The Written Word
for November 12, 2000

I remember a lot of things about World War II though I was only 8 when it began and 14 when it ended. I especially remember things like Churchill’s speech to the Canadian Houses of Parliament on December 30, 1941 … that was his some chicken, some neck speech referring to the suggestion of French Generals in June 1940 that in three weeks England’s neck would be rung like a chicken. But what I remember most of all was his speech on the Fall of France. I’m not sure when I first heard it but probably it was many times during the war. And I’ve thought of it since so often when I hear the uninspiring, spin doctored clap trap that comes out of the mouths of so many world leaders these days. You’ll hear the actual words in a moment but at the Fall of France with Russia Hitler’s ally and the United States choked by isolationism and with Britain left standing alone against the might of Hitler’s armed forces Churchill said this

"Therefore let us brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its commonwealth last a thousand years … men will still say, this was their finest hour." No wonder John Kennedy said that Churchill mobilized the English language and marched it off to war.

But what I remember most were the big kids … the youngsters who were in grade XI & XII when I was in Grade VI … I especially remember a kid named Clark who came to the first assembly of the year at St Georges and took his place alongside his great XI buddies clad in the uniform of the Royal Canadian Air Force … I remember Bud O’Hara, six or seven years older than me who despite his Irish name was a cricketer as was my dad … I called him Uncle Bud even though he was less than a decade older than me… I wrote to him and he would reply from "somewhere in England", the address the censors required. And I remember when Uncle Bud went missing over Germany, dead before his 21^st birthday. I remember the casualty lists that invariably included a friend’s older brother or his dad.

I remember these things because these were all kids. Go to the local senior secondary and take a good look at the kids …it was kids that acted and looked just like this that were killed … around the world by the millions. They were kids whose parents couldn’t understand them … their behaviour was, to adult eyes, anti social if not uncivilized … they had ultra short hair, wore strange clothes and listened to their own music which would take them directly to hell in a hand cart.

These kids, or the ones who came back, are the old men and women you see, in ever decreasing numbers around the cenotaphs all over the world and who go from there in veterans’ bars for a beer or two to remember.

The question is, do we remember?

We were going to you know. In the Fall of 1945 there were remembrance ceremonies all around the country – I went to the one at St Mary’s Kerrisdale to remember my Uncle Howard killed in Italy … at these services we all vowed we’d never forget.

You can’t expect new generations to understand what their parents, grandparents and great grandparents accomplished and sacrificed. It’s too long ago for young people to relate. But you can expect that everyone regardless of age make the supreme effort, long after the last veteran has gone, to honour their forbears.

The issue then was victory or death … death of all the freedoms we hold dear and death of any who stood in the way of the monsters we were fighting.

Whenever I go to London I go down to Parliament Square and see the statue of Churchill, leaning on his stick, and with jutted jaw looking over to the east where the Nazi bombers came from, defying them to do their worst. I look at St Pauls Cathedral whose valiant fire fighters saved it from certain destruction during the blitz. I look all over the city that, by taking it in 1940 and 1941, and later when the rockets came, kept Britain alive long enough for Russia and then the United States to get drawn in. I know then why I remember … I remember because I’ve had a hell of a good life as have my kids and grandkids, thanks to older folks who took it on the chin for me and thanks to young people no older than two of my grandchildren who volunteered to die for me … and who did just that in huge numbers.

And I wonder how we keep this memory alive. Then … I pray to God we do lest by forgetting we doom other generations to make the same sacrifices.