A personal, historical vignette

By Cainnech Ó Sullibhain

When Tom Brokaw wrote the bestseller called “The Greatest Generation,” it only touched the surface of the lives of people who served their country with honour. Beyond that, it did not delve too much into what happened to them and how their lives were changed forever.

So I’ll begin my story on a different note. My father, an officer in good standing, served his country with both honour and dignity in World War II. I could not find a man as dedicated to his job as my father. He served in the Abyssinian campaign against the Italian Legions of Benito Mussolini, who surrendered. From there he went to the Sudan and, when the time came, was sent to Egypt to join the Glorious 8Th Army. He served with distinction in the 52nd Field Hospital on the front line. He saw many of his friends die in the battles against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the Western Desert.

When the war was over my father, a peace-time regular career soldier, sensed something big was about to happen. In 1947 that moment arrived and my father knew that the good old days had ended. The Atlee government’s election in Britain was going to sound the death knell of the British Empire. The India Independence Act of April 1947 was the beginning of the shutting down of the British Empire, not just in India, but Ceylon, Burma and other countries that once constituted the British Empire. My father had given 35 years of his life to the army and this was the end of a great era, never to be seen again or forgotten. In my father’s day, military families were like a clan. They cared for each other. All throughout the war they felt it every time someone was either killed in action or taken prisoner-of-war by either the Germans or the Japanese.

My mother had the habit of visiting the Transit Camp, where families of servicemen that were either killed in action or taken prisoner-of-war were billeted. I watched with great wonder as my mother comforted some of the women in their despair, of losing their husbands. The children of course had no idea of the gravity of the situation, but even I felt their pain. There was not much that I could do, but stand by and listen to my mother comforting people as best she could.

Story continues below…

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When the time came for my father to retire a few years after the war, there was nothing left for him to do. Here was a man who dedicated his life to his country, and now was an empty shell. He could not find anything to take up his time, except to go the British Legion and chat with other servicemen like him, and to while away the time. But even that did not have much influence on his daily life. He very gradually started to give up on living, because his life he felt had become meaningless. Each day that passed I saw the difference, and as the years went by, he became listless and lost. He was truly a man without a duty that one had in the military. The outside world was not the same as the army and when he finally died in 1966, I thought about the many reasons as to why he gave up living. There was purpose in life as he saw it. His life was the army, like it or not, as with many regular soldiers. Without the army life meant nothing. And so when my father died on that bleak morning of February 19, 1966, I knew that he had not really died at all but simply had faded away.

This article is therefore dedicated to those men and women who served their country with distinction, loyalty and honour beyond compare, in the British, U.S., Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and South African forces. We owe them all a debt of gratitude that is both everlasting and which cannot be paid for in just a few words.

May their sacrifices be always be foremost in our minds, from the time we awake in the morn to the sound of reveille at sunset, because they gave their all in protecting our lives and our liberties which they held so dear.