Week 45.09

Tendring Topics………on line

Remembrance Sunday

Next Sunday (8th November) is Remembrance Sunday. It is, I think, a commemoration that towards the end of the last century was beginning to lose significance as the World Wars and their victims began to fade from contemporary memory and to take their place in the history books.

Born as I was in 1921, I can remember during my childhood the continuing desolation of the bereaved of World War I; the grieving mothers, the young widows, the attractive girls destined to become old maids because the love of their life was buried ‘in some corner of a foreign field’. Throughout my pre-teen years there were always women, in tears, wearing their Flanders poppies on black garments at Remembrance Services on what we then called ‘Armistice Day’. At tens of thousands of such services it was affirmed that, ‘They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them’.

But those who remembered them best wished so fervently that they had had the opportunity to grow old; the opportunity to be wearied by age and to endure (and enjoy!) those inexorably passing years.

I doubt if since 1945 there has ever been a single day in which the whole world has been at peace. At least though, we in Western Europe have been at peace with each other, and, for the most part, only marginally affected by conflicts raging elsewhere in the world. The ‘Cold War’ remained mercifully cold.

Then came the Falklands War and, after a relatively short gap, the first and second Gulf Wars, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Once again we have parents, proud of their dead hero sons and bravely keeping a stiff upper lip, weeping widows and orphans, and desolated girl friends……. not, of course, anything like as many as there were in the wake of the two world wars, but their grief is every bit as painful and as profound.

It will almost certainly be in the prayerful silence of our Quaker Meeting for Worship that on Remembrance Day I shall remember my fallen comrades from World War II. In my Territorial Medium Artillery Regiment (6in howitzers for those interested in such things) we were mostly in our late teens and early twenties, young men from Ipswich and other East Suffolk towns and villages, who had volunteered for the TA at the beginning of 1939 when we had had realized that war with Nazi Germany was inevitable.

From 1939 till July 1941 we were part of Britain’s defences against invasion. In 1941 we sailed to North Africa and, during the winter of 1941/1942 we helped to secure the surrender of Bardia and Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) from the combined German and Italian Forces. When Rommel counter-attacked in the New Year we were for several months in almost continuous action in the Gazala Line, west of Tobruk. Eventually we became part of the Tobruk Garrison and were overrun by Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21st June 1942.

There were 100 fatal casualties among the 700 or so men in my regiment.. That was a quite a heavy death-toll for a Medium Artillery regiment serving in North Africa in World War II. What I find particularly appalling is that, while there were obviously some deaths in battle, the overwhelming number occurred after Tobruk had fallen and we had been taken prisoner.

There were deaths when a diphtheria epidemic raged through the large transit POW camp in Benghazi, Libya. There were deaths in Italian prison camps from starvation-related afflictions. I watched Jock McGregor, a Scotsman and a good friend of mine, simply take to his bunk and die of hunger and cold in a camp in northern Italy. A few lost the will to live after receiving ‘Dear John’ letters telling them that their girlfriends or wives had found new ‘true loves’. ‘Who is he?’ ‘I don’t know; some smooth s….. in a reserved occupation or b……. overpaid Yank I suppose’.

In Germany there were deaths on the long trek in the icy conditions of northern Europe during the winter of 1944/1945 as POW camps in Poland and East Prussia were evacuated to avoid prisoners being liberated by the advancing Red Army. By far the greatest number of fatal casualties from my regiment were though from ‘friendly fire’. Fifty young men whom I had known personally, drowned like rats in a trap on 14th November 1942, when a British submarine torpedoed the Italian SS Scillin, the prison ship transporting them from Tripoli to Italy. The commander of the submarine had thought that he was attacking an Italian troop ship.

Myself on my return to England from captivity in Germany and below Heather Gilbert, the girl who had waited for me for four years.

I received no battle injuries, escaped the epidemic in Benghazi, sailed earlier and uneventfully from Libya to Italy, and survived semi-starvation in Italy. On VE Day I liberated myself from German captivity (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Red Army!) and arrived home in Ipswich, safe and sound, just ten days later on 18th May, my 24th birthday! My girlfriend Heather Gilbert was waiting for me, having successfully resisted the attractions of both our American allies and those in reserved occupations during the four years that I had been overseas.

