A good thread to read on this Remembrance Sunday. Here is my contribution:
My great uncle, Bill Church, was a professional soldier prior to the Great War. Serving with the Queen's Regt Royal West Surrey), he was one of the first in the BEF to be sent to France in August 1914. He fought at Mons, and was captured at Gheluvelt in Nov 1914, spending the next 4 years in a German PoW camp. On release after the Armistice he was trying to get home by ship, but was terribly weakened after 4 years in a PoW camp, and only got as far as Copenhagen before contracting Spanish flu, from which he died on Boxing Day 1918. He was buried on 7 January 1919, the funeral service was featured in local papers because it was unusual to have Allied soldiers in Denmark at that time, and I have seen the article and photos from that day. Meanwhile back in London, his younger brother Tom (my grandfather) had also been called up, and having completed his training in the Royal Garrison Artillery was waiting to go to France when he too caught Spanish flu. He was hospitalised before he could go, and was still there when the war ended. So the flu took one, and effectively saved the other.
Years later Grandad Tom gave me Bill's medals, which had been mounted in a frame in 1919, along with a small picture of him. The face staring back at me could have been my own as a young man - he was the spitting image of me. And my birthday? 7 January... I have visited Bill's grave twice in recent years to lay wreaths, and am moved every time I go. He lies in Copenhagen Western Cemetery with a number of his ex-PoW comrades who also died of flu, and the Danish government looks after their graves immaculately.
I would also like to mention my Dad's 5 uncles, all of whom served in the Second World War, all in the Royal Navy. They were Geoff, Walter, Stephen, George and Jasper Mellows. Three came home, George and Stephen were killed. George we knew had been killed when HM Submarine SNAPPER was sunk in the Bay of Biscay in 1941. Stephen we didn't know much about, but the family story was that he was killed when HMS Repulse was sunk by the Japanese in December 1941. A few years ago I did some research and found the truth was different - he was a Chief Petty Officer Writer in HMS TAMAR, the shorebase in Hong Kong, and was taken prisoner by the Japanese. Initially imprisoned in Hong Kong, in October 1942 he was one of many prisoners being transferred to Japan on the SS Lisbon Maru, a Japanese freighter. She was attacked by the USS Grouper, a USN submarine, on 1 Oct 42. She did not sink immediately, so the Japanese crew were able to abandon ship, but not before battening down the prisoners in the hold, so that they would all be drowned. The prisoners had other ideas, and some managed to break out before the ship went down, where the Japanese machine gunned them on the deck and in the water. Of those who made it into the water, just a few managed to reach a nearby island where they were soon recaptured by the Japanese. The rest were swept away into the Pacific. Both George and Stephen have no known grave and are commemorated on the RN Memorial in Plymouth.
I was commissioned myself in 1986, and have another 2 years before retirement. I have always tried to live up to their example, and every Remembrance Sunday I think about them and what they gave up so that we could have freedom.
