Kids today won't know anyone from the war

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Our grandparents or parents were children during the war, and they had stories from their parents or grandparents, who had lived experience of WW1.

So we had a direct connection with somebody with first-hand experience of the world wars. It just occured to me that babies born now won't have that.

Does that mean WW1/2 will feel as distant to them as the victorians do to us? Will it have some kind of subconscious impact on society?

My great grannie is 99, and I've never actually asked her about the war. Maybe I should. I doubt she'll be around when my daughters are old enough to ask her.

My Dad served in WW2 joining up as a teenager in the later stages of the war, He's dead now, but all my children remember him, albeit vaguely as far as my youngest is concerned. We have oictures of him in uniform, and pictures of the ships he served in etc and they definitely feel a connection with him,
Both my grandfathers served in WW1 but one died when my Mum waz a chikd and the other when I was a baby so I never knew either of them. But again we have photos and written recordd and that time period doesn't feel like ancient history to me.

My youngest grandson is 12 and knew my Dad, their great grandad, who was in the RAF in WW2. Their own dad was in the RAF in Iraq.

If only that was true. There are plenty of children living in the UK who have experienced war first hand.

But it seems the issue is very specific to WW1/2. I wonder what marks those wars as uniquely different to the others?

You really should. That generation didn't always talk about it much afterwards and my Dad only really started talking about it towards the end of his life. Don't leave it too late.

I am 45 and to be honest, I never knew anyone 'involved' in the war. Obviously my grandparents lived through it but they were teenagers.

My grandad was in the Royal Navy during WW2 but never spoke about it - my dad said he never wanted to with him either.

I have lots of photos of him from that period though, along with my other grandad (who served at home) and also never spoke of it.

My nan's little brother was killed in action at the age of 21. It's not something anyone likes to sit around telling stories about.

Plenty of teenagers and early 20s have never known a family member in the war. One of my son's mentioned it's unfair that our of his entire history class no one had a relative they could talk to alive from the war also true for the early 20s kids. My kids are certainly not unique in this.

Because they were WORLD wars - genuinely not being sarcastic - they were fought in various places around the world and soldiers, sailors, airmen, nurses etc from all around the world were involved.

My daughter is 20, she met three of her Great Grandmothers. One lived through WW1 and WW2, the other two were born in the 1920s. Not sure how much she remembers about them though? Everything becomes history eventually, even the 1950s and 60s are starting to become distant now to the young.

My grandparents were all adults during the war. It wasn't a topic of conversation though.

Like pp, I find it astonishing that I was born only 25 years after the war. Same amount of time between Blair coming to power and today.

I recently read a fascinating book about the state of Europe at the end of the war. It's incredible how quickly it was rebuilt. I remember family holidays to Germany in the mid 1970s and everything seeming normal to me.

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II: Amazon.co.uk: Lowe, Keith: 9780141034515: Books

This was the book

@DojaPhat
What makes them different is that because they were major global events occurring on the UKs doorstep, literally every single person in the UK was affected by them. They became part of each person's personal story, whether they liked it or not. This inevitably then became folded into the national psyche as you can see from continued memorials and countless films, series, etc. I'm just wondering whether it will fade from the national psyche as the generations pass, and whether this will influence future generations' vision of war.

Of course there are some posters who aren't getting this and seem to think I'm talking about their personal circumstances. And I'm getting the impression that you're trying to extrapolate from my post that I don't think war matters if it happens "elsewhere".

In my school, I’d say over 50% of the children have escaped from war torn countries.

I'm 40, my grandparents were all 'active' in the war effort so it feels close to home and I think of them and the friends they lost on armistice Day. My parents were born 1947 and 1949 and obviously they don't have memories of war but they did live through rationing which went on for several years post war. I think that does influence your perspective on life especially around things like food waste and materialistic consumption.

Well they were much bigger, impacting many countries. We tend to think only about the European impact, particularly for WW1 where most of what is taught in schools, pictured in films etc is focused on the Western Front, but there were many more theatres of war involving people genuinely from all over yhe world.
Plus the wars this country has been involved in since the end of WW2 have only involved professional servicemen and women, not the general public either volunteering or being conscripted for war service. The world wars impacted on almost evety aspect of daily life for people in this country but whilst we are aware of other wars and sadly of course some families have recent experience of losing loved ones in wars, the impact on our lives has been nothing like the same. It's been more that our forces are in a war, not that the country is at war hasn't it?

Im in my 30s and my DGPs told me lots about their experiences. My DGD used to go into schools and give talks about his life. It's the passing of time and all that. It is odd though as everyone I know had DGDs who fought, it's a sort of collective experience.

I have told many of my DGD'S child friendly stories to my own kids. He had a not too traumatic time so easier to tell the stories vs their other DGGD who had PTSD

I think it’s really significant, OP.

My grandfather served in the RAF in WWII, my grandmother had children billeted in her home, both of the lost siblings. My mother (born 9 months after my grandfather got home) grew up with rationing. The impact of the war was immense, the trauma they lived through and the subsequent attitudes to mental health and hardship, the rapid adaption to massive social change that brought about, amoung other things, the emancipation of women at a rate unimaginable before the war. The development of the NHS in its wake.

I grew up knowing, at least to some extent, how these factors shaped our society because my grandparents and parents were living examples and embodied many of the values that had been tempered under the force of war. My kids don’t have that, and though I try and talk about it in a way they will understand, it’s really distant to them. They aren’t going to have the same outlook. In someways this is good but I worry about what might be repeated because we have lost the horror of where politics that demonizes can lead.

There were a ridiculous amount of domestic terror attacks in the decade before the pandemic (pandemic seems to have calmed it down for a bit) so clearly the ‘War on terror,’ Afghanistan, Syria etc are Wars on our doorstep that have affected us directly so UABU in that regard.

Unfortunately there has been many conflicts since. I know a Falklands veteran myself

I'm 53. Me dad fought in ww2 and my Irish grandfather fought in ww1. We didn't talk about it much. The main belief my father had was that people did what they had to do and if you were German you would have been shot for not fighting whereas here you would just be made to contribute in another way.

In many ways I think its a good thing that were at this generational cross roads (and my dad would too). There is a certain group of society that fetishises war (especially ww2) - which include one of my older siblings (quite a bit older). It keeps the UK stuck in the past.

I don't think looking at the world or even just domestic politics right now really confirms that there is something about growing up knowing people who lived through a world war makes you uniquely peace-loving and tolerant.

I'm 39. I am unusual in that my paternal grandfather was a child/ young teen in the first world war and a reserved occupation in the second.

My maternal stepfather, a couple of years older, fought in both WWI and WWII - but rarely spoke about the war, as it was 'an horrific but necessary experience' as he would say. I don't think many people my age (elder millenial/ xenial) knew people who lived through WWI, though we did know people who experienced WWII whether as children or adults. People just a few year's younger than me do not have that same link. Their grandparents may have been young children in the war, or not have been born (older boomers).

I think that does make it feel more distant, but the world changing impacts of the conflict do still reverberate through society. It does make it all the more inportant that we teach what happened, to try and prevent repeating the horrors of those times.

Mine too, with the Friends Ambulance Unit. DC never met him but DD(5) likes to tell people about her great grandfather who didn't fight but drove an ambulance.