It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
My dad’s dad joined the TA as a teenager and was 19 when the war broke out. He signed up right away and went to North Africa with the Royal Artillery. He spent time in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, and by the end of the war he was one of the British officers in charge of a POW camp in Germany. My dad has his uniform, medals and photographs. I have what we call my grandad’s ‘Nazi stick’, a stick he confiscated from one of the prisoners with a swastika, eagle, ‘Russland’, ‘Leningrad’, ‘1943’, a cross and dove carved on it.
Feedback
My feedback thread is here.
My feedback thread is here.
My uncle and father were RAF in WW2. My uncle was in the first Mosie squadron.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
There were two stories he did tell though, one was of being able to hear the enemy being attacked by crocodiles in the swamps.
The other was of acquiring a pet monkey that freaked out one night as the door handle in the building they were in started turning. Apparently they could see the other side of the door and there was no one there. The monkey eventually buried itself into his jacket, terrified. Mad story that if anyone other than my grandad had told, I'd never have believed them. He was such a straight, sensible bloke that he just didn't have it in him to make shit like that up.
A very gentle soul that had a remarkable affinity with animals - they seemed to gravitate to him. I remember my sister have a right little bastard of a dog - constantly barking, jealous of everything, completely disobedient. One Christmas, she'd brought it to our parent's house and it was being a twat until grandad gently spoke to it. It spent the rest of the day curled up at his feet.
It also turns out that he was a member of the SIS/Secret Service during his career. Which no one knew about until recently when my Gran started to give zero fucks and just started telling us shit she probably wasn't supposed to
My other grandfather was a clergyman so I don't think he went to war but I don't know for sure.
He never said a single word about the war - nothing at all. My grandmother and dad both said they knew better than to ask, but they reckoned that he ended up being a medic, as he came back with a rather unusual amount of medical knowledge.
My maternal grandfather was a policeman, and I think later a prison officer, and was already too old for soldiering at the time.
Initially, I think, barrage balloons and similar civil defense measures during the Battle of Britain. Then in Orkney and/or Shetland, where he was ground crew mostly for bombers and coastal command, I think. He was transferred to Palestine at the end of the war in time to get shot at a bit by the Irgun and the like. He continued as a civilian aircraft mechanic until he retired in the late 70s.
My paternal grandfather, on the other hand, was a career soldier. He was in India from the early 1920s on. He was a Sgt Major in the Signals, and spent most of the war in North Africa -- dragging around in the desert in a jeep intercepting field telephone cables, and the like -- and then in Italy, where he saw a lot of fairly hard fighting close up. After the war, he was in the Indian Army for a while, including post-independence, as they kept a smallish number of British non-commissioned officers for a few years as part of the transition to independence.
His son, my uncle, wasn’t old enough but that didn’t stop him. He ran away from home and signed up about 18 months before he should.
He wasn’t the worlds best soldier and faced court martial several times, once for overturning a truck on the parade ground. He liked to drive fast.
Captured in the desert fighting with Montgomery, and taken to Italy. Needless to say he wasn’t having that and escaped. Found the partisans and lived with them until the end of the war, never missing a chance to fight and kill people.
His family thought he was dead until one day his sisters went to the cinema in Leeds where the newsreel was showing footage of the liberation of Italy.
Mentioned in Dispatches and ended up a with three stripes before being demoted. Again.
or years and retired near Farnborough and stayed in touch with his regiment and the partisans, going to Italy every year and receiving a high honour very late in life.
When he died, the funeral was in some soulless crematorium with the service conducted by someone who didn’t know him from Adam.
It was shit until, out of the blue, a soldier in full dress uniform marched in and played the Last Post and laid a wreath. Bit of a shaker that.