I remember D Day...I was very young but I remember the joy involved....the rejoicing.
My husband David had been a very young officer and was heavily involved in the Dunkirk Little ships society. He held various of the offices during his life time and it was important to him.
It kept him in touch with those men who risked life and ship to get the men left stranded at Dunkirk back safely home.
They set out with huge courage and kindred spirit to rescue them and the society founded in their name keeps the boats safe now, hopefully for ever.
David had a "little ship " She was called Wanda and various pictures of her hang around this house . I’m never going to take them down.
The society is devoted to keeping all the little ships in good repair and a great deal of money was spent on this enterprise. Ancient little ships need work and love in order to survive. Bit like people really.
There are pics of my husband talking to the Duke of Edinburgh whilst out at sea on one of the little ships.
It was not just the ships they remembered of course...it was the courage and determination to save lives that are remembered still but somehow the little ships have become the symbol of the British determination to save lives with courage, against the odds...
Crossing the channel in a cruise liner is never going to be a comparable moment but in bad weather it does give me an idea of the courage and gritty determination of those who went back for their comrades.
Live on Miss Wanda , my husbands little boat...where ever you are now.
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1 comment:
It was moving to watch some of the ceremonies to celebrate DDay.
But I have memories of my Father being called a D Day Dodger because he was in Italy, fighting the war there. Another Uncle was in South East Asia, fighting the Japanese, neither thought that D Day turned the course of the War, it contributed to it and the liberation of Europe, but their wars experience was different, but just as important in their eyes.
I suspect with hindsight we will have memorials to those campaigns, but few are now alive who survived them to witness to them, in the same way as D Day veterans are now in their nineties, they are fading away fast.
While I honour the service off all, my own experience of service life in the last 10 years of my career, made me pacifist. Recruiting and Training young men and women and sending them out to foreign parts to fight wars (or peace keeping as the Government fondly describes such actions) seemed to me to be the waste of young lives. While the casualties were not on the scale of WW1 or WW2, I wondered why we had not learned the lessons of those conflicts and worked harder for peace and reconciliation without taking the military option.
War makes no sense. It is cruel,and often victimises whole sections of the civilians who are in the line of fire. Surely two gulf wars have given us signal, but we still seem to have Politicians who are quick to push the was button, rather than seek peace.
The world is a dangerous place these days. Russians and Chinese and North Korea flexing their Nuclear muscles while we maintain weapons of mass destruction to keep up with our American Allies. Surely that is immoral?
Why is there not more work for peace than their is for conflict and confrontation. British forces are deployed world wide to frighten off those who threaten our allies, what about defence of the homeland? Not sure that the huge costs involved are worth it. Afghanistan has shown us that all attempts to force peace on their population, but we persist in deploying troops to train local forces, in the face of superior opposition. Why not bring them to the negotiation table instead?
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