A Son of the Rock

Barely a month after the hundredth anniversary of Great Britain’s entry into what became known as The Great War, today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the similar joining (more a sidling in than any sort of assertive entrance) of what would grow into the turmoil that overshadowed not only the lives of its participants but also the childhoods of the generation born just after it, my generation; to wit the Second World War – an altogether more vicious, horrific and all-encompasing meat-grinder than its earlier counterpart, despite the perceptions of the two conflicts in this country.

I noted its seventieth anniversary five years ago. Five years gone in a flash.

The war was later described as six years of utter boredom punctuated by ten minutes of sheer terror. That would be a British perspective. I think the Great Patriotic War as fought in the Soviet Union was pretty much sheer terror all the way. The soldiers there would have considered World War 1 trenches a doddle by comparison.

My father was in the Territorial Army and so was called up immediately and travelled into France, without benefit of passport, and Belgium on the end of the Phoney War. Like the rest of the BEF he was soon back in France again (briefly, before being evacuated at Dunkirk) after at one point being a field away from an oncoming German tank. In later 1940 he spent days jumping off a ship into the North Sea in what was apparently a ruse to con the Germans into thinking we were going to invade Europe that year. (I doubt it worked.)

He re-entered Europe some time after D-Day (again without benefit of passport) spending the winter of 1944-5 in Holland but never actually saw action. I was perhaps lucky there. If he had he might have been killed in which case I could not have been born. A sobering thought.

He finally obtained a passport in the 1980s.