What got you interested?

Discussion in 'Historiography' started by Gage, Mar 4, 2006.

  1. infoseeker

    infoseeker Member

    Grandad was in RA, never spoke much about it but after he died my Nan spoke about their lives quite often, they had been married for 69 years and knew each other for some years prior to their marriage (she obviously missed him), so there were a hell of a lot of stories, some of the things she spoke of sparked memories of my own so I decided to investigate their lives in more detail. I've found out some interesting things spanning much of the 1900's, relatives long forgotten or never known, work in the cotton mills of Manchester, or in the munitions factories etc.
     
  2. Noreen

    Noreen Member

    What an interesting thread; I've really enjoyed reading through it.

    I think my interest sparked when I was a kid in the late fifties; we were playing on waste ground and found a tin trunk filled with gas masks. Those who dared put them on and chased the rest of us.
     
  3. von Poop

    von Poop Adaministrator Admin

    Thought of them today.
    The Peasholm Naval battles played a part. Certainly deserve some blame/credit for an early interest.

     
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  4. The Cooler King

    The Cooler King Elite Member

    What got me interested in WW2....................Well the simplest answer I could give would be by just being a boy!.................Airfix Kits, Playing with my Action Men (Be careful!) War films like the Great Escape, Were Eagles Dare etc........ and it just carried on from their. Helps that most of your mates felt the same way of course!.
     
  5. Chris C

    Chris C Canadian

    It's a bit of a jumble for me I think for me it was a mounting interest as a child in the late 70s/early 80s with contributions from:

    Seeing old episodes of The Rat Patrol
    Avalon Hill's Squad Leader wargame
    Reading Brazen Chariots

    I had some other wargames at the time as well. (Squad Leader belonged to my older brother.) This phase of my interest lasted some time into my teens. I remember getting some very dense volumes describing many, many naval actions out of the university library with the aid of my grandmother.

    Then I completely lost interest for about 25 years. More recently it was definitely World of Tanks and specifically people also making scale models that got me interested in WW2 again. I felt a strange but STRONG compulsion to make a Crusader tank model. Then I rebought Barry Pitt's books on the desert war. It was all onwards from there.
     
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  6. vitellino

    vitellino Senior Member

    In 1999 I was managing holiday properties in Umbria, Italy, and in one of the cottages that summer was ex-RAAF pilot Jack Doyle. Jack had come back to Italy after 55 years to try to find out where he had been blown up by a time bomb thoughfully left by the Germans on 29 June 1944. He had just one piece of information on which to base his quest for the villa in which the bomb had been planted, an aerial photograph taken from a height of 26,000 feet on the 22nd of June. He seemed to remember that it was to the north of Lake Trasimeno, though it had been almost dark when he and his team arrived and the following day they had not moved from the attic where they were operating the radio when the explosion took place. In an article written for magazine of 450 Squadron RAAF in 1999 he wrote:

    When my first tour of operations ended, after 14 months, mid-way up Italy, I was placed on Rover David duties. This required me to be up near the front line directing patrolling aircraft on to targets specially selected by the Army just prior to an attack by our troops. Obviously a high vantage point helped. So I chose a large two-storied mansion which I had remembered as being to the north of Lake Trasimeno. It was dusk on 29 June when I drove my jeep up the wide steps and into the reception hall. With my RAAF radio operator and followed by my Army Liaison Officer with his radio man we went to the attic where I removed some roof tiles and looked towards the front line. The Germans had departed the house twenty four hours before we arrived, and some servants were still there so we considered it safe. Unbeknown to all of us the Germans had planted a 500 kg aircraft bomb in the basement as a booby trap, timed to explode at 3 pm, which it did. Some army personnel had been pulled out of the front line for a short rest and these plus others made up the twenty people in the building. It is believed only three of us survived. I was evacuated out by air to Naples hospital from Orvieto, so I knew it was further north of Orvieto than shelling distance. Actually I thought it was just north of Trasimeno, at a guess. I picked the 'Casa di Pan' out of a catalogue which said that the friendly English owner lived upstairs, a wonderful source of information because my Italian is very limited.. 'Billie' Whitford and I with the help of an English lass, Janet Dethick, who lived nearby, found this place.

