08 June 2016

The Weight of Silence








  1. A good piece- the Fawcett obit was fascinating.
    And speaking of Bletchley- did you catch the first season of the Bletchley Circle which had to do with what happened to the women after the war.

  2. So exactly right, David. As I've gotten older, I find D-Day so painful that I avoid the anniversary. My father was an army combat engineer that landed on Omaha Beach. He survived that and the rest of the war, eventually rolling into Germany with a victorious army. He's dead now and I miss him very much, which is the reason I avoid the anniversary. He was one of the spear-carriers, as you put it, and never claimed to be other than that. The small bits of information that he occasionally shared were absolutely astounding in their ground-level detail, and riveting in their intimacy with terror and death. The loss of my dad, and all the others connected with that time, is truly the severing of an immediate connection to a world-changing event.

  3. Good piece. I just discovered a British TV show called The Supersizers, in which two people live for a week as people in a particular time period would have done - with emphasis on eating as they would have. The first episode is World War II, and reminds us of the rationing, the phony foods, etc. They put a week's worth of rations on the table and report that Churchill said it looked like a nice meal. Of course, his food wasn't rationed.

    Science fiction writer Connie Willis wrote two novels called BLack Out and All Clear (really two parts of one book) about time travelers going back to Britain in World War II, and she dedicates it to (I'm paraphrasing) "the taxi drivers, dancers, housewives, grocers, and plumbers who won the war." In other words, the home front, more of the people who don't make the history books.

    She quotes a wonderful story: a house in London is bombed in the blitz and one woman is pulled out of the wreckage. "Is your husband in there?" "No, he's at the front. The coward!"

  4. Did you know that he very last World War I veteran, Mrs. Florence Green, a British lady who was not a combatant but a 17-year-old canteen waitress during the last two months of the war, died February 4, 2012 at the age of 110!

  5. One more thing. There was a terrific author of mystery short stories named Dick Stodghill. He used to be a regular commentator on Criminal Brief. He didn't land on D-Day but he was in the first wave of replacements. His memoir NORMANDY is a terrific read. http://www.amazon.com/Dick-Stodghill/e/B00J8B4NDC/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2?qid=1465402779&sr=8-2

    His blog is still up at http://stodg.blogspot.com/ full of current comments and reminiscences from the war as well. Here is one that combines the two; go down to February 12. http://stodg.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html

  6. David, well said. I enjoyed reading your article.


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