“I wasn’t afraid of the bombs. To me, nighttime air raids over Glasgow were just the way life was—noisy, but not frightening. I accepted them the same way I accepted food shortages and soldiers in the streets; British and American uniforms side by side. At the first wail of the sirens I would climb into a chair beside the window to watch the city black out street by street, until all I could see was the flicker of flashlights as wardens went from house to house checking blackout curtains. As far as I knew, life had never been any different. Outside I could hear men shouting, fire fighting equipment rumbling by. Sometimes there would be earth-rocking explosions as bombs struck the Clyde Bank shipyards nearby.”
Those are my childhood memories I wrote in my book Scott Free a number of years ago.
As young as I was then, old memories are being stirred up as my wife Nedra and I have been watching the Ken Burns PBS series on The War. We wept and prayed.
What a horror, what sacrifices, what a price; and what selfless heroism.
For those of you who may have missed the series, PBS is showing individual episodes on Wednesdays for the next seven weeks.
Give it 15 minutes and you will be hooked. If you have the facility to record it, do so.
Yesterdays’s USA Today newspaper has published the third feature story on THE WAR. High schools throughout the country are being equipped with free resource kits to supply history classes. Local PBS stations across the USA are interviewing the men and women of that generation in their towns and cities. The Library of Congress is urging people to record stories of World War II veterans before their stories are lost forever as more than 1,000 veterans die every day.
As one observer stated “this is turning into a social movement.”
Memorial Day is more than beer party and the beginning of summer; and Thanksgiving Day more than turkey; it should be a time to express gratitude to God and the men and women who gave their all.
As an immigrant son to America I just want to say, thank you and with Winston Churchill salute those who gave their “blood, sweat, and tears.”
Scott Ross
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