I've written before about how my parents met and married in England during the early years of World War II. While my father went overseas for three years to fight the war in the Western Desert, my mother remained in England. Her nights were spent standing watch for incendiary bombs, armed only with a bucket of water, another of sand and a stirrup pump. She told me of the terror of hearing the bombers overhead, hearing the bombs fall and their explosions, and seeing the red flare of flames in the night sky as England's cities burned under the Blitz.
With that in mind, I was interested to find this video clip of the Blitz in London during 1941. It's silent (the sound of a film projector has been added to the video by whoever edited it), but it shows the true horror of those months and years. It's a sobering thought that our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents went through that . . . I wonder if we'd hold up as well as they did in similar circumstances?
Let's be grateful that we don't have to live under such a constant, imminent threat of violent death - and let's spare a thought for those, elsewhere in the world, who do live under such threats. Their nemesis is more likely to be a terrorist bomb than one dropped by an enemy aircraft, but the terror is no less real.
Peter
The only time that I ever thought that my Mom was going to slap my Dad was once when he was blathering on about the "deprivations" that he suffered as a boy during WWII.
ReplyDeleteHe grew up in rural Connecticut, she grew up in England. Worlds of difference.
My mother went to London from Wyoming to teach school a few years after the war. The maps she kept of the city were most interesting with large sections blanked out and the words "blitz damage" written across.
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