75 years today since WW2

[salymap]

I hopeI've got the date right but as someone who remembers it well I have been looking at an old book by Godfrey Winn, Scrapbook of Victory which includes som poems about the
men who took part in the air battles etc.

I know we are remembering the beginning of WW1 but feel this day will bring memories back to we older members of the Forum.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes - the Nazi invasion of Poland was on 1st September, and Britain & France declared War two days later, so today is the 75th anniversary, as you say, sals. Sad anniversaries this year.

[Stanley Stewart]

Warmest greetings, saly. I, too, recall the much dreaded Sunday morning radio broadcast, on 3 Sept 1939. "...and, consequently, this country is at war with Germany...". Started searching for my toy rifle!

[salymap]

thanks both for posting.

Stanley, thanks for your past kindess and the DVDs which, sadly, I can no longer hear, due to deafness [inspiteof of Ss's efforts]

I remember my parents getting me downstairs and putting up dark curtains as temporary 'black-out' as we had


returned from holiday the nightbefore.

[BBMmk2]

Pity not much publicity of this than WW1

[Richard Tarleton]

I hopeI've got the date right but as someone who remembers it well I have been looking at an old book by Godfrey Winn, Scrapbook of Victory which includes som poems about the
men who took part in the air battles etc.

Hi Saly, my father remembered having Godfrey Winn on board on HMS Kent, escorting one of the supply convoys to Murmansk in 1941. My father was a young midshipman.

[Mary Chambers]

I was born six months into the war. My mother told me she fainted when she heard the news that day. Although I don't remember as much as some of you, the war did dominate my childhood.

I wish I was totally certain it will never happen again....

[Sydney Grew]

Like Madame Chambers, I was a war baby, and all I can remember is the end in 1945. A good book which recaptures the atmosphere of that time bears the title Nineteen-Forty - Our Finest Hour - it was written by Arthur Mee and published in 1941. But I still think Chamberlain and Churchill were criminals. Only those brainwashed by the mere phantom of "nationalism" say otherwise.

[umslopogaas]

I was born in 1949 and my early years were spent in a house my grandfather had bought in the 1920s. Next to the back door was a long narrow room reinforced on the outside wall by three massive cement-covered pillars about two feet square by ten feet high. It was called the "Refuge Room" and it never dawned on me until years later that was because the pillars were there to strengthen the walls in case of enemy bombing. Fortunately no bombs ever fell nearby so I guess no-one ever had to take refuge!

[Serial_Apologist]

I was born six months into the war. My mother told me she fainted when she heard the news that day. Although I don't remember as much as some of you, the war did dominate my childhood.

I wish I was totally certain it will never happen again....

Then I am 4 months your senior, Mary, though, oddly enough, my elders spoke very little of their wartime experiences, apart from mention of having spent the first night of their "honeymoon" under the bed owing to an air raid, and an occasion at the local cinema when no one took any notice of an air raid siren, but rather, kept on watching the war film that was showing! The War was made to seem an event from long ago, notwithstanding the evidence still all around our district of West London. This relative circumspection about "The War" might have had something to do with the fact that my mother had three miscarriages before the only I came along - to my great shock she came out with this when drunk while we were on holiday when I was 14 - all down to the stresses of living through it and then buttoning down the memory.

One thing firmly entrenched into the growing consciousnesses of many of us of that baby boom generation, regardless of social or political background, was that war would be no more; another thing being that victory had been ensured by the rich overcoming their scruplies of upbringing and throwing in their lot with the poor to make sure such happenings would forever be consigned to the past. It shouldn't however be forgotten that while, on the surface, encouraged to look beyond the rationing and the ravaged landscapes to a better, more prosperous and inclusive future for all, we were also imprinted a slanted version of history and actuality that placed heterosexual British men at the helm in heroically bringing civilisation to a heathen world of people who looked different from, and were grateful to, us.

My father (1908-2001) continued believing in the latter myth right up to seeing the film "Ghandi".

Erratum: Apologies Mary for not reading your post properly: it was 3 months after the end of World War II that I was born.

[salymap]

Then I am 4 months your senior, Mary, though, oddly enough, my elders spoke very little of their wartime experiences, apart from mention of having spent the first night of their "honeymoon" under the bed owing to an air raid, and an occasion at the local cinema when no one took any notice of an air raid siren, but rather, kept on watching the war film that was showing! The War was made to seem an event from long ago, notwithstanding the evidence still all around our district of West London. This relative circumspection about "The War" might have had something to do with the fact that my mother had three miscarriages before the only I came along - to my great shock she came out with this when drunk while we were on holiday when I was 14 - all down to the stresses of living through it and then buttoning down the memory.

