.
DeleteYep.
DeleteWhere i live now in the NE of Scotland the bombers jettisoned all their unused bombs on our town as they left.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I call rude and inconsiderate. At least we had a target when we dumped thousands of tons of them on Dresden and Hamburg.
DeleteThat happened in my Surrey village too; when they finished bombing London. A young school teacher was killed by one such bomb, and my sister was named after her in her memory.
DeleteThat must have been really bad luck - to be on the flight path out of a proper target, not expecting to get bombed.
DeleteWe buried ours and the Turks buried theirs,
ReplyDeleteand it started all over again.
The war to end wars never did.
I feel a great sadness for the post war lives of Europeans and Brits.
And then there was Vietnam. It swirled all around us for a generation.
And then Afghanistan.
And then...
Too sad to think of....We don't seem to be heading in the right direction...
Delete22,000 at Normandy alone. Vietnam must have been the most depressing war of the lot.
DeleteThis semester at the Freie Universität Berlin we read a Dutch book written by a famous Dutch author, Harry Mulisch (and of course we read it in Dutch): "Het stenen bruidsbed" (The Stonebed for the Bride).
ReplyDeleteIt is a novel which tries to discuss and entangle the question of guilt. (Here the "hero" is an American bomber pilot bombing Dresden, and flying back after setting the city on fire - to bomb the civilians who had fled into the river to escape the flames).
My father, marine, was 21 when he came back after 3 years as Prisoner of War in England - he was almost a child when they sent him to Japan - then his ship sunk, he survived on a live-saving boat for 24 days without food and only water that fell from the sky at night (and two of the six sailors drank salt-water and died).
After the 24 days they landed in Madagaskar, got a trashing from the French (were they the administration for Madagaskar?) but luckily came under the reign of Great Britain, and were sent to England. There he was treated well, he worked as a farmhand for a pastor, and was very thankful to be there.
(Irony of fate: my sister married a Frenchman)
And yes: I am thankful too to be born after the war, and when I looked at my son when he was 21, I thought: What a blessing that we live in peaceful times!
And yes: The Europeans have a good life.
That's a story. I get the impression that Britain was a good place to be a POW.
DeleteWe had some on farms around here. Peter's best friend tells a similar story to Gary above.
DeleteIn Devizes gaol they graded the German POWs into white, grey and black. The black were unsaveable. Most were hanged for murdering the whites and greys.
DeleteWhat was the poisoning he survived later?
ReplyDeleteWhen he got out of hospital they put him in an office of the Ministry of War (now MOD) and he suspected a fellow worker of being a German spy so did some checking-up on him. The spy realised he was being investigated so left in a hurry, but not before poisoning my father's tea. He overdosed him and my father threw it up, but ruined his stomach-lining. I have memories of visiting him in hospital when he was having corrective surgery to his stomach. Certain death avoided twice.
DeleteInteresting. We had stories only of the Home Guard and wartime harvests and my mother flirting with the Yanks based around here.
DeleteThere were black G.I.s in the West. People in Somerset had never seen black people before.
DeleteHi, I wrote my comment when it was just dawn (not at 21:09, as is written over the comment, but 5 o'clock in the morning).
ReplyDeleteI was tired.
And thus I forgot to say that I am happy that history developed as it has: if you look at the utterly horrific buildings the Nazis left (for instance in Berlin the old Olympia Stadion, or the ugliness in Nurnberg) I sometimes think: what sort of life would we live when Germany had won? Horror to think about that. They were so cruel - and it is not OK to sum up the cruelty of other nations. It does not erase the guilt that Germany has.
Yet I am also very happy to live in a time where only old people tell me that I was the foe - I wasn't, I was not born then. And I am thankful that I was spared any decision to fight for my country at those dark times.
Young people don't see me as a foe, so it is understandable that I like the young :-)
When I saw the movie on Churchill it was the first time ever I cried in a cinema: those courageous tiny English boats who went to save the English soldiers, that were seemingly lost.
I am very glad to live now.
Yes, my father could never forgive his generation of Germans, but Germany has been bearing the guilt for a long time now and - as you say - the young are coming to terms with it without ignoring it or pretending it never happened. Only a few Brits keep reminding Germans of the 1966 World Cup now.
DeleteMy Schwäbin friend was born in 1950 & she said that the prevailing question of her generation was: Was haben unsere Väter getan? Whether or not they received the answers they sought is another question entirely.
DeleteMy Dad had three wartime stories, one about Brasso in The Shetlands, getting glasses in France and returning from Germany through 'customs'. He never said anything about other times - including D Day.
ReplyDeleteMy father hardly ever talked about it either. Brasso in The Shetlands sounds intriguing.
DeleteWhen you see images of ordinary British people waving Nazi flags and abusing foreigners just because they look foreign it makes me realise how short people's memories are. Peace was hard won and it frightens me that there are those who simply don't want to live peacefully with their fellow man.
ReplyDeleteThis is what worries me about Brexit (sorry to bring that up again). There is an old-style nationalism beginning to rise up again, and the focus is on Germany, who have the most to lose if the EU falls apart. They have only just reunified with the East, and The East has a lot of neo-nazis.
DeleteWhen I looked at the faces of those old men in their nineties yesterday I thought I bet they remember it all as though it was yesterday - even if they rarely speak of it.
ReplyDeleteThat's something you could never forget.
DeleteYour father and HI's father had seen and experienced certainly more than I ever have (and hopefully ever will) in my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteYes. There was more too.
Delete