Rememberance

I have watched with interest the documentaries over the past week regarding the men of 617 Squadron and the audacious dambusters raids that cost the lives of so many and typified the ingenuity of Barnes Wallace the man behind the bouncing bomb. Wallace was also behind the development of other bombs such as the Tallboy that eventually sank the Tirpitz and ensured that many lives were saved on the Atlantic convoys.

I find war memorials fascinating, their architecture, some so simple, or so ornate some isolated and some central to society. I remember as a child going to the Wellpark after getting my hair cut at the barbers across the road, I would have been about the age of the twins and remember seeing the same group of men, they were not council employees just ordinary men of a generation proud to have served, proud to remember their friends who did not return, proud to lift fallen leaves and the odd piece of blown litter.

I remember talking with them as a child does, wide eyes full of questions, I suspect they would talk to me when maybe they could not talk to adults, they pointed out people they knew and recalled their stories, playing as children, growing together and often going to war together. To me it was a romantic vision, soldiers and sailors, the fodder or of comic strip heros I read about in the Victor comic not the hell I have come to appreciate through my reading in later life.

These men are gone, their memories and recollections consigned to history, nobody now to tend the memorial as they did, with a pride and an affection for their fallen friends. This park and this monument are well kept, respected and sit in a beautiful little enclave above the town looking our to the river beyond

I took a moment to reflect on their sacrifice, to a lost generation and to think of the men and women, including some of my friends who serve today in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the debt we owe them, not just in November but every day...