One thing firmly entrenched into the growing consciousnesses of many of us of that baby boom generation, regardless of social or political background, was that war would be no more; another thing being that victory had been ensured by the rich overcoming their scruplies of upbringing and throwing in their lot with the poor to make sure such happenings would forever be consigned to the past. It shouldn't however be forgotten that while, on the surface, encouraged to look beyond the rationing and the ravaged landscapes to a better, more prosperous and inclusive future for all, we were also imprinted a slanted version of history and actuality that placed heterosexual British men at the helm in heroically bringing civilisation to a heathen world of people who looked different from, and were grateful to, us.

My father (1908-2001) continued believing in the latter myth right up to seeing the film "Ghandi".

No TV of course- I was 9 when WW2 started and 15 when it ended. I and my parents survived a bomb just by our front gate but life was changed obviously and we never felt safe again. We had a big table shelter in our living room which we slept in and used as an game, jumping from it when young..


I really believed Vera Lynn and all the songs about 'bluebirds over theWhite Cliffs of Dover.

My eyes were opened to the dreadful damage when I started going to concerts and working in London. I'll never forget the terrace houses near London Bridge Station. The half-bedrooms precariously fallingin to the ground, I'll never forget them.

[gurnemanz]

I was born six months into the war. My mother told me she fainted when she heard the news that day. Although I don't remember as much as some of you, the war did dominate my childhood.

I wish I was totally certain it will never happen again....

Roughly the same as my parents' wedding day - shortly after Churchill's "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat". In my speech at their golden wedding I cheekily wondered if my father had echoed those words in his marriage proposal to her. When quite ill at the end of her life my mother said she would just like to make it into the new millennium and to her diamond wedding anniversary -- both of which she managed.

[Stanley Stewart]

The WW2 memories for me - I was 8 years old at the commencement and 14 on VE day - focus, particularly, on the wireless and voices of the announcers on the Home Service; Bruce Belfrage, Frank Phillips and Alvar Lidell; several decades later, I met Mr Lidell and he laughed out loud when I mentioned that this adolescent always thought his name was Al Bal-de-Dell! We had a house pact not to talk or make a noise during the evening news broadcast, always introduced with a stentorian cry of "Into battle" and a snippet from the march Lillibulero (spelling?) before we heard the resonant voice of the announcer. A pact, too, for Saturday Night Theatre which taught me the value of listening along with an appreciation of dramatic construction over many years.

Could it happen again, Mary?

"...there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come,
it will be now; if it be not now yet it will come:
the readiness is all:..." Hamlet, Act V, Sc II

[ardcarp]

I was a young child in the immediate post-war period and can remember bomb-craters, government-issue orange juice and rationing. The austerity we thought normal. I am un-fascinated by war, but intrigued by lesser-known peripheral facts which emerge from time to time. I was told by an elderly and eminent musician (who shall nevertheless remain nameless) that he was up at Oxford during WW2. At his college (The House) those achieving high marks in the First Public Examinations (end of first year) were allowed to continue their studies, whilst those who didn't were conscripted....if they didn't volunteer.

I have been quite unable to find out anything about this (was it university law or the law of the land?) and should be interested to hear from anyone who knows about university student status in wartime.

On another matter, my family went to stay with a German family for a holiday in the summer of 1954. I saw bomb craters there too, but the civilian population...at least as we saw it in the Rhineland...didn't seem to be suffering quite the same privations as us. Having said that, the father of the family, who had been captured on the Russian Front, had only been released from a Russian prisoner of war camp seven years after the war ended. My father had served as an officer in the RN during the war and the mutual friendship of our two families (which continues through the generations today) was the result of a deliberate attempt at reconciliation.

[Segilla]

I’m glad so to hear that you didn’t manage to catch Alvar Liddell’s pronunciation of his own name. To me it was Albardedale.

A very common word in WW2 new broadcasts was harass, as in ‘harass the enemy, with accent on the first syllable and I used to think it was harris as in Harris. Pronunciation of the word has become Americanised as har*ass* - but not my house!

On the subject of misunderstood surnames, they can be difficult to read as signatures, where there is only the one chance to decipher them. And in spoken form, the BBC World Service has plenty of examples of gabbling of their own names by people who have a very good grammatical grasp of English but are unable to pronounce it well.