If I offered you some ket the next time you hear the beep of a campervan reversing onto your drive I reckon you’re taking it.
Been toing and froing with the home office neigh on 5 years trying to get my dads war records, had an email earlier saying we will be getting a redacted copy, the records are 175 pages,some light reading coming up.
That’s amazing mate. I’ve got some stuff from my Granddad’s regiment Sergeant from when he fought in Burma, along with all of his medals. My Granddad never really talked much about the war and when I asked him, he said it was just a case of looking after yourself and your mates and trying to get a job done. It was only when I read about some of the stuff he’d been through, that I understood how much he was downplaying it all.
My dad fought in Burma too, ended up in Changi, rarely spoke about it though, with our contact with FEPOW, that was a common theme. We are getting a list of medals, so we can get copies, as he sent his back in disgust at something he wouldn't say why, perhaps these documents will uncover it. I was 19 when he died and to my detriment never really questioned him on things. Not that he'd have said a lot, even though he did tell me about the time he killed the one Jap that he considered to be the only decent one he came across, kill or be killed
I think at 19 none of us really understood or had the insight into what those generations went through, so I’m not surprised you didn’t ask him. My Granddad used to say the same thing about the ‘enemy’. He said it wasn’t really an enemy, just lads like him who’d been sent to fight. But in the heat of battle he was acutely aware that it was kill or be killed. My wife’s Granddad told me a really sobering story once. He was in Holland and it was his task to take the personal belonging off of the bodies of the soldiers who’d fallen, on both sides. He said that he took a bible out of the top pocket of a British soldier and lying next to him was a German soldier, he searched his pockets and found another bible, in German. He stood there on the battlefield holding these two bibles, looking at these two dead young men and thought ‘what the hell is all of this for. Both young men, who believe in the same God, killing each other’
God not the problem, that was their strength humans are the problem as demonstrated on the WAR thread
How do you go about this mate, I'd love to find out more about my granddads time in WW2? He said nothing about it. My Mum said he had PTSD ( in hindsight, it probably wasnt a thing then) when he came back, definitely.
You can do some of it through Ancestry mate - they have a military / was records bit. My Grandad was one of four brothers - the youngest was a motorbike dispatch rider in WWI ... used to bomb along the front lines with German snipers trying to pick him off ... I found quite a bit out about him, including that one of his medals was for 'Distinguished Conduct' re his motorbike escapades...
