"Victory in Europe" - at what cost to those who fought?


My mother's Uncle Arthur (aka 'Dick') after the war

"Arthur is back from internment but we cannot convey to each other what the past years were like" (1946).

The people who want to celebrate "victories" in wars are rarely those who fought in them - because those who do the actual fighting are left with the memories that they'd rather forget about what war is really like. 

That was certainly true of my family, not least my Uncle Bert who fought through North Africa and Italy, and my Uncle Noel who did the same before also being parachuted into Greece in 1944. They both knew only too well what it's like to take part in modern warfare - and that's also why both said very little about what they had been through.

My own Mum - who worked on the radar stations on the south coast looking out for the rockets that could be landing on her family back in London - also rarely discussed a war which had brought her too much grief and stress. It was only as I grew older that I realised that she couldn't bear to stay in the room when we were watching the war films that were so often on the TV. In fact I later found out that both Eileen and Bert had suffered breakdowns soon after the war ended. 

But my Mum (Eileen) did hint at what she had been through in some photo albums that she put together with her own handwritten captions giving an idea of her thoughts and experiences:

1939/40

Eileen goes to St.Claude in the French Jura, to stay with her uncle who has been sent there as a manager of a tobacco pipe factory. A world war still seemed an unlikely prospect to her family. She only returned from France in April 1940!

Eileen's passport

1943

After working in the Land Army, Eileen joins the RAF as a mechanic.

Eileen (middle row, far left) in Morecambe, 1943

1945

Eileen is based at RAF Pevensey where she meets Jerry Ford, a Jamaican airman:

1946

Eileen is demobbed and returns to the Jura. Her Uncle Arthur, as a British citizen, spent much of the war in an internment camp. His business does not survive in his absence and he emigrates with his French wife, Ginette, to the US. 

"We cannot convey to each other what the past years were like".

1956

Eileen's best friend, Simone, has married Georges Epchtein, imprisoned during the war for his activities in the resistance, from which his health never really recovers. 

"We talk politics but socialism in England is already done for"

A decade after the war, Eileen's hopes that the horror of war would be replaced by a socialist future had faded. Seventy years later, years in which the post-war boom and the collapse of Stalinism further eroded confidence in socialist change, the horrors of capitalism - of war, inequality, oppression, poverty and now environmental destruction - are back with a vengeance. Eileen's belief in socialist change is one that lives on in the next generations.


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