Victoria Panton Bacon - Remarkable Women of the Second World War: A Collection of Untold Stories

First published 2020

The History Press

97 St Georges Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Victoria Panton Bacon, 2020

The right of Victoria Panton Bacon to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9590 0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

To the thousands, upon thousands, of men and women who deserve our thanks and remembrance, as much as those who have told their stories for this book.

To all who gave us our freedom.

History is made up of billions of shards of experiences, each valuable and essential to make up the larger picture, each tiny yet all-important at the same time. In this fascinating and touching book we hear from survivors of the Second World War in their own words. Their very personal accounts of this huge and terrible period of history show courage, humour, pity and horror, splinters of memory, glittering and vital to our understanding of war, and its effects on those who lived through it.

I happen to be one of the diminishing number of those who were born just before the outbreak of the Second World War. I still have vivid memories of a fighter plane crash-landing in the road beside our house and of soldiers marching in formation along the road towards their barracks. At night my mother was careful to cover all the windows with blackout material so that we would not be spotted by enemy aircraft.

Those men and women who actually took an active part in combat are increasingly few in number and they have even more vivid memories.

Victoria has performed a valuable service in recording their experiences in this book. Not only has she provided the reader with a fascinating account of those years, but she has given us a unique insight into the lives of some of those who left their homes and occupations and entered a strange new world. She covers a wide territory from the Home Guard to Burma to Bomber Command and Auschwitz.

There is little glamour in warfare. It is brutal, frightening and horrible. It is important that we remember those years not only to pay tribute to those who gave their lives but also to remind ourselves that we owe it to future generations to do all in our power to promote peace and harmony in this world.

This collection of the Second World War memories is a gem. The front-line stories are humane, modest and compassionate inspiring admiration to the point of awe.

People sometimes forget that war is not about cold metal aircraft, battleships and tanks. It is about the pain and suffering of human beings, their courage and anxieties, and the relationships that generate hope and fear. In Remarkable Journeys of the Second World War, Victoria Panton Bacon captures the vulnerability of the human spirit at sea, on land and in the air, from the Lancaster navigator watching the stars; to the wine waiter on the high seas; the young Hungarian Jew who made a life after Auschwitz; and the warrior historian seeking truth. Her book is full of remarkable testimony, a series of remarkable journeys.

As the Second World War passes from living memory, Victoria presents an extraordinary cast of characters who reveal what it was like to take part in the fight for freedom. From cavalrymen to rear gunners to merchant seamen, this book reveals the participants as human beings with recognisable passions and emotions. Their stories are exciting, heart-breaking and vitally important.

Victoria Panton Bacon has woven together voices with historical context to create the Bayeux Tapestry of the Second World War. An important part of her book is her own perspective as someone who is two generations separated from those who lived through the trauma. For those of my own generation, Baby Boomers born in the 1940s, the men and women who experienced the war were parents, teachers and work colleagues. We often sat next to them in staff rooms and saw them on a daily basis. In some ways, we took them for granted and did not fully appreciate what they had experienced. Victoria is from the grandchild generation and the freshness of her perspective is a vital part of this book. If anything, she has taught us that we should love these extraordinary men and women even more than we do.

Remarkable Journeys of the Second World War is an outstanding book which deserves to become a classic of the period. Victorias narrative gets up close and personal to her truly remarkable interviewees. Her sympathy for and interaction with these individuals creates honest and gripping revelations. The voices in this book reflect a wide range of war experience. There are pilots, sailors, Home Guard soldiers, POWs and the harrowing recollections of a Bergen-Belsen survivor (an account that should be read in history lessons in every school).

Although much has been written about this period, Victoria constantly turns over new leaves. Far from the Dads Army image of popular imagination, the Home Guard suffered 1,206 killed. In addition to the horrors of the gas ovens, there was also the sadistic twist of having family photos confiscated by concentration camp guards sadism that becomes emotional as well as physical.

I must also praise the writing skill and professionalism with which this book has been woven together. Each voice is unique and utterly memorable. At times tragic, at times humorous, but always gripping, Remarkable Journeys of the Second World War is a book that will reverberate in the readers mind long after the final page.

(Author of her Fathers Second World War Diary, Flying Blind: The Story of a Second World War Night Fighter Pilot)

When I looked it up to check, I was surprised to find that the last surviving service veteran of the First World War was not the last fighting Tommy, Harry Patch (18982009) as I had thought: he was the last surviving veteran to have fought in the trenches; nor was it Claude Choules (19012011), a British Australian who was the last surviving combatant, and who served in the Royal Navy in both world wars. It was, in fact, a lady called Florence Green, who joined the Womens Royal Air Force when she was just 17, in the summer of 1918.