My Dad won a medal in the war. He didn’t actually get it until 50 years later, but hey.
The island of Malta was awarded the George Cross, but the servicemen who suffered the horrendous bombardment and desperate privations of the Siege of Malta never received a campaign medal.
Eventually in 1992 the Government of Malta produced a long-deserved medal for these veterans, the Malta George Cross Fiftieth Anniversary Commemorative Medal. My parents decided to attend the official presentation on Malta and enjoy a holiday there.
Unfortunately their host’s English wasn’t too good, and he thought Dad had won the George Cross! Beaming with pride, he introduced Dad to his friends as a great World War II hero.
Not wanting to embarrass their host, Mum and Dad hid their smiles and played along, but of course my Dad didn’t do anything particularly heroic during the war – he was no coward either, but just an ordinary Royal Air Force ‘erk’ doing his bit.
And I’m bloody glad he wasn’t a hero.
If Dad hadn’t kept his head down at the right time and instead become one of the 580,000 British servicemen and women killed during the war, I wouldn’t exist, and nor would sixteen other members of my family.
60 million people died in World War II. If each of them would have had a similar number of descendants, that means the war deprived the world of around 1000 million warm, loving and decent people who deserved to be born. We’ll never know what we missed.
Dad’s service record during the war may have been nothing special, but he deserved his medal. What the servicemen and civilians on Malta suffered was unbelievable – 3000 bombing raids in two years, near-starvation, shortages of vital medicines, fuel and supplies and an epidemic of typhoid – but they didn’t surrender. They were all heroes. If he’d been any more of a hero, he’d have been dead.
And his efforts and those of countless others have made the world an infinitely better place – especially for me.
I’ve lived for over 50 years without suffering the terrors of war. I’ve never come home to find my house is a bombed-out wreck, or seen dead children lying in the streets. I’ve never watched my friends being shot in front of me, or had my family dragged away screaming, never to be seen again. I’ve never been tortured. Or worse, been forced to learn German.
My Dad saved me from that. And best of all, he survived to give me my life.
So unlike those 1000 million people who were never born, I can wear my poppy with pride this year, and every year – because my Dad wasn’t a hero.