Child of War – A Personal Story
My father’s war, known as the Great War, ended nearly six years before I was born, but the slaughter in the trenches of the Western Front brooded over my childhood like a malevolent ghost; constantly present in the faces of my father, my surviving uncles and their contemporaries. The nightmare of shelling, poison gas, close-quarter bayonet fighting, teeming rats, a constant smell of putrefying bodies, the cries of the wounded cut off in
no-man's land, lost hopes kindled by fraternisation between the lines with soccer matches in no-man's land on the first Christmas, all near and real to them. Memories of the Menin Gate, the Angel of Mons, the "Wipers" salient, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, Passchendaele and the Somme haunted them.
At school most of my teachers belonged to this haunted generation -- echoes of their nightmares often permeated the classroom. In the beginning the message that such horrors must never happen again was given with confidence. During my last years at school this changed to fears that a similar ordeal was facing my generation. News-reels in the cinemas indicated that another European war threatened even greater frightfulness than experienced in the Great War. No longer would war mainly involve soldiers, sailors and airmen. Massed bombing fleets must mean that civilians, women, children, the old and the infirm would have to suffer enemy action too. No city dweller would be safe, even in our island so long a happier land than its continental neighbours, safe within the moat of the sea. The cinema, the main entertainment for most people, sharpened the grim prospect as we watched flickering news film of the bombing of Chinese and Spanish cities with fascinated foreboding, and the frightening goose-stepping mass rallies in Hitler's Germany.
Dread of another great war, along with some realisation that the harsh Versailles Treaty had given Germany grievances that brought Adolf Hitler to power, led to widespread support of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, and the sacrifice of the "far away country" of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Soon after that, my half-brother Gordon, a sergeant-pilot in 49 Bomber Squadron, flew on operations to test London's defences, and was later killed in an aircraft collision.
Aged 14 at the start of the 1939-45 war, I served first as a Boy Scout messenger at the village Air Raid Precautions headquarters, later in the Home Guard, then followed my elder brother, Douglas, who had left a reserved occupation to fly with the RAF a year before. He was a flying-officer navigator with 101 Bomber Squadron and was killed on the night of the day I reported for RAF flying training. Given compassionate leave, I missed my platoon and a faulty needle on being immunised against tropical diseases put me in hospital, and this delay in my training meant that I was among later entries made redundant for air crew. Robbed of the joy of flying, as a volunteer I was able to transfer to the Royal Navy, and was a Coder aboard the destroyer HMS Petard on operations to recapture Singapore when the atomic bombing of Japan suddenly ended the war.
The elders of my generation fought what was perhaps the only really just war. They undoubtedly saved the world from Nazi domination, even though victory turned sour so quickly. The generations that followed mine were Europe's fortunate young people.. Despite decades of nuclear containment they have been able to get on with their own lives without losing the brief years of youth. Even those of us lucky enough to survive paid that price.
