I've agonised all week end whether to make this post or not but finally decided to go ahead.
Many on this forum, like my own family see WW2 as history, which it is, but a history that was written in the blood of millions.
I would like to tell about one old soldier I knew.
Christened Robert, he was 'Jim' to all, and like most of the men who served that I knew he spoke little of his experiences, but over numerous pints I was able to fit his story together.
He was a keen motor cyclist in his teens, and some time after Dunkirk the Motor Cycle News printed a report from the War Dept, due to the loss of so many bikes during the evacuation anybody with a bike and a licence could join up as a Dispatch Rider using his own bike till the War Dept could replace it.
As a bonus all volunteers would be excused basic training and 'square bashing'.
The following morning, not yet 18 years of age, Jim signed up and spent the next few months thoroughly enjoying himself as he carried dispatches to all and sundry.
Till one day, as he passed over a hump backed bridge, he was faced with two lads riding push pikes round in circles in front of him.
The subsequent crash put him in hospital for months with a fractured skull, during which time the rest of his group were posted to the far east and were wiped out by the Japanese.
Jim was posted to India in 1941 and joined a Gurkha battalion preparing to invade Burma. The army commander was Bill Slim, and as the invasion meant crossing the Irrawaddy on rafts he ordered that only swimmers would cross.
Jim couldn't swim a stroke! But determined not to be left out he got one of his mates to teach him and crossed with Slim's HQ.
Over the remaining months of the war Jim fought his way south and ended to war guarding POWs in Rangoon.
He won no Field Marshall's Baton, was awarded no medals, finishing as a Sargent and grateful to be alive.
Along with most of his mates he voted for the Attlee government after the war on their promise to bring them home quickly, and was sickened by the betrayal that followed.
He told me that men in the middle east and far east then mutinied, I found it hard to believe, but he was correct, and as punishment they were left there, Jim finally returning home in 1947.
Soon after being demobbed he married the girl he left behind and settled into married life in a cold and damp 'prefab' just in time for the coldest winter of the century.
Jim was in his late forties when first met him, with a passion for gardening to that won him numerous cups and awards. Many of his compatriots in the midlands had fought in the far east and many of those I knew were left with a burning hatred of the Japanese, but not Jim. In fact in all the years that I knew him I only heard his voice raised in anger once.
WW2 wasn't the end of his battles, in his late 60s he was struck down with bowel cancer, which he fought with the same determination as in the war, and won.
In his 80s he again developed cancer, this time of the oesophagus, and he again showed the same courage and beat it.
But Jim lost that last battle that we all must lose, with the years, and passed away in his sleep a few days ago.
That man was my father-in-law and I am proud to have had him as a friend.
Roy.
