V E Day

[Chelsea14Ian]

We lived in Friossart Road Eltham. They say it's a small world.My Granddad was in the Royal Horse Artillery in WW1 and drove trams in the second war.

[Polly]

Someone just played The Last Post on a bugle. It echoed over the gardens....

[Chelsea14Ian]

A very different way today to mark the end of the war.None the less think a good balance. One things for sure when we come though our own battle with covad- 19.We should have a party.

We'll meet again dont know where,don't when but I know we'll meet again. 

[ExSurveyor]

My Father in Law spent VE Day in Taronta, Italy, onboard SS Orangeleaf. She was moored having repairs undertaken. shortly after she sailed to Bombay, via the Suez Canal and Aden.

During the war he was sunk three times and reported missing, he always turned up eventually.

 

[ExSurveyor]

My 95 year old Mother in Law worked at Roots in Canterbury spraying army vehicles in camouflage, depending on there destination.

 She celebrated in the City with everyone else that night.

The following day she received the awful news that her fiancé had been killed by a sniper an hour before the official ceasefire.

It has been a day of mixed memories for her, sadly she is somewhat confused most days but remembered the sadness today.

[MauriceMynah]

I wanted to call this post "My family and other battles" but thought better of it.

 

My father very rarely spoke of “his war” and for a number of years I had thought that he must have had it pretty bad. It was only in later life, when one day I asked about it, I found out that for the most part his time was, aside from one incident, uneventful.

He spent time in Italy, where he failed to learn Italian, and he spent time in the desert, where he failed to learn anything else. … no, not quite true.

It was in the desert where he learned that the only weapon he had been equipped with, an army issue revolver, was as much use to him as a chocolate tea-pot. The gun was fine, but at 25 feet he couldn’t hit a 50 gallon oil drum. It was this fact that lead to the only noteworthy incident he had.

My father was a dispatch rider. He spent his time bombing around the desert on a motorbike, delivering messages here there and everywhere, and for the most part, enjoying it.

He had been given a dispatch to deliver. He was going pretty much flat out on a dodgy bit of track and in the distance he saw another dispatch motorbike heading in the opposite direction, coming towards him. As they neared each other, dad realised that the other rider was a German. It was also apparent to him that the other fellow had also recognised the situation. Two things happened at more or less the same time. They both started fiddling with their holsters to get their guns, and they both fell off their motorbikes.

Dad explained to me that falling off his motorbike was something he was well practiced in, more so than the German, as dad was on his feet first, and had his revolver in his hand. The German had dropped his gun whilst falling off his bike so stood there terrified with his hands as high in the air as he could get them.

Dad, being pleased (and just a little bit proud) that He’d got the “drop” on the German, but being well aware that the German was in no danger whatsoever, beckoned to the German to move back. He picked up the German’s gun, looked at it blankly and through it as far as he could.

Returning to his bike, knowing that he couldn’t take the man prisoner, and equally knowing that he couldn’t shoot the German even if he wanted to, He picked up his bike, started it and rode off. He assumed that the German would look for his gun and do much the same.

That was the moment my father suddenly realised that it might just have been a good idea if he had taken the German’s dispatches from him.

He also realised that it would be a pretty good idea if he didn’t mention any of this to anybody else as well.

That was the only “action” my father saw.

 

And now for my mother’s war.

 

Unlike my father, my mother would talk incessantly about the things she saw and did during the war. Although a schoolgirl at the start of the war and one who was evacuated from Leigh-on-sea to Mansfield, by the end of the war, she was back in Leigh, and working in a drawing office. My mother had had her education in art school which had set her up nicely to be a draughtswoman. There was an electronics business just outside Southend called Ecko which specialised in radio and for the later war years she worked for them.

She realised that when the war was over, she would be out of work when the soldiers returned. She also knew that she would need some sort of “portfolio” of her work if she was going to get another job in a drawing office.

Now, we all know that the best way to keep a secret is not to let anyone know that you have a secret to be kept. Ecko worked on that principle. My mother had no idea that the drawings she was working on were secret, and as there was little in the way of security, she assumed they were unimportant. So, for some of her drawings, she made an extra copy. These were transported home in the basket on the front of her bicycle. These drawings were of a device of which she knew nothing. It was a version of the Magnetron.

So, in short, my clueless mummy was cycling around Southend and Leigh-on-sea with the primary secrets of Radar in her bicycle basket.

 

Many people are proud of their parents and I am no different. My pride is that they both managed to survive the war without being stood up against a wall and shot… by either side!

[JennyMorgan]

 

I wasn't around then so I'll refer to the my cache of family legends.  My father, being on the Home Front, was one of those who volunteered to go underground if the Germans invaded. For whatever reason his home then became something of an arsenal. Coincidentally his home was opposite a meadow that was deemed a possible landing ground for Nazi paratroopers. Mother was of a nervous disposition and when dad was on duty with the observer corps  took to arming herself with a pistol and a sten-gun. One evening a young lady from the chemists delivered a prescription sometime after dark, mum very cautiously opened the door, sten gun poked through the gap. The chemist complained to my father the next day because his delivery girl was so shook up that she resigned there and then.  That was the height of mum's war-time adventures! 

My parents were lucky in that they could afford to employ a 'char-lady', a Mrs H. Now Mrs H was normally extremely punctual but one morning she wasn't, her excuse being 'oh my lore, oi hadda insendry up moi back passage laars noight'! That was probably the height of Mrs H's adventures, the tale was told for many years after the event!

At one point Oulton Broad had anti-personnel mines strung on trip lines across the water in order to hamper German sea-planes and gliders should they come into land. My brother, seven or eight years old, plus other local youngsters, had apparently discovered that if they threw bread scraps onto the water that swans sometimes came into land and in doing so hit the lines that triggered these mines.

Many years later, when I managed what is now the Waveney River Centre, we allowed the dredging people to dump mud from Oulton Broad on our land and we had several of those mines in the spoil. The Bomb Disposal people came along and detonated them on site. Nothing major but it must have been exciting to the youngsters, if not to the swans. In later life I was to find out that the swans didn't need to be enticed with bread, it just happened. Eventually the remaining mines just sunk and were left until the dredgers came along. My brother then got shunted off to Wales as an evacuee, an experience he apparently hated. When he eventually came home the family had moved onto a houseboat at Beccles.