I was, as I have so often been, extremely lucky. On Sunday I shall remember with sadness the tragically wasted lives of friends and comrades who didn’t enjoy that same good luck.

Flanders’ Poppies

This morning (26th October) I heard a ‘what the papers say’ report on the radio that a letter in the Daily Telegraph, from a Lieut. Col. (retired) complained bitterly about tv news announcers wearing their poppies prematurely. ‘Poppies’, the good Colonel insisted, ‘should be worn only after 1st November’.

Who on earth says so? That sounds to me like one of those stupid Regimental Orders that used to appear on our Battery Notice Board insisting that ‘From 0800 hrs. 1st October, great coats will be worn on parade’, never mind the fact that 1st October might well be in the middle of an Indian Summer heat wave.

With Christmas catalogues in the post before the end of August, and Easter eggs and hot cross buns on sale the minute the Christmas decorations come down, it’s sad if we can’t wear our Flanders Poppies a week or so early!

In any case tv news announcers are not alone in having never heard of (or of ignoring) this prohibition.. No politician hoping to be returned to Westminster in next year’s General Election has been seen without a poppy for almost a week. Lots of ordinary people in the street, myself among them, are wearing them too.

I think that everybody who wishes the Poppy campaign well, should be very pleased that this year the poppies were on sale in good time and that people were already wearing them well before the end of October.

Pride cometh before a fall!

So says the proverb, and mine certainly did. On Saturday 24th October, my son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, came to Clacton to visit me. After lunch at the Bowling Green we wondered what to do next. It was a damp and miserable day. ‘Let’s try the Martello Tower at Jaywick’, I suggested, ‘often there’s an art exhibition there’.

That Saturday was ‘between Exhibitions’ but Andy and Marilyn thought they’d like to see the view from the top. They looked at me doubtfully, ‘Anywhere you two can go, I can go too’, I said with eighty-eight year old pride, ‘I can climb those two flights of stairs. No problem!’

And so I could, holding on firmly to the hand-rail and pulling myself up. Andy and Marilyn followed behind, ready to try to break my fall if I had been over-optimistic. I reached the top safely. Here there was no hand-rail. I took two steps forward, lost my balance, and fell heavily on my front. Pride had indeed come before a fall!

No, I didn’t suffer any permanent injury. I broke the frame of my glasses and scratched the left lens (over my one ‘good’ eye!). The frame dug into my face and caused cuts that, at the time, bled profusely. I think though that my glasses probably saved my eye from more serious injury. Andy and Marilyn found some tissues to staunch my bleed and Andy dialled 999 for a paramedic to check me over. I made my way slowly and carefully to the ground floor (on the way up I had quoted Sir Thomas More’s piece of black humour as he mounted the scaffold to have his head cut off: ‘Would you be kind enough to help me up please. I’ll make my own way down!)

On the ground floor there was a comfortable settee on which I sat and waited for the Paramedic. He arrived in a very few minutes, applied plaster dressings to my ‘wounds’, told me that I had a lovely black eye developing and urged me to phone my doctor if during the next 24 hours I experienced sickness, faintness, serious headaches or dizziness. I had none of those symptoms and have been left with nothing worse than a still-lingering black eye and the need (that will soon be met) for a new pair of glasses.

I’m not surprised though that ‘Pride’ is listed as one of the seven deadly sins though, in my case, I am glad to be able to say that it proved to be a good deal less than ‘deadly!’

Tony Blair for EU President ………I think not!

Speaking as a Europhile (by fairly recent convincement!) and firm believer in closer European integration, I think that Tony Blair is the very last person who should be considered for the Presidency of the European Union. For one thing he would represent a country that is only a half-hearted member.

Even if our European partners were prepared to accept a British President, Tony Blair would be among the last names that would come to my mind. I think that, with his ever-ready smile and persuasive tongue, he would probably use his presidency to try to create a New-EU on the lines of New Labour, an organisation for which I feel minimal enthusiasm..

I have little doubt that his appointment would be welcomed by the CIA and by the Far Right in the USA who, judging him by past perfomance, would see him as ‘Our man in Brussels’. I can only hope that if by some mischance Tony Blair were elected President, he would prove them to be wrong.