What stories do you know about your (Great?) grandparents experience of WW2?

[HappyPeach]

Inspired by my other thread, I realise I know nothing about my grandparents war experience. Other than one Nan was in the WRVS, though I don't know what she did. All my grandparents died years ago so I can't ask now. I wish I knew their stories. What do you know about your relatives experiences?

Sorry! I didn't see 'WW2' until l'd posted that!

My grandad fought in both the First World War and the Second World War, he wouldn't talk about it.

My other grandad had a foundry he was exempted.

My Paternal Grandad was on HMS Sheffield taking food and Medical supplies to the Russians in WW2 . I have all the diaries including photo's of a pet Chimp who was also on board ! My Maternal Grandad had half his Arm blown off by a bomb going off in London ! Miss them so much x

@PissedOffNeighbour22
My mum's dad was a regimental sergeant major. Liberated Changi jail.
That's where my father was held for the last 3.5 years of his imprisonment. He didn't share many experiences of his time in the camps but the few stories he did tell were all fairly horrific. Interestingly he didn't hold anything against the Japanese who he felt were just soldiers doing their jobs. He did however have a huge problem with the pro-Japanese Sikh prison guards as he saw them as traitors.
The most interesting story he told was that the British Officers were treated much better than the men. On one occasion he had come back to the camp from a 12 hour work shift and one of the British officers called over to him to order him to bring him some water. My dad told him to sod off. The British officer then complained to the Japanese resulting in my dad being sentenced to death. The only reason the British officer withdrew the complaint was that a Dutch officer who overheard the exchange threatened to kill the British officer if he didn't.
Dad was demobbed out of the RAF after the war as 'A1 fit'. He weighed little more than 6 stone and still had dysentery. Being A1 fit meant that no additional payments were paid to him.
It apparently took him about a year after the war before he could function normally again.

Grandad - was in the RAF - part of bomber command. Trained in Canada to be a Pilot but wasn’t good at landing so switched to navigator.

Nan - worked in a canteen in Lowestoft serving meals

They met at a dance. Both have died - very sadly missed.

One grandfather died in a horrific industrial incident before the war started, entire family left in penury and at the mercy of the Catholic church, the knock on effects fucked things up for us for a couple of generations, no medal, no memorial. Pretty common story for working class families at the time but not something you ever see TV specials about.

The other was too old for active service. Did a manual job from age 14, never owned a house or car and eventually died from a cancer related to his occupation.

Life was pretty grim for a lot of ordinary working people at that time; some of the grimness now gets called heroism.

My MIL was evacuated as a child. Don't know the details of what she experienced but she gets angry at the WWII bunting/cakes/nostalgia industry.

My Grandad served in France in WW1.

During WW2 my dad had a reserved occupation (something to do with electronics but he never told me what, exactly) so he wasn't called up. He volunteered for the Home Guard instead. He'd spend his nights on duty fire-watching on factory roofs. My mum also had a reserved occupation, she was a secretary, again she never told me exactly what she did. They both went through the Blitz in London and married during the war.

Paternal grandfather was manager of the Coop which was a reserved occupation. He was also Captain of the Home Guard. Nana was in charge of the WVS.
Maternal grandad was a Sapper in the Royal Engineers and was a desert rat in North Africa and the invasion of Italy.
Grandma was no better than she should be apparently. An elderly widow had left a bunch of wild flowers at the front gate for her knowing how much she loved flowers and this was enough for village gossip to crank up. His own sister wrote to Grandad at the front to tell him. Poor Grandma rarely left the house again.

My Gramps was in the chindits and was mentioned in dispatches he was promoted in the field from what Iv learned.
He and some comrades were captured by the Japanese and held prisoner for 4 years. They escaped into the jungle but were caught again and I can only imagine what their punishment was. He and his fellow escapees decided if they survived they'd donate their bodies to medical science and my gramps was the last to follow through with this.
Back on civvie street after witnessing the peace treaty being signed he had a very senior management position which meant him meeting people from all over the world. Apparently whilst polite to any Japanese people he was doing business with he'd never shake any of their hands.

