WW2 YOUR DAD/GRANDFATHER

My grandad was a stretcher bearer in ww1 and my dad a dispatch rider in ww2.
 
Dad joined the Territorials when the fasist tide was rising. He was mobilised at the outbreak of war and sent to Belgium. After digging in their guns several times, 115 battery was told to make for the coast - "everyman for themselves Make for Dunkerque".
After a few days without food or much to drink, he and his mates arrived at the beaches, where the lack of food and water continued. Eventually got away to Blighty, to be given a bollocking for not having his rifle. Fortunately the population at large were less judgemental and plied a young innocent provincial lad with drink.
Like many others, he had been posted as missing in action - widely considered to be a euphemism for "dead" to people like my grandparents who had gone through the Great War.
Fortunately dad was detrained at Leicester, and was spotted by a neighbour being marched to a camp outside town. One of his many brothers was immediately dispatched, "Don't come home without our Doug". A few hours later, a by now very hungover Douglas was getting the rollicking of his life from Grandma.

Although in an artillery regiment, he was trained as a signaller. He spent a few months at Beaumanor Hall near Woodhouse Eves, Leics listening in to the Wehrmacht. Beaumanor was a Y station for Bletchley Park.

After his stint at Beaumanor, he was shipped out to Burma, chased all the way to Imphal, then chased the Japanese back to Mandalay.


Mum was in the ATS as a radar operator. She told how her squad of 6 girls had to not only do the radar stuff, but constantly maintain the genset with not an ounce of mechanical knowledge between them. One girl getting her fingers amputated when they were in the wrong place.
One day they were all shoved into the back of a lorry, the back closed up and driven off to god knows where. Arriving at late afternoon, they not only had to make their own mattresses, packing paliasses with straw, but having to paint the inside of the cold, wet and draughty Nissen hut first - with limewash.
 
My sister is married to a German guy. My BiL Max still has his Dad's, Artur's, paybook.
Artur was lucky enough to get typhus fairly early in the Russian campaign and was shipped home. He was incapacitated and weakened for the rest of his life. During the war he had to maintain the farm and fulfil his quotas or have it taken off him - His family had lived there since the 16C.
His brother, Max, after whom my BiL is named, died. His parents got the telegram -" Verloren im Ostern" Lost in the East
No one knows where or when or how.
In Frankfurt there is a church with many, many names of the lost and missing with the same epitaph, Lost in the East. I'm sure there are many other churches and graveyards with similar momentos to the waste and savagery.

Max, my BiL's mother had been engaged to be married to Max, the one lost in the east. As they were actually peasants and it was important to hold the land together, she had to marry Artur instead. An arranged marrige.
It was obviously wartime there too, but standards had to be maintained and everyone still had to spend their two years in trade school - that included Friedhild.
Max and my sister still have her "how to be a Farmers wife" textbooks - on lambing and carving to fungus in wheat crops, and much of the equipment she had to hand make, like a set of now very well worn wooden spoons she carved, a jug and funnel made from old oil cans - you can still see the branding inside.
 
My dad was part of the rearguard action at the Dunkirk evacuation where he was captured and spent the war working in salt mines (probably in Poland). Never spoke about it so I've no stories of what horrors had to be endured!
 
My dad volunteered for the RAF at the start of WW2. He was tail gunner (tail end Charlie) in Lancaster bombers. He was also stationed in North Africa for much of it. He never spoke about it. He was also radio operator for the Lancaster. After the war he spent 30 years with GCHQ and he spoke even less about that. Hasn't said a word now for 17 years. Died in 1999.
 
One grandad wss a Major in the Reme, out in India. He had some good tales to tell, of using elephants to haul broken tanks etc, and a bullet wound in his leg to impress us kids. Another grandad, on the wife's side, was in a commando intelligence unit, going ahead of the front line to get to important places and people before the infantry destroyed everything of interest. He got his Legion D'honneur recently for being involved at D Day.
But the grandad who undoubtedly killed the most people was my father's father: he was an army cook. :eek:
 


Back
Top Bottom