AIBU to question the impact of WW1 and 2 on society today?

[westridingpauperlunaticasylum]

My great grandparents were directly impacted by WW1. The men fought in France, the women tried to keep families alive. We lost relatives in the conflict but those that returned turned to drink. WW2 I had a grandfather who was a Japanese POW. His experiences influenced a whole family on his return and I think the effects reverberate now. Did the 20th century wars create the society we have now? People talk about 'these days' negatively with a sense of nostalgia which pisses me right off. Today is influenced by the past and we have no control over that.

There is actually a huge correlation between the amount of money a country spends in defence projects and its technological development.

The impact globally stlll ripples and I find it hugely offensive that Germany should think it can behave so insensitively and to have taken over the EU in the way it has. Hijacked the entire peace project and even now still not understanding the growing disquiet in Poland, Greece, Spain Italy, UK etc. Have we learnt nothing?

I agree have we learnt nothing by continuing to blame Germany for almost everything when the war ended over 60 years ago. (And before anyone starts my dad fought in it and is now dead like most of the people who fought in it).

The post-war settlement shaped the world we live in enormously - the partition of Europe into the eastern block and the west, the formation of what eventually became the EU partly as a response to the horrors of war.

And for some of us it's still family oral history. I listened to a fascinating convo a couple of years ago between DS and my dad. DS was 6 at the time, and (prompted by something on CBBC) my dad was reminiscing about running home from school every day at the age of 6 to listen to the radio news and plot the allied advance across Europe. Really fascinating, and so weird - thinking "he was the age DS is now while all this was happening - and war thrust him into this awareness of current affairs which 6 year olds nowadays just wouldn't have."

I don't think anyone has yet mentioned baby-boomers. Without the war, we would not have had a baby boom. So much would be different without them - the sixties, the rise of youth culture, 70s feminism, our current population structure and need to plan for old age care to name but a few.

I have also idly wondered about our health as a nation and obesity. Obviously it's a complex issue with many causes, but in my family I can name several people with what I think of as a slightly disordered attitude towards food that has led to weight gain. In all of them I can see a direct influence of having been brought up with rationing - they panic about food, eat every scrap whether they need to or not etc. It's so fundamentally ingrained from childhood and then that attitude is passed on to children at home too and the cycle is difficult to break. I wonder what sort of long term effect a whole nation under rationing is still having on us all.

My grandmother lost her parents and was evacuated, she raised her 11 siblings alone. The only impact it had was having a cold and uncomfortable grandparent. I never met my grandfather who was a farrier in the war, he died when I was 2.
But I’m 22 so the biggest impact has been my school learning. I fear ww3 and see a lot of nostalgia for the community at the time ... but I think we’re getting over/away from its impact to an extent ... we’re ungrateful now.

Although I agree with @Swirlingasong and agree that our cultural alcoholism is an effect.

My parents were directly VERY affected by WW2. My mother had to give up her dream (and scholarship to the Guildhall) of becoming a singer to join the Land Army, and my dad (a gentle pacifist) spent 6 years in the Army, mostly in India. He helped to repatriate POWs of the Japanese.

My childhood was very much one of austerity, even though it was now the 60s, that idea of never wasting anything and having no luxuries continued. I recognise that my childhood (although happy) was definitely rooted in the war.

It's not history to me, it's my reality.

My FIL wanted to become a vet, but the veterans after the war had first dibs on university places. So he went off to do another job, supposedly just for a few years before then going to university, but ended up getting married and having children. So never became a vet. Not a traumatic outcome like some, but the war had many impacts.

I think it's very dangerous to pin those negative effects on Germany and Japan. Yes, those countries were responsible for atrocities, but wars were fought both ways and the effects are still felt in both those countries today too. It's war itself that we still feel the impact of.

And @Crumbs1 my mother was also on the beach at Ramsgate when the little ships came back. (She was 18). She clearly remembers that there were soldiers everywhere, just sleeping on the ground around the beach, and how exhausted and awful they all looked.

westridingpauperlunaticasylum my comment was not a personal attack merely a suggestion that reading about this might get you more answers than mumsnet. Apologies if the lack of intonation made my comment appear offensive.

I think an enormous issue is that the Germans try to learn from the WWII, whereas many people here seem to want to relive it. We seem to expect those in some countries (eg Balkans, Northern Ireland, Iraq) to forget their conflicts but we keep banging on and on about the a war that finished a hundred years ago.

yes. one GF was an abusive alcoholic after WW2, but he'd been in Dunkirk and bombed out of ships 3 x :( My mother is very, very damaged.

