My Dad and the war.

My father was in the army and I believe spent most of those years in Libya, which gave him an enduring hatred of sand, that fact only came up if we were on the beach otherwise he didn't talk about any aspect of his time in the war. I learnt more from my mother who told me he caught hepatitis in North Africa and was very ill. I have some photos of him in army uniform a couple with uncles who were in their airforce uniform and one with my French uncle who was in French naval uniform and part of the Free French in London where he met and married mu aunt, my father's sister.I also have a letter he wrote to my grand mother from Palestine saying how much he'd wanted to come there. He wasn't really one of those men who wanted to re live war time experiences he thought it was something everyone should move on from. I got more information from my mother, she was a telephonist working up in London for some ministry or other and told me of her experience of seeing an incendiary bomb being dropped and in later life becoming friends with a woman who was the other side of The Thames on the same day, obviously that day stayed with them both. I remember mum saying once "you've no idea how the war destroyed relationships" or not knowing whether your home or family were going to still be there, I think she had a Canadian boyfriend who was killed. Life I imagine for both parents was on a knife's edge, they were both teenagers when it began. My parents didn't meet till after the war was over .

Well , I’ve learnt something this morning. I didn’t realise some occupations were reserved occupations. One of my granddads was a docker working in the London docks and the other was a bank manager, but he was partially deaf , so couldn’t join up. However he was a fire watcher (I think that’s the term) .
Both my parents lived in London and were evacuated. Dad to Kent , mum to Devon . Mum was lucky , she, my gm and her siblings stayed with friends in Devon and so were together .
My fil was a stoker on the railways and was on the troup trains from London to the south coast.
I’m not sure what my mil , and paternal gm did during the war .

Forgot to say my mom worked in a bicycle factory. But at the start of the war it became a ammunitions factory. Mom said she made pom pom shells for the acac guns . They worked 24 hours ,3 shifts .

Reading the stories what has come across most is that those that fought didn't revel in what they did . And didn't approve of those that did. They did it because they had to. No such thing as post traumatic syndrome for them. They just had to get on with life once the war was over. Some like my dad his war lasted longer than those that fought in Europe but at least it did end.

It always saddened my dad they truly thought after what their fathers went through in the first world war and what they went through that wars would stop.

But of course they never will. It's just become a way of life that there is always at least one war going on every year. Just look how many are going on at the moment. How many needless deaths and families destroyed.

It shows even though we are supposed to live in a more enlighten age the powers that be have learnt nothing . The only people who win are the makers of weapon's of destruction. There will never been an end to wars . How sad is that.

Deedaa

My father was in the RAF. He spent some time in America (why?) which I know he hated. He was particularly shocked by the chain gangs he saw there. He also spent some time in the Shetlands, which he hated even more because it was so cold. He didn't succeed as a pilot (probably just as well) but he was a compass adjuster on Lancasters.

My mother was in the ATS and worked on radar. She was up in Liverpool sending information to the anti aircraft guns. She was also involved in training the Americans who came over to use Radar. She had to sign the Official Secrets Act so never told me much about it.

Your father could have been sent to America to train. My father spent nearly a year training in Canada. He was sent there in 1942, but unfortunately there wasn't enough equipment to train the wannabe pilots, so he spent months helping local farmers with the harvest.

He qualified as a bomber pilot in 1943, but somehow managed to miss Dresden. After the war, he was transferred and flew supplies into Palestine. He didn't talk about the war very much. He signed up on his 18th birthday and I think it scarred him.

They, not the. He was only twenty.

My Dad was involved in the liberation of Belsen. He said it was dreadful and spoke of how the made the Germans bury the corpses at gunpoint.

My father was in the RAF. He spent some time in America (why?) which I know he hated. He was particularly shocked by the chain gangs he saw there. He also spent some time in the Shetlands, which he hated even more because it was so cold. He didn't succeed as a pilot (probably just as well) but he was a compass adjuster on Lancasters.

My mother was in the ATS and worked on radar. She was up in Liverpool sending information to the anti aircraft guns. She was also involved in training the Americans who came over to use Radar. She had to sign the Official Secrets Act so never told me much about it.

My father refused to talk about his service in the war ... he would just dismiss any enquiries. I am guessing he had a really bad time ... he was in Singapore. He was very angry about being called up and forced to, as he saw it, waste his young adult life. There was no hint of patriotism there at all. He felt the whole war was a massive mistake.
My parents-in-law were linguists and spent their war code-breaking at Bletchley Park ..... but we heard little about it as they had signed the official secrets act and maintained silence till they died.

The people who really have my admiration are those who were conscientious objectors who refused to fight or to contribute to the war effort on moral or ethical grounds. They were vilified as cowards. Yet many of them worked in dangerous roles as ambulance drivers and stretcher bearers and in similar positions which put them in the line of fire as surely as those who bore arms.

I believe that if this country were to be involved in a conventional war the likes of Ukraine many young people nowadays would refuse to fight or to aid the war effort in any way.

Someone else has suggested looking him up on the '1939 England and Wales Register'. This is a very useful document, available to search on Ancestry etc. (If you are not on Ancestry I expect you know someone who is and will look him up for you.) It will give you his address in 1939, who he was living with and what his occupation was. Also it may show if he was a special constable, air raid warden etc. I hope you find him there.

tanith

Thanks everyone it seems he was indeed in a reserved occupation then. I’ll have to settle for that.

Some jobs were very important therefore designated as reserved occupations.

Others joined up and were sent to do certain jobs eg, sent down the mines.
www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a6652019.shtml#:~:text=The%20reserved%20(or%20scheduled)%20occupation,agricultural%20workers%2C%20schoolteachers%20and%20doctors.

