V E Day

[MrGongGong]

Isn't the word flunky?

The great John Cooper Clarke summed him up perfectly.....
including the inspired lines

You’re like a dose of scabies,
I’ve got you under my skin.

[antongould]

.




... mme v's pa was a night fighter pilot, flying ace, air commodore DSO DFC & bar and all the works. My pa was a conscientious objector, attached to the Friends' Ambulance Unit in Bethnal Green. We wd all share kernelbogey's take on the wretched jingoism that has become attached to this commemoration.

.

Totally agree vints and kb

[richardfinegold]

I have given thought to every one of those questions, I believe, Richard; and perhaps that is a consequence of having grown up in the shadow of the war. None of my immediate family was a combatant (my father as a teacher being in a reserved occupation), but my mother, of Austrian descent, had family 'on the other side'; and postwar Britain in the '50s was just that - emerging, slowly, from the consequences of the war. As a young man (in the '70s) I met at least one older man who had been a combatant and who remained fiercely resentful of the prosperity of the Germans, compared with the postwar austerity which he believed we had endured.

So I too have read fairly widely on the history.

I fear celebratory/commemorative days such as we had here on Friday are unlikely to stimulate debate and enquiry of the kind you so rightly commend. I avoided all of the radio and tv broadcasts, but could observe that the direction of them tended towards the celebratory.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I could reiterate at greater length about the value of using an opportunity such as this for reflection but it would be redundant. I will observe that sometimes after parade aspects of the day have passed, the more thoughtful events will appear as sort of a two step. I would keep up on the events of the Imperial War Museum during the year, for example.
I was born in 1958, but my early World was shaped by the War. My father had polio as a child and couldn’t serve, so he worked in an Aircraft factory where he met my mother. We had many Holocaust survivors. In religious school with other spoiled Jewish American brats of the late sixties we would search our teachers arms for tattoos, which were a great source of shame to the bearer.
The popular entertainment my youth featured many TV shows and movies that featured gritty Americans killing scores of Germans
Each week. Later in my adolescence our defeat in Vietnam and the counterculture made that fare unfashionable. Many of the cries of “Make America Great Again” by Trump’s firearm laden followers are a desire to return to that fantasy TV land .
My wife’s father was a navigator in the Pacific. His plane took flack over Tokyo on his maiden flight. The pilot was killed and the copilot was mortally wounded but managed to crash land their plane on Iwo Jima before expiring. How he summoned the courage to fly multiple missions after that is beyond me. Something like 15,000 Americans died taking Iwo, whose strategic value was that it was an island halfway between the Marianas Islands and the Japanese Home Islands and therefore a refuge for stricken planes. On a cost benefit analysis and with the benefit of hind sight it may have been less costly to take the losses of the Pilots and the Planes that were saved, but then no one knew at the time that the War would be over in a few months, and of course my wife would never have been born.
There was an Iwo commemoration recently, and when I mentioned during a Zoom call with my wife and her extended family I was chastised gently for what they, and I guess everyone that knows me, considers my excessive interest in WWII.
When I mentioned that had it not been for the conquest of Iwo neither she nor her 5 siblings would be here there was a slight pause

[Andrew]

Mixed feelings.... My Grandfather was in the Luftwaffe!

[BBMmk2]

Unfortunately, my late father was out in the Far East.

[gurnemanz]

My wife's grandfather was a professional soldier in the German Army already well before the First World War. He was in his 40s and a lieutenant-colonel when the War started. He went over to France by train with his horse on board and was shot by a British sniper within the first few weeks. We have his last letter home, thanking my wife's father, aged 8, for the nice picture he had drawn. We also have a fine photo of him with moustache and pointy Prussian helmet.

[ardcarp]

My wife's grandfather was a professional soldier in the German Army already well before the First World War. He was in his 40s and a lieutenant-colonel when the War started. He went over to France by train with his horse on board and was shot by a British sniper within the first few weeks. We have his last letter home, thanking my wife's father, aged 8, for the nice picture he had drawn. We also have a fine photo of him with moustache and pointy Prussian helmet.

