How the fuck did they get through the war??

[ssd]

If it was 6 years...

This hasn't been a year yet and were all losing the will.....

I think the only benefits people in 1939 had were no 24/7 telly and no social media

But 6 years....OMG

I think two things: firstly people still had each other. Secondly I think we're too inclined to believe that people pulled through without despair and never moaning about the government etc. How would we know this?
It is known however that people's houses were looted after they were bombed, people broke rules buying and selling on the black market.... and other people dobbed them in. They were still people with all the faults we have.

I would actually compare this period more to the years immediately after the war, which were very difficult - without the community spirit/adrenaline of conflict, the nation had to deal with economic ruin, worsening rationing, extremely harsh winters, a lack of housing and the return of men from fighting, leading to women losing jobs that had at least given them financial security. Families were reunited when they’d been living independent lives for years, often finding this hugely challenging as the different family members had changed a lot in the intervening time.

The lack of an end-point, the ongoing deprivations and the political and familial tensions would all be recognisable to us today, I think.

gravity there’s a lot of sense in that thinking. Bloody hell ‘post war’ but with no war preceding to contextualise it . No wonder we’re in a mess !

Irene the quaint

People in ww2 moaned about lack of petrol and holidays on continent? Really?

Back then most people didn't own a car and certainly didn't holiday abroad.

Lack of petrol was a huge issue in WW2. Although there weren’t as many private cars, they weren’t at all uncommon, and many doctors (home visits being far more common), delivery drivers and farmers depended on being able to get petrol. The country became far more motorised during the 1930s and private cars were far from rare.

Yes, exactly as GravityFalls says. I can confirm that people also moaned a lot about unreliable public transport.

@Horehound

I thought more people have died in the UK from covid than from the war. So one year if covid surpassing 6 years of war..

You thought wrong.

Isn't it more civilians dead than the Blitz?

It was because they didn't have social media spreading negative vibes

The mind blowing number of deaths in battles must have been shocking.

WW1 was awful - whole villages and towns lost so many people as sometimes they were made up of units from the same town.

1000's killed on a single day.

We get shocked by a few deaths of soldiers. I can't even comprehend actions where 1000s die in a few hours.

Just been reading through this interesting thread. A fascinating insight into how people coped. Food supply was more of a problem post war because items such a bread which had not been rationed in the war was put on ration. It was very dreary. I think rationing for some items was in place until 1954. Deprivation went on for a very long time. My parents remember that food was very basic and not very tasty despite the efforts of my grandmothers.

My Dad grew up in London and was at work the first day of the Blitz. He said the sky was heavy with German planes. Everyone at his work trouped out to the shelters and when the raid finished some of his fellow workers in another shelter were hit and all dead. He was 15 and his mother must have been beside herself.

The overall impression I got was the dreariness of the period. Some might have been out enjoying themselves but for the average mother it was hard going. Women were also drafted into factory work, the land army and transport. My aunt was a young child and was evacuated. She was so unhappy my grandparents brought her back thinking they all would die together. It must have been hard for parents to send their young children away. Some children were treated really badly but others had good memories and at the end of the war felt more at home with their evacuation parents because they were so young when sent away.

I can highly recommend the following books collated from the Mass Observation Diaries of ordinary people. People from all walks of life and around the UK.

Wartime Women: A Mass Observation Anthology (WOMEN IN HISTORY)

Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of 'Housewife, 49'

Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Postwar Britain
by Simon Garfield | 7 Apr 2005

We Are At War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times
Simon Garfield

Private Battles: Our Intimate Diaries: How the War Almost Defeated Us
by Simon Garfield | 6 Sep 2007

and I have just ordered

Blitz Spirit: Voices of Britain Living Through Crisis, 1939-1945
by Becky Brown

There a lots of other books on the period using material for the Mass Observation Diaries so I am working my way through them.

I believe the Mass Observation project is still going and it will be fascinating reading for those in the future to understand what happened during this pandemic.

The BBC has an archived collection of peoples' memories of WW2. I added my Dad's for him. Also useful for school projects

www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/categories/

Some of the stories under the Childhood and Evacuation Topic are really sad.

I agree with everyone saying that the two situations aren’t comparable. However, in general terms, I do think people were more stoical then.

