Then there’s the other side of things, the guys who DID do their jobs and had something to be proud of, who have now turned jelly-brain, and forgotten the lot. My grandfather was ground crew in Bomber Command, working on Wellingtons, Stirlings and Lancasters, all with 149 Sqdn. Listen to what’s left of him talk now though, and he swears that he piloted Halifaxes.
Sad.
It certainly is sad that so much first hand knowledge and experience goes undocumented for whatever reason.
I had a great uncle who died about 5 months ago, he was a navigator on Wellingtons and Lancasters throughout the war and was forced to bail-out on at least two occassions. His experiences very nearly destroyed him before the war was even over and my mother recalls reading his log books as a child. She says that by the later stages of the war his previously neat handwriting had deteriorated to the point where it was unrecognisable as his and was almost illegible. He won a DFC but, such was his mental state by then, that he threw it in the fire when he got home from collecting it and it was only just rescued in time by his mother.
I suppose my point in telling this is prompted by Dan Johnson who said…
Seems to me the first clue is the willingness of the person to tell the stories. Most if not all of the vets I’ve met are quiet and humble men who don’t go out of their way to talk about their wartime experience.
…and I think that’s absolutely true. To this day we don’t really know if there was anything specific that so badly affected my great-uncle or whether it was the general stress of the whole situation that ground him down, but either way it’s perfectly understandable that these people often prefer to keep things to themselves.
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