1) When my pal Russ (historian, researcher, broadcaster, author) contacted me this Summer about what my father and grandfather did in The War, I had a sense of imposter syndrome. My Grandfather, as harbormaster at Dunmore East, definitely had a role to play in The Emergency of 1939 - 1945 because his tenure in office (1922 - 1947) bracketed the entire period. Dunmore would have been the Front Line if Das Dritte Reich had made moves to occupy the country and make quislings of the IRA. But wrack my brains with hammer and tongs but I couldn't come up with a single anecdote about his (second) War and only smidgeons about his adventures in WWI.
About my father I had slightly more information, not least because I had captured a few events and anecdotes in The Blob over the years since Jan 2013. Sinking off Sardinia. - - - Up Dover Beach. My qualms were brushed aside, and Russ'n'Bob filled a generous hour of memory-by-proxy in September. There are plans to digitize and hopefully make searchable transcripts of this material . . . for posterity. It was slim heritage pickings at our kitchen table because my Dad basically did not talk about his War. In an essay typed up [a good bit easier than speaking up!] in the 1990s, my father referred to Bryan Scurfield, a much admired and effective older officer under whom he served in HMS Hunter. Scurfield's later command HMS Bedouin was out-gunned and sunk in the Mediterranean in June 1942. Scurfield survived as a POW only to be killed by friendly fire in the very last month before VE-day. The pity of war, the ptsd war distilled.
And nor did my Mother: she served at least six years in uniform, dated a number of aircrew who never came back, saw one of her friends blown to fritters at a V2 launch site, shared a jeep with French commandos with knives bloody from killing German sentries. But my father died aged 83, while my Mum lived into her 100th year. In her 90s, her PTSD drained away a little and she opened up with some scarcely believable tales of lice, horses, scavenging professors, code-breaking, fur-coats and Hitler-rich photo-albums. Ignore all that, my mother never set foot in the Déise until she married in 1950: three years after her much-love FiL had retired to Co Wexford.
2) Silence among veterans of foreign wars was a running theme at the Waterford Conference. One delegate referred to it as omerta -- neither asked nor spoken about in the family nor the local community. So it seems that the best time to tap into oral history is not 60 years ago; because then the memories are so raw they may bleed if poked.
Another running theme was the fact that The State was less than 20 years old when hostilities broke out [in Poland] in September 1939. Not so fast! Up until the very end of 1937, the polity in the 26 counties was Saorstát Éireann. The Republic was not two years old when it was announced that a state of war existed between Britain and Germany. de Valera [felt he] had to teeter totter so as not to offend either of the belligerent sides and try to bring in enough tea to sustain the people.
Hindsight gives a different complexion on actions and inactions during The Emergency. Would Ireland really have been neutral-but-leaning-Allies if Churchill had fought them on the beaches . . . and lost. I mention this because Nuremberg told us that The Other Side was the sole perp when it came to war-crimes in WWII. There was no killing of prisoners [ooops Katyn] or civilians [er Hello Dresden], let alone weapons [Hiroshima] of mass [Nagasaki] destruction [to use an anachronistic term] by the Allies. Many Waterford folk were definitely leaning-Allies: Serving in the merchant marine in Allied convoys like my FiL Pat the Salt; or Dermote Bolger's Dad on MV Kerlough. Or going full in and sailing with the "Grey Funnel Line" a euphemism for the British navy.
The last talk flagged a monument in Bavaria
where the crew of a British Lancaster has been adopted by the village
of Bolstern. The speaker was the gt.nephew of the Navigator, F/S Terry
McEneaney from Waterford City. The bomber crashed outside the village
and the whole crew was killed. It is possible that one of the last
actions of the pilot was a swerve to avoid hitting the village. The
family took the trouble to find out what happened to ObLt Gunther
Koberich, the pilot credited with downing the Lancaster . . . he died 5
days later on yet another mission. The pity of war; the pity war distilled. That personnel research is of personal interest because we live in the house the bomb fell on that Felix built in 1941. Because it has been on my mind, for the last 25+ years, to mine Luftwaffe records to see which squadrons were out on the night of 1st/2nd Jan 1941and which crew reported a) getting lost b) jettisoning their load at 0600 hrs. Like the folks from Bolstern, it would be nice to go Full Atatürk on these boys who were doing a job of work in severely adverse and dangerous conditions:
"You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway
countries, wipe away
your tears; your sons are now lying
in our bosom and are in peace. After
having lost their lives
on this land they have become our sons as well."
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