VE Day

My Father was a country boy from Berkeley who ran away at 15 to join the Royal Navy. He served as a Stoker on Destroyers for the Arctic Convoys.
After the war ended he only told one story, where he was part of a team that was put on a German Submarine as the Submarine was being taken into a friendly port. I have no idea of the location,port etc. He said that they were given bayonets and they had to stand behind the German crew as the submarine traveled on the surface. His orders were basically if he saw any of the German crew doing something that he thought was wrong to stick the bayonet in them ! 

My Dad, my hero.

I've just finished Julian Thompson's book on Dunkirk. They went through Hell so hat's off to your dad.

Me to my Dad was a Royal Navy medic who went ashore with the first wave of Americans at Omaha,he was just 20 and what he saw and did changed his life from being very religious to an atheist and then spent all his working life in the NHS.
Spoke very little about it until the later years of his life almost like an unburdening.
He's been gone 4 years so I will toast him and all those young men who's dedication delivered the freedom we have today.

Important to remember & celebrate the innocent men & women killed through war.

My grandad was the same as others have said, never talked about WW2 and would leave the room if anything war related came on to the TV, even when he was 96!

We are so fortunate that we weren't occupied like most of Europe.

To give a perspective "from the other side":

My Nan was German and grew up during the war in Silesia Eastern Germany. Her family had no truck with National Socialism. She told me about how her family had taken on a Polish girl as a maid and as things grew more politically volatile they ended up protecting her from the Nazis. Her dad expected the worst if word got out about her to the point where he told the family that if the SS came in the night for him they were to run and hide. Such was the culture of fear that ordinary citizens lived in in Nazi Germany. Her dad was in hospital having an operation when the Russians came. My Nan's family had to leave at once and leave him behind, their village was near a bridge and they had to make it across that bridge before it was sabotaged. They hadn't got far when they realised they had left some bread behind, so two of my Nan's sisters went back to the house to get it, promising to catch them up. Her sisters ended up running into a Russian patrol and they had to hide from the Russians in barrels. Unfortunately they were found and brutally raped by the Russians. My Nan never saw them again for decades. There is so much more- my Nan passed away last year and to this day I kick myself for not writing her life story, her life in those days was like a bloody action film. The kids today with their Play Stations and democracy just wouldn't even believe such hatred and subjugation could happen on the same planet.

All those lives lost and families torn apart when ultimately, there were no winners. A total waste.

My mum's side of the family has suffered greatly from war. Her Dad was Polish and like Ironicgas's relative he wouldn't talk about it. What little we know is that as a 15 year old he was taken from his village by the SS to be shot in the woods, yet he somehow escaped.

British, Polish, American, German, Russian, Italian...the nationality doesn't matter, everyone suffered and experienced the horrors of war. I take my hat off to those who stood up for liberty. RIP

My great grandfather was a clerk of the works with the Greater London Council. He helped dig and maintain the tunnels that the tube trains trundled through.
When WW1 broke out, conscription wasn`t introduced until 1916, but he joined up straight away and ended up in a tunnelling company attached to the Royal Engineers.
It was their job to dig out under no man`s land, to enable high explosive to be detonated beneath the German lines. He spent most of the war, in and around Ypres.
I can`t imagine anything more frightening, but he was no hero to his wife. She never forgave him for enlisting.
Apparently, she felt that it reflected badly on the state of their marriage, that he chose to go off and live seventy feet below the surface of Belgium, rather than stay home with her. He survived the war, but died a couple of years before I was born. I would have loved to have met him; from what I`ve been told, he was a real character.

Thank you for this, a bit if history I was blissfully ignorant of.

Some great stories in here, hats off to all that served!.

haven't got much to share myself other than knowing my granddad served for the desert rats. he died when I was to young to remember and my family rarely chat about it.