Her mother lost her great love in WW2 - he was an RAF pilot.

WWI - my g grandparents met in London, he a soldier, she a shop assistant. He was gassed.

I feel the damage on families of those wars has not been reckoned with, not even close.

TefalTester123 I absolutely agree.

And I had a rationing mother which meant you had to clear your plate. I've had to relearn my relationship with food.

I grew up in the 70s reading fiction that was mostly set In the War or Just After the War. It was taken as read that WWII was recent. Imagery of it was all around - pictures of starving prisoners being rescued from Dachau was a commonplace on the news and in primary school school Assembly. Everyone's grandfathers had been in it and parents born in time to mostly remember the end.

My kids are in primary school now. Their grandparents remember rationing, possibly VE day, but most were born well after. It's all part of 'history' not 'recent current events' to them.

It's very hard to say what would have happened without the wars - Germany already specialised in many towns and cities with their own medium-sized technical industries, as a result of the Thirty Years war and previous power grabs by the papal states and other nations. 1918 flu disproportionately killed the healthy and would have had similar effect without the war. The Iron Curtain might well have been created by Communist nations without WWII.

Though I suspect both women getting emancipation and the vote, and the folk memory now of the peaceful lovely 1950s, are down to war first removing and then killing off a quarter of the country's young men.

My granny was a nasty, bitter woman which could easily be explained by her three brothers all dying in WWI. But then we found out her family wasn't actually poor - yes she'd had to go into service as a maid age 14, but the brothers had gone to public schools! So again can't put everything on the war.

Though my uncle wasn't an alcoholic at all until he served in Korea - direct correlation there.

I recall watching a fascinating programme about people in Europe who starved (not to death) and their lifelong health problems (think Audrey Hepburn). But not only that, how health problems had been passed down to their children who were born after the war and didn’t experience starvation.

Wish I could find the link as this highlighted how the impact of war is still being felt today.

I also remember reading somewhere that a lot of the old drunks living on the streets were old soldiers.

On the positive, it helped women move into work and many inventions from this period are still used today, for example radar.

YANBU to question the impacts of both world wars, which are many and varied. The large number of deaths in WW1 I think had an impact on the attitude towards Hitler and the Nazis- we might think of Neville Chamberlain and his 'piece of paper' as naive or surrendering to the Third Reich in 1938, but after so many deaths between 1914 and 1918 you can see why war was something to be averted if possible.

As for memories of the war, my mum still struggles with any air raid siren noise, even in a fictional setting. My aunt will not eat Spam or any other similar luncheon meat. My late great aunt lived under Vichy France and it was over 50 years before she spoke about what happened to her, and a Parisian born neighbour of my mum has never spoken about her experiences to her own children.

There's always wars.
I think the spanish civil war was the 30s. First Arab -Israelia War in 1940s. Korean War in the 50s. Vietnam War in the 70s. Falkands War in the 80s. War in Croatia in 1990s.
Just saying.

I remember as a child old homeless men on the street.They were the only homeless people I saw then and many were probably old soldiers

I have always been very reluctant sharing my family's experience of WWII. Mainly because they suffered horrific atrocities, but as civilians in a country that ended the war on the losing side. I think it's important to remember that the negative effects of war are felt generations later on both sides.

Make do and mend indeed also stills much rasicm towards the Germans... Seems they are still fair game.

I'm not sure what point you are actually making sumo. I am not sure you can really compare those wars to the world wars, in terms of their impact.

That's a good point, Sumo. Back in the late 80s I got to know various Yugoslavians (as they were then), both Serbs and Croats (I had a Croatian boyfriend at one point). It was horrifying to see their country descend into one of hte most vicious civil wars of recent years, including attempted genocide. (I remember watching the university buildings I'd studied in go up in flames on the 10 o'clock news one night. Just horrifying.)

And also agree with a PP on the domestic impact. My mother and her sibling's childhood was wrecked by their abusive father (verbally abusive to the girls, physically abusive to the boys) - part of which was driven by PTSD from serving in the first world war.

I'm always painfully aware with German friends of my own age (50s) that their mothers (Northern Germany) probably suffered the most appalling atrocities during the Red Army's advance towards Berlin.