My Mum wasn't in a reserved occupation so she went into the ATS in WW2. While she was still in England grandad sent his wife and other daughter out of London. He worked in a manufacturing place and he needed to be there at night in case of bomb hits during the Blitz. That would leave Mum at home on her own, so when she was on leave, rather than do that, she went with grandad to his workplace and slept there.
She was stationed in Dover for a while. One Sunday morning she and other girls were walking back from church (church parade) and they were strafed by an enemy plane. They rolled down a slope but one of them was killed.

The ATS uniform jackets buttoned up the same way as mens' jackets - left over right. You can see that in pics of the (late) Queen in her ATS uniform.
Mum had to go to Liverpool to get on a troop ship. She was travelling all day and wearily longing for a cuppa. They were told to hold out their mugs and this thin brown liquid which was poured into them turned out to be soup. She never forgot the disappointment.
I think troop ships went in convoys - not just one alone - and they zig-zagged out into the Atlantic a bit before they turned south, always trying to avoid being attacked by German U-boats, if a U-boat was indeed there. She went to Cairo by way of South Africa. They couldn't go through the Mediterranean and South Africa was part of the Empire in those days, so they had to go the long way round. When they put into dock in SA, to take on supplies I guess, she and her friend C went off ship and stayed a little while with a family. I suppose SA families were asked to host service personnel for a few days. I don't know how it worked, exactly.

Her father had been in the regular Navy from 1900 to 1912. He was working in his civilian job, with a wife and child, when WW1 started. He was recalled into the Navy in 1914 and I think he served, at least some of the time, in submarines. In 1916 he was discharged 'to return to his civilian occupation'.

My gran was born in 1936. When war broke out she wasn't evacuated away from her family. Instead her entire family was evacuated together because her father had a job that was 'essential for the war effort' but she didn't know what it was and neither did her mother apparently.

I have therefore come to the only reasonable conclusion that my great grandfather was of course a ww2 spy.

Maternal GM was in her late teens. She told me loads of stories about the war. The street parallel to hers had a bomb land on it. Her friend was killed as it landed on her house and the force of the blast shattered the front windows of her family home. Luckily they'd woken up from the air raid siren and were in the Anderson shelter in the back garden. She worked in a munitions factory with her sister.

Maternal GF was in an exempt occupation and that's all I know.

Paternal GM lived in a remote area, so it didn't affect her in the same way.

Paternal GF was in the RAF. He was a blacksmith by trade, so he fixed damaged aircraft. I know he spent time abroad, but I'm unsure where.

Also, I know that my maternal great GF served in the home guard - dad's army style. He'd fought in several key battles during WW1 and stayed on in the army afterwards, eventually becoming a sergeant major. He was too old to fight in WW2 but still wanted to be involved in the war effort.

I am 55.
My grandfather fought in WW1.
His stories have become family legends.
My mum was born during WW2, and the stories of things she remembers and what the family did are also family history.

My granfather's verbal account of his time in WW1 is part of the War Museum archive.

We have a small peice of trench art he brought back, and a WW1 bayonet.

This is an interesting thread, so many lives affected by war.

My parents were both in occupied territory. Mum was only 5 when the war broke out in Jersey. She and her sister were orphaned, and were living in an orphanage at the time. It was very hard for them growing up with food shortages. There were lots of relatives, but of course it was very difficult for any of them to take them in because it was difficult enough to feed their own families. But she did have stories about being the smallest one to fit under the shed where the potatoes were hidden from the Germans.

Dad was a boy in occupied Brittany. He didn't talk very much about his early years, but I believed he witnessed men being shot; the whole village was made to watch as warning against helping the resistance. I think my mum told us this story, Dad never spoke about it.

DGF was a bomb aimer in the RAF, don't know much as he didn't like to talk about it. He used to tell one story where he was supposed to go on a raid with his regiment one night but got delayed fetching some supplies and they went without him. The plane was shot down with no survivors, he cried every time he told that story.

This is an interesting thread, so many lives affected by war.

None of them still alive though.

