Heroes
THE GREATEST GENERATION AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR
James Holland
For Jimmy P
Table of Contents
Warren ‘Bing’ Evans & Frances Wheeler
When Roland Beamont turned twenty-one, he was already a veteran of the Battle for France and the Battle of Britain, had shot down a dozen enemy aircraft, and won a Distinguished Flying Cross. A year later he was a squadron leader with over sixty pilots and groundcrew under his command; before he was twenty-four, he was in charge of an entire wing of three squadrons, operating a brand-new aircraft that he personally had played a significant role in developing.
Today in the Western world none of us is forced to spend the best years of our life fighting and living through a global war. International terrorism may be a cause for worry, but it has directly touched few of our lives so far. For the generation who were born from the embers of the First World War, however, coming of age offered little cause for celebration. Youth was sapped as the young men – and women – were forced to grow old before their time. Mere boys found themselves facing life-threatening danger and the kind of responsibility few would be prepared to shoulder today.
These people were an extraordinary generation. The majority of those who fought were not professionals, but civilians who either volunteered or were conscripted as part of a conflict that touched the lives of every person in every country involved; ordinary, everyday people. One of the fascinations of the Second World War is wondering what we would have done were we in their shoes. Would we have willingly answered the call? Which of the services would we have joined? And would we have been able to control our fear and keep ourselves together amidst the chaos and carnage? Or would we have crumbled under the weight of terror and grief? ‘How did you deal with seeing friends killed in front of your eyes?’ is a question I have asked veterans over and over again. ‘You simply had to put it out of mind and keep going,’ is the usual reply. Would we have been able to do that in an age when we like to demonstrate mass expressions of grief and to turn to counselling as the panacea for any trauma? One veteran who had survived much of the war in North Africa and then the bloody slog up through Italy told me how when his house was recently broken into, someone offered him victim-support counselling. ‘I told her to bugger off,’ he said.
Nonetheless, most veterans believe we would behave exactly as they did. I would like to think so, but am not so sure. It was hard growing