    Jack put his photo on the kitchen table, around which we were seated, and I immediately recognised the road going past my house at Vitellino and the villa itself, Villa Paolozzi, near Gioiella. He told me that at the time of the explosion there were some British troops in the villa, where they had set up their headquarters, but he didn't know who they were. That started me off of my quest...in the villa were the headquarters of 4 Recce Regiment, 4 British Infantry Division - quite a bit has been posted on this site regarding the explosion. This encounter changed my life - I now have numerous books to my name and three websites and am still looking for information,

    Vitellino

    Jack Doyle fotografia.jpg MEC2095  Jack Doyle a Malta 1943.jpg Jack Doyle at Villa Paolozzi.jpg
     

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  7. Uncle Target

    Uncle Target Mist over Dartmoor

    Inheriting 94 letters from a man who was killed in 1944. They were so well written describing his world of 1940 -1944. His family discussions, politics and interests.
    Not memoires but written as he lived his "Buccaneering" mobile existence in tents and ruined buildings until his death.
    I took them out the week that I retired to begin transcribing them and like a genie out of a bottle the whole thing has grown over the last four years.
     
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  8. Uncle Target

    Uncle Target Mist over Dartmoor

    The author of my letters was killed along with three others on the Via di Montughi La Pietra Florence. The map reference is recorded in the war Diaries as it was a great disaster for the Regiment losing three aspiring young officers, the Survey Officer, two Command Post Officers and a Bombardier Driver/ Surveyor. The Recce Jeep went down the lane first followed by the Survey Jeep. The Recce Jeep either missed the mines or struck them but they did not detonate. The Survey Jeep detonated them blowing the jeep over a 2M wall (the lane was walled on both sides) killing all the occupants. They lie in Florence War Cemetery. It was not uncommon to place a torsion bar in the Teller mine cut part way through to prevent it detonating an anything lighter than a tank. They were placed with two or three together to destroy it rather than break the tracks. The week before the lane was used as access to a field base used by the 2nd North Staffs fighting in the area. They were accompanied by 446 Bty 67th FR FOO team who were following a Recce Carrier which was hit by an anti tank gun killing all the occupants nearby on the Via Bolognese. The mine must have blown when the torsion bar finally snapped after a number of passes. The area was familiar to the men in the Regiment so they were unaware of the danger hidden there.
     
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  9. daisy1942

    daisy1942 Junior Member

    I had always had a fascination for WW2 after all both my parents had served, Dad in RAF and Mum was a Wren. Also, there was the family joke that if only Granddad had shot straight in WW1 then WW2 would never have happened (Grandad and Hitler were both wounded in the same WW1 battle)!
    Then in the 80's I met and married and my interest increased out of all proportion. My hubby's father was one of the lucky ones who escaped from Singapore. At that time, we did not know how he had got to Singapore, which service he was with or anything and some of these questions still remain unanswered. To compound the issue, my father in law vanished about March 1942 and resurfaced in the West Indies, in US uniform. Some 14 months later he did it again! This time he turned up in Montreal Canada about May 1944 in the British Merchant Navy.
    Trying to solve the jigsaw has taken many many hours and has introduced me to some wonderful people all over the world, many are members on this site. There are still gaps to fill but I shall keep trying!
     
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  10. Jim Klag

    Jim Klag Member

    My dad and my uncles were veterans and I my mom had a couple coffee table books with lots of photos about the war. The very first book I read on the war was by a British author, John Frayn Turner and the book was Invasion '44. I borrowed this book from our local library because I was interested in the Normandy invasion from movies and my "uncle" (a friend of my dad's who we called Uncle Ted) who was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne.
     
  11. Grasmere

    Grasmere Well-Known Member

    My mum and dad met in a munitions factory during WW2.
     
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  12. von Poop

    von Poop Adaministrator Admin

    Occurred to me that the Falklands War maybe played a part.
    Was 10-11 in '82. First conflict I properly noticed on the news. Bought the whole Marshall Cavendish part-work with pocket money etc.
    Perhaps engrained a fair chunk of 'This military stuff is quite interesting'.

