Remembering Remembrance Day

Today is Remembrance Sunday. It is a day which has taken on extra poignance for me personally since the death of my father in November 2014, who first fell ill on Remembrance Sunday and died ten days later. As he grew older, his experiences of being an emotional, impressionable child living on the shores of the English Channel with their barbed wire and pill boxes returned to haunt him. He would recall the German planes flying overhead on their way to bombing raids in London, seeing one brought down only a few yards from where he lived with his parents in Brighton. He recalled with equal horror, and clearly deep emotional trauma, the shouting of a deranged Hitler coming over the radio airwaves into his home. A personal invasion. 

I have decided this year not to write anything new, but instead to look back at posts I have written in the past from my own home in the Peak District hills, not a million miles from Ladybower Reservoir where Barnes Wallis and a group of young RAF pilots worked together on the bouncing bomb and its strategic part in the outcome of World War 2. The eventual breaching of the Mohne Dam, and its necessary re-building, took vital resources away from Hitler’s efforts to build up defences along the Channel coast of France which, in turn, helped D-Day to succeed in its aims. One of those 617 Squadron pilots, Flight Lieutenant William ‘Bill’ Astell, D.F.C, lived - when he was home - with his parents and siblings in the house I am currently calling home. He did not make it back from Operation Chastise, the top secret mission - indeed, he did not even make it to the mission as his low-flying Lancaster bomber hit power lines in the darkness and exploded catastrophically with all the munitions it was carrying. Fifty-three other courageous servicemen did not return that dark night in May 1943. But let us not forget, either, the loss of innocent German life as a tsunami of water flooded the valley below. The human tragedy of war. 

Here is a link to those former posts which are a combination of reflections and musings on Remembrance Day and the coincidence of living in the home of one of the Dambusters. 

https://viewfromthehighpeak.blogspot.com/search?q=Dambusters

Here too is link for Aircrew Remembered - William Astell D.F.C:-

http://aircrewremembered.com/astell-william.html

And one for an explanation of the raid:-

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-incredible-story-of-the-dambusters-raid

My family and I moved into Spire Hollins House in May 2003, 60 years after the death of one of its former occupants, Bill Astell -  a free spirit, an adventurer from birth, a decorated serviceman from his courageous exploits in the Middle East, who lived more in his 23 years than many of us have in the triple of his short lifetime. I had the privilege of corresponding with his sister, Betty, many years ago and this summer I had the pleasure of communicating with his only surviving youngest sister. I can only tell you that she is as formidable and colourful character as the brother she lost. 

Remembrance Sunday, 8th November 2020