My dad was in the Navy ,he never spoke of his time at war ,all of my uncles were in the Army ,two were among the Scots regiments left behind on the beaches ,one had a leg blown off in a parachute jump.all came home with mental and physical disabilities .NONE wore poppies ,none visited cenotaphs .
The uncle who lost his leg had nothing but praise for the German POW camp who fitted him with an artificial leg and cared for him ,the others had a very bad opinion of the competence of Churchill all of which I discovered when asking for help with an essay in the 60's .
That was the only time I asked about their war ,I understood it was a painful subject .My dad couldn't stand the type of men who revelled in war stories he said it was bad enough to live through without glorifying it like a bad novel
The continuing obsession with WW1 and WW11 is in my mind very strange ,surely we should be leaving it in the past and trying to STOP war happening again.

My father was in a reserved occupation, in a factory that made explosives. Many of the men in our neighbourhood worked for the same company in similar jobs, so there was no stigma in having a reserved occupation. He was also Captain of the local Home Guard and later in life was a fan of Dad's Army which he said wasn't too far from the truth!

My father-in-law was also in a reserved occupation. He was headmaster of the grammar school in a market town in East Anglia. There was a London school evacuated there, which shared his school, not an easy arrangement. He was also an air raid warden at night.
In a way, DH was lucky in that both parents were there and not in harm's way. But they were so busy that there wasn't a lot of time for children, who ran wild, fighting with the evacuee schoolboys and stealing food because they were always hungry.

My father was on what Churchill described as The worst journey in the world
He was 19yrs old and a signalman on the Russian convoys.
At the same time my mother was assembling munitions in what was known as the danger buildings in the Woolwich Arsenal.
Those buildings were directly next to the Thames.

My dad serviced in the South Staffordshire regiment during WW2. He was in Egypt,Burma ,Indian and parachuted into Naples during the plague. Dad said he was hooked up and was told to bend his knees on landing before he was pushed out.

Dad was very proud to match every remembrance day. Dad could have had 4 campaign metals but he wouldn't claim them . He said medals should only be for acts of bravery and courage not for doing what they where ordered to do. He told us funny stories what happened. But he hated people who reveled in what they did to the enemy . He said they did what they did to fight for freedom and a way of life. They followed orders.

He had great respect for the Gurkhas and the ,Chindits . And you always made sure your boots where laced the British way and the Gurkhas would crawl through the jungle and feel the laces of the sleeping soldiers if it wasn't the British way they ham stringed them.

He was angry the Gurkhas never got the same benefits of the British soldiers and their wives and widows.

Dad's legs where in a terrible state from leeches . He was malnourished as a child and joined the army when he was 17 . Because the food got spoiled because of the heat in the army. He had a big ulcer when he was 28 . To big to removed so they made his stomach smaller using mesh.

My dad was proud to service his country and he never told my mom what he did . He only told us he got stabbed in the back in Cario when my daughter was doing about the second world war in primary school.

I have an uncle and cousin who both served in the army. My uncle served many times in Northern Ireland during the troubles he would never talk about what happened. My cousin was in the royal engineers and worked in war torn countries but he was like my dad and uncle and didn't talk about what he saw.

My Grandad worked in Portsmouth Naval Dockyard so that was a reserved occupation.
The area was a bombing target, and when I went past the dockyard to get to school in the early 1970s there were still bombsites in the area.

The declaration that we were at war with Germany was announced on my Mum's 7th birthday, 3rd September 1939.
My Grandma used to tell us she heard it on the radio in the kitchen and said, "Now we're for it..."

Mum could have been evacuated but Grandma kept her at home. She decided if they were going to be hit, they'd all go together.
Thankfully they all survived 🙏

Thanks everyone it’s interesting and informative to read your stories, I’m very proud of my Dad whatever task he undertook during the War.

My dad volunteered at 18 for the Navy and was an ordinance artificer on anti-aircraft guns on landing craft at D day aged 21 He never talked about it. We found his old papers and he had been in India with American and Australian troops about to invade Japan when they dropped the bomb.
My mum was in a reserved occupation a confectioner and baker her sister was sent to munitions factories at Bootle and came home with bright yellow hair.
My FIL was in a reserved occupation an electrician,he spent a lot of time in the Vickers Armstrong works in the Northeast mending the electricals that had been bombed, and the houses down on the Tyne.
I think reserved occupations were as important as the people who were in the forces, many of whom never talked about it.

My Dad. A Sergeant was in the RAF and served in Gambia, where half died of malaria and also was in Germany.
Mum, a Private, joined the ATS, where she was the Baby of The Battery operating radar on Romney Marshes.
I have both their badges.

My grandfather died in 1918 mot long before the war ended. . He was in the RAMC but never saw action as he died in training because of a faulty gas mask. Do I think any the less of him? No. His work as a Salvation Army Officer had involved him in supporting many families and people doing war work of various sorts. His death was a loss to the community as well as to his wife and children.

My dad also couldn't fight due to a medical condition but he was in the army and sent wherever the most bombs were falling to clear up afterwards, including dealing with those who had died. My mum was in a reserved occupation to do with medical instruments, not everyone went abroad to do their bit.
The 1939 Register is very interesting to see who was where as war broke out.

GF not GD !

My GD was a train driver.....he was never called up ....his trains took him to Liverpool ( he lived in Leeds)

It was important to have men working at the docks tanith. Women took over many men’s jobs but few, if any, would have had the strength required of dock workers and drivers of heavy vehicles. Many men in reserved occupations would doubtless have liked to join up but the government recognised their importance to keeping the country going. Any hostility shown towards them would have made their lives very difficult, but without their contributions on the home front women, children and the elderly would not have survived. Don’t let the fact that he didn’t fight diminish him in your eyes - my dad couldn’t fight because he was blind, and his inability to do his bit affected him greatly.