The Wartime Memories Project - The Second War

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241698 James Clifton Rowland British Army Royal Irish Fusiliers from:Stockton On Tees My da, James Rowland, was young and enlisted towards the end of the war. I know he served in Africa first but ended his time in the Army mopping up in Europe. He told us, his children, very little about the war - nothing dark or scary, just how happy the people were to see the British and to know they were finally liberated. As they travelled, people lined the streets smiling and cheering, throwing flowers at the soldiers and the tanks they now travelled with. As I said, very little in the way of dark or scary, just how badly the Germans had treated the people. Imagine my surprise when, just a few weeks before he died my father, gave me a tiny pair of brass clogs which had been a present from a lady friend he'd met over there and then proceeded to tell me his most distressing memories of his service. Bergen Belsen... Of course I had heard of it but had no idea my father had been among the British forces that liberated that dreadful camp. He told me about the piles of corpses all over the camp, even stacked like wood in the trees and the difficulty of telling the skeletal living from the dead. About the trenches full of the recently dead and the rotting bodies. About the cruelty and the indifference of the camp guards. And about how angry he and his mates were - so many were young men who had never seen such disregard for human life. He told me a lot more - but I won't repeat it here. After he died, I researched the liberation of this camp and all the revolting details were there, just as he'd told me. I'll never forget what he told me and I think all the time of the young men who had to see and experience this awful truth. The British soldiers behaved with restraint and humanity God bless them. Barbara Rowland Lindhjem Add to this record.  Related Content: Royal Irish Fusiliers Can you help us to add to our records? Add a record to our website. The names and stories on this website have been submitted by their relatives and friends. If your relations are not listed please add their names so that others can read about them Did you or your relatives live through the Second World War? Do you have any photos, newspaper clippings, postcards or letters from that period? Have you researched the names on your local or war memorial? Were you or your relative evacuated? Did an air raid affect your area? If so please let us know. Help us to build a database of information on those who served both at home and abroad so that future generations may learn of their sacrifice. Contact us. Celebrate your own Family History Celebrate by honouring members of your family who served in the Secomd World War both in the forces and at home. We love to hear about the soldiers, but also remember the many who served in support roles, nurses, doctors, land army, muntions workers etc. Please use our Family History resources to find out more about your relatives. Then please send in a short article, with a photo if possible, so that they can be remembered on these pages.

The free section of the Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers. We have been helping people find out more about their relatives wartime experiences since 1999 by recording and preserving recollections, documents, photographs and small items. The website is paid for out of our own pockets, library subscriptions and from donations made by visitors. The popularity of the site means that it is far exceeding available resources and we currently have a huge backlog of submissions. If you are enjoying the site, please consider making a donation, however small to help with the costs of keeping the site running. Hosted by: The Wartime Memories Project Website is archived for preservation by the British Library Copyright MCMXCIX - MMXXIV - All Rights Reserved We do not permit the use of any content from this website for the training of LLMs or for use in Generative AI, it also may not be scraped for the purpose of creating other websites.