It's interesting, this obsession the UK has with WWII. It's become stronger as the distance from it passes. When I was a little girl people rarely spoke about it and that was a time when a fair few had experienced it. They didn't want to talk about it because it was fucking horrible and they wanted to crack on. We didn't have armistice Day silence even - that got reintroduced by Blair in the 1990s.

People being increasingly keen to talk about it is I think prompted by unease at the change in UK fortunes since then - no empire, waning international influence, any war we've been involved with since is dubious at best. But hey 85 years ago we beat the Nazis (even though really it was the Russians flinging thousands of young boys at German guns that beat the Nazis) so we're a nation of heroes really. Once were warriors indeed.

Presumably it will reach fever pitch this November having spent a couple of months telling ourselves repeatedly that no one buries queens like we do, same as no one fought war like we did almost a century ago.

Then after that we'll have some good old riots when we realise that in our zeal to vote for being a nation that rules itself we have in fact just hawked everything to the international asset class.

I don’t know a great deal about my Dad’s parents during the war, except that my Grandad was a miner which was a reserved occupation. My Dad remembers the sky glowing in the distance over Birmingham during the air raids.

My Mom used to tell me stories from when she was a child in Birmingham during the war, they were my favourite bedtime stories. My Nan refused to have any of her children evacuated. My Grandad was too old to be conscripted and sadly he died (I think of polio) in 1941, leaving my Nan with three children under the age of 7 and pregnant with a fourth. My Mom remembers waking one morning in November 1941 and hearing what she thought was lamb bleating. It was actually her baby brother, my Nan had given birth to him in the Anderson shelter during the night, so as not to wake the children in the house.

My grandparents on one side were farmers so in a reserved occupation. They never talked about the war at all but presumably had a much easier time than most people.

My other grandfather was a reservist so was called up as soon as war started. He did his initial training in 1939 then came home on leave and married my grandmother then went to war. Can't imagine what that was like. They lived in a large port city that was heavily bombed and my grandmother was an ambulance driver which was really dangerous. She lost a baby in infancy at that time as well which was never spoken about. That grandfather was in all the worst places, he was in the water at Dunkirk for hours making sure all his men got on the boats, he was in Africa (shared a bottle of whisky with his friend the night before a big battle they thought they wouldn't survive), Italy and Greece (where he spent 48 hours hiding from the Germans under an upturned boat). He never told us children what he did but did tell my Dad some stories.

We didn't have armistice Day silence even - that got reintroduced by Blair in the 1990s.

@BruceHellerAlmighty I remember doing it at school in the 1980’s. Did it stop and get reintroduced?

My gran gave birth in a "maternity home" in 1940 because she'd moved to be close to my papa at his barracks before he was sent overseas, and had no family or friends to help.

There were frequent air raids so the women were told to place their babies on the floor and turn over the iron cots on top of them to protect them. They just had to take their chances.

My Maternal grandfather was a merchant seaman.
Maternal grandmother lived in the East end of London in East Ham, with her son who was three in 1939. My mother was evacuated to North Wales as she was five.
Paternal grandfather was a fireman in the east end docks area.
Paternal grandmother went to visit her parents in Suffolk just before the war with my father who was seven and his brother, they never went back to their London home until after the war.

@Cameleongirl it moved to the nearest Sunday in 1939. John major had an additional weekday one on the 11th in 1995 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of d day even though that was a different war. After that armistice seemed to get even more conflated with WWII than it had previously and in 1997 The Sun ran a campaign purportedly spearheaded by WWII veterans wanting a silence on the 11th every year as well as on the Sunday. Blair was keen to get Sun reader votes so he went with it. He used silences a couple of times more eg Diana's funeral etc - it's a thing that worked for him, evidently. Now ofc people silence all over the shop.

Oh and Major ran the d day thing initially as a way of deflecting from all the sleaze stories about his government which were really ramping up at the time.

Grandfather - pilot in 617 squadron (Dambusters), awarded DFC
Grandfather - firefighter
Grandmother - schoolteacher
Grandmother - not sure