War's horrors unspoken by a generation

The dawn service in Wanganui last year attracted a large crowd, including many young people. Photo/File

I am fascinated by the numbers of young people who turn out at Anzac parades, getting up long before their brains are awake year after year.

But I wonder if they really understand the horrors they are remembering.

Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, who navigated the Enola Gay, was asked to speak to a school class in Florida recently. But when he was introduced by the young teacher as the man who had navigated the bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in "World War Eleven ...", he stood up and left without saying a word.

Of the tens of thousands who left our shores in the first and second world wars, thousands never returned.

But the shooting part of the war was rarely spoken of with those who hadn't been.

To some it was upsetting, some were jealous of these heroes, and some relatives had been told by the authorities not to talk about it with the men because it would upset them.

Post traumatic stress syndrome wasn't recognised, and men with "shell shock" were seen as weak or cowards.

One of my uncles told me that when he had been moved as an escaper to the cold of a German prisoner-of-war camp near Poland, he was starved and fed potato peel on good days. One day Nazi soldiers rounded up 20 or so Russian prisoners and shot them as reparation for some "indiscretion" or other.

They dug a large hole and threw their bodies in. Days later - after the bodies had been covered with snow and ice - some of their frozen hands were protruding out of the snow. Some German guards were playfully using their rifle butts as golf clubs to break them off.

No one returned unscathed - mentally or physically - after those wars.

World War I was probably worse. Men surviving miserably for weeks in the mud of the trenches; officers shooting men for cowardice if they couldn't bring themselves to climb the ladder to "go over the top" - even men frozen to the ladder with "shell shock" were shot, at least by the British.

Little wonder that someone said: "If their mothers could see them now, the war would be over in three weeks."

At home they thought that the first war was "glorious". I have a postcard gushingly written to my grandfather as one of "Our heroes of the Somme".

Heroes certainly, but the battle of the Somme was really a mindless, bloody disgrace with men charging machine guns for king and country. Both of my grandfathers were wounded in Europe in World War I, one losing his leg and dying young. So the assassin Gavrilo Princip, who shot Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo to spark the war, even shaped a little boy growing up in Marton.

That, and the many killed and maimed, was a high price to pay for what has been described as a "family squabble" - just aristocratic silliness with our men paying for someone else's pride with their lives.

It contrasts with World War II, which was genuinely an attempt by satanic monsters to take over the world. Thanks, you blokes - have a beer on us!

Thinking about it, I'm the first of my line in at least 180 years who hasn't fought in a war.

Young and silly, I nearly went to that nasty little war in Vietnam and am eternally thankful I decided to stay home. At least I had the choice.