DEANO Don’t ruin what they fought for
HOW are you today?
Hungover maybe? Kids playing up? Amazon delivery not arrived? Election- mad politicians driving you up the wall?
Well, 80 years ago, it was just a bit different.
Our grandparents had more pressing matters on their minds… It was D- Day + 3.
British troops of the 3rd Infantry Battalion were still trying to capture the French city of Caen.
It was supposed to have been taken on D- Day, but German resistance was solid.
The city would not fall for another month after weeks of bloody fighting.
Elsewhere, British troops were fighting through the French countryside against a Wehrmacht armed with 88mm guns that could blow a man to atoms or destroy a tank with just one shot.
Raging
On the sea, the Battle of Ushant was fought off the coast of Brittany between German and Allied destroyer flotillas.
In the East, the Battles of Imphal and Kohima were raging as British and Indian troops held out against fanatical Japanese attacks.
At home, families were waiting for that dreaded telegram from the War Office, telling them a loved one was dead or missing.
A few days later, V1 Doodlebug rocket bombs would start raining on Britain, eventually killing more than 5,000 people.
Rationing meant everyone was hungry and five years of war had left people’s nerves in tatters.
The people who endured this horror – who fought, saw friends and loved ones killed, and suffered every day – were the smiling old people you saw sitting on benches in our towns and villages watching the world go by.
The doting grandparents who gave you sweets and pocket money.
The grey- haired, gentle people who shaped so many of our lives were once mighty warriors – hard as nails and brave as lions.
Everyone fought – from the men who leapt off landing craft at Sword Beach, to your granny who worked through the night making shells and bullets.
Evils
They fought one of the greatest evils ever to have emerged in this troubled world.
They won and went back to their lives – getting married, having kids, rebuilding a nation, brushing away praise for their superhuman efforts between 1939 and 1945.
If they had not done what they did – if this great nation had not done what it did – tyranny and unspeakable wickedness would have won.
We would be living in a hellish prison camp run by murderous madmen.
There are not many of that Greatest Generation still with us.
We saw them at the D- Day commemorations last week.
Proud, yet modest. Tears for lost comrades in their old eyes.
We will NEVER be able to repay the debt we owe the wartime generation. That debt is infinite. But we can do our best.
And we can start by not ruining everything they fought for.