Sexual assaults were rife in the blackout. People didn't report them very often at that time. Many suffered hugely in silence. My grandfather was nearly starved to death as a POW. My grandma worked herself silly in a factory, my other grandfather was a firefighter with the Manchester bombs falling on his head. My uncle was regularly white feathered for not being in uniform despite trying to join up but was refused on health grounds.
What choice did any of them have but to just get on with it and survive. I'm very interested in all things 40's from the history to the fashion but I am not under any illusion that the propaganda that every one was smiling while drinking tea out of jam jars on a bomb site is anything other than just that, propaganda.
Evacuees were often treated very badly and one of the first serious case reviews undertaken by a council into the death of a child was in relation to the abuse neglect and murder of an evacuee boy.
Different challenge, different problems but people are people the same. Some moan, some get in with it, others suffer greatly often quietly. The only difference is we have SM and we see and hear things we never would have from others in WW2

They didn’t, they hated it. My grandparents were all alive during WW2, two of them through WW1. They didn’t have a single nice thing to say about the war, other than that it was nice when it was over. Not everyone felt the same, my mother was a teenager at the start of the war, in domestic service as nothing else available. War came and she got a well paid job in a factory, when the GIs arrived she got a GI boyfriend. She always said she had a great time. My father's mother said it was hell, her husband and 2 sons were on active service, she was at home coping with the worry and the younger children, one born during the war. So it varied. I would think it is the same now, some people having positives and enjoying things like working from home, keyworker role with lots of overtime and other people struggling to cope with work and kids or out of work and no money.

Some people had, as they said at the time, a “good war”. If you were in the right place at the right time there were amazing job opportunities, chances for rapid promotion and travel that some people could never have dreamt of before the war. Some people got propelled into amazing situations as a result (think of the people drafted into the armed forces entertainment corps who went on to showbiz fame after that rapid apprenticeship into how to work a tough crowd!). Of course this was mixed with deprivation and loss like everyone else but it was more than possible to prosper during the war.

My grandfather drowned/froze to death in the North Sea after his ship was torpedoed. Only two crew members survived, they were picked up by another vessel after clinging to wreckage in the freezing water ( it was mid-winter). My father was on north atlantic convoys as a teenager, I remember him telling me the horrors of ships being sunk but them not being allowed to break the convoy so ploughing through men screaming in the water. The thing he said that stayed with me was, "Don't learn to swim if you want to join the navy, if you are going to drown drown quickly." I don't think he ever got over it, it might have been nearly 20 years later when he drank himself to death but he was also a war casualty.

@ancientgran. Your poor father, I can well imagine that witnessing those deaths was massively traumatizing- it gives me the shivers just thinking about it. 💐

@ancientgran

My grandfather drowned/froze to death in the North Sea after his ship was torpedoed. Only two crew members survived, they were picked up by another vessel after clinging to wreckage in the freezing water ( it was mid-winter). My father was on north atlantic convoys as a teenager, I remember him telling me the horrors of ships being sunk but them not being allowed to break the convoy so ploughing through men screaming in the water. The thing he said that stayed with me was, "Don't learn to swim if you want to join the navy, if you are going to drown drown quickly." I don't think he ever got over it, it might have been nearly 20 years later when he drank himself to death but he was also a war casualty.

My grandfather who was a POW became alcoholic and it certainly contributed to his demise. Interestingly his experience then affected the next generation in a different way. He hated food waste and encouraged them to eat and eat. This came from a place of love and his fear of hunger. They all are obese teetering on the edge of type 2 diabetes

I suppose it affected me as well, I'm teetotal, can't even stand the smell of alcohol.

@AmICrazyorWhat2, terrible thing when you think about it. Now he'd still be at school at 18.

The thing is: By and large, although this is miserable, we are getting through it.

I imagine just as we find snippets of joy through memes and funny tiktoks there will have been similar satirical humour and cartoons during the war.

It’s a shame the ‘keep calm and carry on’ thing has been so overdone in the last few years because that is all we can do really.

My grandad had some of his best times during the war-travelling, meeting people, learning new skills.
He was also utterly traumatised by it and never spoke of it. So on the face of it he got through it, and maybe was one of the lucky ones but at the age of 90 he would still startle and panic at the slightest unexpected noise

They were probably very depressed for six years. I doubt they were all skipping for bloody joy.

@BaileyBoos

😂😂😂😂