    Also: Ian Hogg small arms encyclopedias.
    Several in the house. Accessible, illustrated, almost Top Trumps sort of stuff for an intrigued kid.
     
  13. 51highland

    51highland Very Senior Member

    As a child I started to get the bug with reading the weekly issue of the Victor comic. Then in 1968 started my apprenticeship and these (really old boys in their 40's) men I was working with and being trained by started relating various stories, one had fought at Arnhem, another, Ken 'Winkie' Walker had lost an eye in the navy on one of the runs to Malta. Dad never ever said anything about his time. I just remember the photo on top of the TV, I did not even realise it was my Dad and Montgomery. In the 90's I enrolled dad in the Camerons regimental association and had our first visit to Cameron barracks for the gathering. Then the stories started coming out when he was with 'his own kind'. Then I started to really get the bug with researching his time in the army 1939 to 19946. after visiting Holland and France on several occasions, I really did understand him. What I cannot understand is how he turned out to be such a gentle man after the things he had done and seen. His nightmares on our trips were a real eyeopener. God bless him.
     

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  14. davidbfpo

    davidbfpo Patron Patron

    Quite a long journey to get here. In my early teens I had an interest in history, this led to Napoleonic wargaming with painted Airfix soldiers and then onto wider military / strategic matters. Devoured and purchased Purnell's? WW1 & WW2 weekly magazines. Then off to university to study politics plus. Joined IISS and RUSI, though main interest then was not history. When my paid career allowed I read a lot, went on multiple, organised fortification tours in Europe; hence The Crimea, Ukraine to the eats, Norway to the north, most parts of the Med and of course points between.

    Then along came retirement and a return to military history. Pursuing one project in 2018 on an episode in Partition I found here was very helpful and interesting. Still here now.
     
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  15. idler

    idler GeneralList

    I can't actually remember a time when I wasn't. My dad had left the Army when I was two so there were a few bits of kit around that I grew up with - his 1944 Pattern map case lasted a few years before it fell to bits. Add to that grandads and great uncles who'd all done their bit, militaristic televisual classics like Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, Airfix soldiers and dad-built kits, I had no chance. I do remember getting my first Action Man for Christmas at probably four; lessons on doing the paratrooper's puttees not long after. Then graduating to war comics and films, building my own kits, devouring books at home and in the library; inevitably started sowing the seeds of my own...

    Then, as now, the biggest problem was lack of focus. Only ever dipped into the family military history. Never even thought about it as an academic path as I veered towards sciences rather than humanities. No idea if World War studies were a thing back in the mid-80s; probably still too recent to be 'history'.
     
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  16. Mparker7001

    Mparker7001 New Member

    What got me interested is absolutely my grandfather. He was a war photographer in the army air corps. He as well raised me. Looking at all of his old war photos and listening to him explain them to me as a kid was the catalyst. I wish to release many of his war photos and am not sure the best way to go about that, but I figured joining a WW2 forum was a good first step. I also have to figure out how to print the negatives, I am not sure if modern machines are setup for 1940's style negatives and I do not have a dark room.
     
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  17. ltdan

    ltdan Nietenzähler

    Definitely this book by Janusz Piekalkiewicz:
    00.jpg
    I got it from my uncle when I was 11 - and I can't count how many times I read it back then....
    Since then, the "exotic" fringes of war in particular have stayed with me.
     
  18. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

    My dad's and neighbors' father's souvenirs and WWII movies on B&W TV.
    It eventually wore off for my childhood pals but not for me.

    One friend recently asked why I like museums so much. He said, "You've seen one cannon, you've seen them all."
     
  19. stolpi

    stolpi Well-Known Member

    Airfix definitely!

    airfix-1-72-s28-ww1-french-infantry-type-2-box--loose--p-image-460223-grande.jpg

    ... and a visit to the Ardennes ... museums at Clervaux & Bastogne.
     
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  20. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

    That was the first pack I had.
    Our nextdoor neighbour was an " Old Contemptible " & told me a few stories when he saw them.
     
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