VE Day

On the 80th anniversary of VE Day I thought this was appropriate.  It is a Christmas Card sent by my uncle to my mother at Christmas 1944 expressing the wish that it should be the last one 'with the lads away'.  Thankfully, his wish was granted.

My uncle was in a reserved occupation but my father served through the war with the Durham Light Infantry, spending over a year in Malta and finally being posted to Kos where he was taken prisoner by the Germans in October 1943.  He spent at least some of his time as a prisoner in OFLAG79 which was in Waggum, close to the town of Braunschweig in northern Germany.

I would like to think that such a war would never happen again but I fear that it could.  It is unlikely there will be many veterans of the war at the next significant anniversary which means that it will pass out of memory and into history.  Sadly, I believe we learn from memory but not from history; it just becomes 'something that happened a long time ago'.