An article by Ward Clark, an American veteran of Operation Desert Storm, writing of V-E day, Victory-Europe Day, the official end of the war in Europe on May 8, 1945, listed his family’s role in WWII:

My father was in Victorville, California, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces, checking out in B-29s in preparation for heading to the Pacific. As it happened, Dad never deployed; the Pacific war also ended while he was waiting for orders.

Dad’s brother, my uncle Don, was lying in a bed in a British hospital, still in a coma due to the fragment from a German 88 shell that had taken off his forehead and ruined his left eye. He recovered, but was never the same, living the rest of his life with a metal plate in his head and a glass eye.

My Mom’s older brother, my uncle Carl, was a Marine; on this day, he was in a U.S. Navy hospital ship, recovering from the sepsis that had nearly killed him. The sepsis was the result of the Japanese bayonet he had taken through the shoulder on Iwo Jima.

My Mom’s younger brother, my uncle Norman, was a radio operator/gunner in a B-26. He was at his airfield in France when the news broke.

On this day, eighty years ago, my Dad and others were sitting on top of a Russian command tank – one that had a radio, which they were listening to – having been liberated by the Red Army from a POW camp only a week or so earlier.

Everybody knew that something was up, since, in the last day, there had been none of the sounds of war which they had all grown so familiar with over the years: the crump of artillery, the buzz of machine guns, the crack of rifles, the clanking of tanks, the roar of fighter-bombers shooting up a train beside the POW camp, or the low rumble-hum for hours from the Western horizon that warned of yet another massive bombing raid from the RAF or then USAAF.

The Russian commander had tuned into the BBC (rather brave in hindsight given Stalin’s paranoia about exposure to the West) and Dad and his mates cheered their brains out when they heard Churchill’s voice announcing the end of the war in Europe.

The Russian commander’s english was not quite good enough to understand this and so he was mystified at the reaction, but did finally understand the excited yells from Dad and the rest: “War’s over! The War is over”. However he just smiled and said, “No! War not over until Stalin says”.

At which point my Dad said to his best mate: “We’re getting the hell out of here before we find ourselves in the middle of World War Three”.

That night they snuck across the countryside to the American lines, reasonably confident that the pickets would be relaxed, and so it turned out to be, with their first GI encounter being along the lines of “Hey, you guys ain’t Limeys or Russians! You Canadians?”

Twenty fours later they were on a DC3 to Britain, where they got medical treatment and food, Dad pigging out on Pineapple juice, rapidly piling on puppy fat to rebuild his weight from 7 stone (98 pounds or 44.5kg) to his normal 12 1/2 stone (175 pounds or 80kg). Mum said he still had the puppy fat when she met him off the train in Hamilton a couple of months later!

His younger brother Jack would come home from two years of combat in Italy totally unscathed – well, aside from being a mild alcoholic with a liking for the nasty, cheap plonk known as grappa. He’d do okay in post-war NZ, owning a dairy farm in the BOP before dying of a sudden heart attack in 1980.

My other Uncle Jack, on my Mum’s side, was not so fortunate. Part of the New Zealand 3rd Division in the Pacific he was one of the few Kiwis wounded, getting shot up by a Japanese plane during action in the Solomon Islands campaign. What followed were years of surgery that didn’t seem to do much good, while he slowly descended into alcohol for the pain. By the 1970’s his memory was gone and he died in an RSA rest home in the early 1980’s. Never married, no kids. As such I never knew him, but Dad – no slouch in the brains department himself – said that Jack had a very high IQ. He’d actually been offered a university scholarship by the Jesuits before the war, only to have it rejected by his stiff-necked grandfather.

On a day like today I think of all these men, and the woman like my Mum who supported them from home, often enduring long periods of silence when the mail did not get through. One of the most somber things I’ve ever read was what I found a couple of years after Mum died, in one such letter from Dad in a German POW camp. Following capture at Sidi Rezegh, internment at Camp PG52 in Chiavari (which I would visit in 2019), escape, re-capture, escape again (this by jumping from a train headed to Germany), freezing with Tito’s partisans in the snow while German fighters stalked them, re-capture again, and blood-poisioning in a German hospital, Dad wrote to Mum wondering whether she’d still want him when he returned, “as I am not much of a man now”.

Unlike my mothers brother, Dad would not only survive but thrive after the war, enjoying life to the fullest. But that simple admission – from a man I knew well and could not imagine feeling or saying such a thing – is my best, personal understanding of what war does to men and what they sacrificed.

We will remember them.