What did you do in the War Dad?

[Olham]

I'm a coward, I find it almost impossible to understand the scale of the sacrifice in ww1 and ww2 (both sides).

Well, you mustn't be a coward, not to understand that. It was a very different time.

People in the Britain, Canada, Australia, America as well as in Germany went to arms with a big "Hooray!"

as if it was all just a big adventure. People were MUCH more naive in many ways.

They did not have critical press and TV to shape an own oppinion - they were blinded by propaganda

and followed their "fatherland's call to the arms" enthusiastically.

Those days people were in many ways poorer of any chances to get overseas, to get a military rank,

to learn flying even! That all was quite something. And then you would return as a heroe!

A blinding picture - until you were in the mud.

No, I think it's only common sense - not cowardism - if you wouldn't want to join that hell.

 

I must do some research to see what the old boy got up to, but I reckon he was bloody lucky.

Yes, if he returned from that war as a Captain, and all in one piece, and with a soul intact - he was!

[Bullethead]

I'm a coward, I find it almost impossible to understand the scale of the sacrifice in ww1 and ww2 (both sides).

 

No reason to call yourself a coward. The vast majority of people viewed as heroes were just ordinary folks who found themselves, usually involuntarily, in do-or-die situations and managed to do, often by pure luck, and all the while scared to death. I've never met a man with a high gong who didn't say was just the guy whose name got jotted down somehow, and that everybody in his unit or even area of operations did no less than he but got no credit.

 

My grandfather was an NCO in the RFC very early on. He actually transfered out - family legend has it that after a couple of flips he decided that the trenches would be safer ! I probably wouldn't be here if he had stayed in the RFC.

 

After the RFC he seems to have had a varied military career. My mother has a photo of him as a DR, I'll have a look and see if I can see any unit info. He had something to do with MGs so maybe the Machine Gun Regiment, but not sure on this. He definitely was in the Tank Corps later on.

 

He served 1914-18, started out as a private, finished as a Capt. Unusual I think in the British Army at that time (he attended no Public School), a testament to the scale of casualties.

 

In ww2 he was a Major running part of Woolwich Arsenal and was then posted to the wilds of Scotland doing god knows what.

 

Damn, that's a worthy ancestor if ever there was one.

[Flyby PC]

I agree - no cowardice at all.

 

My old man chose to go to Burma and India for most of the war because according to my mother, his option was to be a tail gunner in a Lanc. My father had seen what was left of some tailgunners, being hosed out what was left of their turrets.

 

I don't think he chose Burma because of the weather. He chose Burma because he had the choice.

[UK_Widowmaker]

My Dad chose SOE because the Royal Engineers Sapping job was too dangerous

[Bullethead]

My father's father and all his uncles had been infantry in WW1 and their stories convinced my dad that he didn't want to do that himself. So, he had a choice. He could wait until he was 18 and get drafted, which almost certainly would have made him a rifleman, or volunteer for something else at 17. He chose the latter option and joined the navy to have more of a chance of fighting the Japanese, against whom he had more of a grudge (although he really didn't think the US should have been in the war anyway).

 

As it happened, however, he'd just joined his ship (which was working up a new crew in the Caribbean prior to returning to action) when the nukes fell, so he never saw any action. Which is just as well. He was a radarman in a destroyer that was preparing to invade the Japanese home islands. Destroyers by then mostly functioned as distant radar warning ships for the carriers. The Japanese knew this so the 1st wave of their kamikaze attacks went for the destroyers, particularly targeting the bridge area and its radarmen. So I figure that without the nukes, I probably wouldn't have been born.

[RamblingSid]

Hi guys

 

thanks very much for your thoughtful comments.

 

Perhaps "coward" was an over-statement: ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations can do extraordinary things, and I am very ordinary. Thanks to the sacrifice of others, I've never had to find out how I would behave in such appalling circumstances.

 

Cheers