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The Remembrance Thread - Memorial photos

Was up in Wick yesterday, the hospital has a large display with silhouette soldiers and lots of poppies, the village hall in Watten is the same. All the memorials are full of poppies too. So, up here, at least, they are making the effort.

I have a new pin badge every year, which I usually wear year to year. Plus I usually donate to Erskine, or the poppy fund.

Dad, ex Seaforth Highlanders, wouldn't buy a poppy if it was associated with the Haig fund. He said Haig was one of the biggest mass murderers in history owning to his style of generalship.

Was talking to a courier the other day, who made a valid comment about how certain sections of society who would rather we just didn't have the anniversary. Yet we both agreed that it's immensely important not to forget. Forgetting things like this increase the chance of it happening again, and I don't think we'll come out of it very well if it does.
 
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Did some more research on this photo, HD preparing to cross the Dommel canal (near Eindhoven, Netherlands) October 24, 1944. That's my Dad, third from right.
 
There's a chunk of the population that have no real concept of what those two world wars really involved, and thus cannot comprehend the true scale of the horror and suffering. They don't get that the act of remembrance was to keep those conflicts, the loss of lives, and the sacrifices made to end it, high in our minds each year, so that it was never forgotten and so that we might not repeat the mistakes all over again. Unfortunately, too many completely misunderstand and see it as somehow glorifying war and military prowess. Those well meaning yet misguided, or deliberate bad agents, will ultimately be the cause of another world conflict unless we are able to maintain the remembrance.
IMHO, The adulteration of the symbolic poppy with DEI or LGBTQIA+ sentiment has absolutely no place, and actually threatens to undermine the very freedom that underpins the rights for everyone to live their lives as they choose.
 
Paul d said:
Watched the old soldiers marching at the cenotaph on the tv .must be a very sad but proud day .1 was 104 years old .

I always buy a poppy and a cross for my dads grave he was a cook during the war based in Jerusalem ..

In the village.View attachment 552008
Click to expand...
Just remembered something he once told me when i asked why a cook ,his reply i didn’t want to carry a gun ..
 
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A different type of memorial- the merlin engine we display at shows. Rebuilt in the memory of the crew of beaufighter R2335:
Donald lake
John Edward bignell
Frank Edward greaney

All 3 killed whilst conducting an exercise to test airborne radar in a merlin powered beaufighter in 1941. On landing the undercarriage refused to deploy, and so the aircraft was taken back up to altitude to try to shake it down with aerobatics. Unfortunately the aircraft lost control and crashed. The engine was recovered in 1978 approx 20 feet down, alongside its sister engine, and rebuilt
 
I expect I'm going to offend a lot of people now. Sorry in advance. Remembrance day is a time to reflect on the stupidity of mankind and the inevitability of war. Hopefully to find some way of stomping on the causes of war before they get out of hand. As to the dead of two world wars and those of so many other conflicts, Remebrance 'weekend' is the one day of the year that as far as possible I don't think about it. More people die on a daily basis than I care to think about, and it matters not to me whether their cause of death was war, famine, pestilence or just plain old age. I did not know them and there death leaves me largely unmoved. The dead whose lives I did once know and who shuffled off the mortal coil before their rightful time I miss much and often but I don't wait till the eleventh of November to do so. Remebrance day is the opportunity to supply money to the Royal British Legion and long may it continue, but I'm not going to wail and gnash my teeth and I don't even wear a poppy. I do donate to the RBL, respect all they do, and wish them well even though, for reasons of my own, they won't let me join. The ones we should really be thinking about aren't dead yet. The ones who our governments have long been happy to use to their own ends but are largely discarded when they return badly broken, those are the ones that the systems should collectively care about and for. So remembrance day should get the same sort of media begging bowl presence that 'children in need' has become.
 
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