Your post prompts me to talk about our family's relationship with Germany. My father served as a British Naval officer throughout WW2 (mainly escort duty on a destroyer in te Med...but he didn't talk about it much). However, he and my mother were strongly internationalist after the War, and set up a local branch of The United Nations Association. They actively sought to have links with German families, and set up a charity to help German refugees in German refugee camps. They were those who fled from East Germany to the West. I remember several of them...mainly older children....coming to have holidays with us. Another German family we befriended (via a pen-friend of my sister called Regine) invited us to stay in Bad Niederbreisig for a holiday. I was four at the time and remember sitting on a suitcase at Bonn station playing my plastic ukulele and singing My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean. But I digress. Regine's family lived in a beautiful house near the Rhine...much more opulent than ours! However Regine's dad, who had been an officer in the German army, had been taken prisoner on the Russian front...and had only just been released from a Russian POW camp. It was 1952, so the poor guy had been incarcerated for about 10 years. In short, they were a lovely family and we became close friends...a friendship continuing to this day with children, grandchildren, cousins, etc, etc.

[gurnemanz]

Your post prompts me to talk about our family's relationship with Germany. My father served as a British Naval officer throughout WW2 (mainly escort duty on a destroyer in te Med...but he didn't talk about it much). However, he and my mother were strongly internationalist after the War, and set up a local branch of The United Nations Association. They actively sought to have links with German families, and set up a charity to help German refugees in German refugee camps. They were those who fled from East Germany to the West. I remember several of them...mainly older children....coming to have holidays with us. Another German family we befriended (via a pen-friend of my sister called Regine) invited us to stay in Bad Niederbreisig for a holiday. I was four at the time and remember sitting on a suitcase at Bonn station playing my plastic ukulele and singing My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean. But I digress. Regine's family lived in a beautiful house near the Rhine...much more opulent than ours! However Regine's dad, who had been an officer in the German army, had been taken prisoner on the Russian front...and had only just been released from a Russian POW camp. It was 1952, so the poor guy had been incarcerated for about 10 years. In short, they were a lovely family and we became close friends...a friendship continuing to this day with children, grandchildren, cousins, etc, etc.

In the 50s my parents, both British, were involved with an organisation which encouraged post-war links between young British and German people. I was too young but my elder sisters went on group exchanges. 60 years later my sister is still I touch with one partner. I remember learning my first German sentence: Du bist doof! I went on to study German and for all of of my working life I taught German in England or English in Germany. It was while doing the latter that I met my wife, and my parents ended up with a German daughter-in-law.

[Serial_Apologist]

In the 50s my parents, both British, were involved with an organisation which encouraged post-war links between young British and German people. I was too young but my elder sisters went on group exchanges. 60 years later my sister is still I touch with one partner. I remember learning my first German sentence: Du bist doof! I went on to study German and for all of of my working life I taught German in England or English in Germany. It was while doing the latter that I met my wife, and my parents ended up with a German daughter-in-law.

Then you were lucky! My parents' postwar anti-Germanicism [sic] would express itself in my father patronisingly telling my mother, "Well, dear, I don't like Germans any more than you do. but like it or not, we have to get on with them, now that we're in the Common Market". In view of which it came as some surprise to me when Mum welcomed a German girlfriend I acquired in the early 1970s with open arms. When I expressed this surprise, her reply was, "Well, Susanna is all right - it's the rest of them I can't abide"! You used to get a lot of that sort of thing directed at blacks, behind their backs!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

My parents were married in August 1945, when the country had large numbers of German Prisoners of War. They joined an organisation that enabled POWs to meet local people in Manchester, and befriended three of them in particular. The gratitude shown by these men resulted in lifelong friendships.
Our family was invited to Hildesheim, near Hannover, in 1958. Then in 1961, we stayed with another family in Offenbach, near Frankfurt. The 3rd ex-POW lived in East Germany, which more or less blocked our going there, though we were invited. After reunification, my mother was eventually able to go there in the 1990s

[gurnemanz]

Re 1945 in Germany. My wife was not yet born but her family lived in Leipzig where stories were rife about what would happen when the Russians arrived. Her uncle (father's brother-in-law) had a small firm and shot himself at his desk. There were a lot of suicides at this time.
Re POWs. I think of a colleague German teacher at the school where I worked for many years. Her mother had married a German ex-POW who had been assigned to farm work during the war and had preferred to stay in England rather than go home. Like the recently deceased Man City goalkeeper, Bert Trautmann.