There have already been a few mentions of ‘my history’ regarding interest in the Second World War. However, another vested interest in studying it has dominated many of my thoughts this weekend. All my grandparents were alive during the war, my mother was born in 1944 and my father in 1945.
My maternal grandfather was a farmer and was exempt from military service; my paternal grandfather was in the RAF. When my sister was at school, she did a project where she interviewed both grandfathers. I vividly remember parts of the former but very little of the latter.
Grandpa Willison
Despite not serving due to his vital war work, Grandpa Willison did have plenty of wartime stories to tell. His farm is situated nearly twenty-five miles to the southeast of the steel-producing city of Sheffield. Operation Schmelztiegal (Crucible) was the name of the German bombing raids on the 12th and 15th of December 1940 otherwise known as the Sheffield Blitz. 
As well as farming, his other role was that of blackout warden for his little village, an important job if you live on a potential flight path towards a large industrial city. To facilitate him in his job, he was issued with a truncheon.
When my sister interviewed him, he was able to show us two of these truncheons, I do not believe he did anything that ‘wore out’ his first truncheon but he still ended up with two. The most vivid memory of these truncheons was him demonstrating how to swing the best part of the two-foot-long lump of wood, by hooking the loop of leather in the handle over your thumb and swinging it around the back of your hand to catch it in your palm, then swinging it back around your hand.
Prisoners and marines
There were two other stories I remember, firstly one about the Marines and secondly one about POWs. Some marines were temporally billeted somewhere on the farm and to keep fit they would run around the farm using anything in their path as a type of assault course.
This included running upstairs into a barn and then jumping off the top of the exterior stone stairs on the first floor [second floor in the US] onto the farmyard then running off. There was also a POW camp nearby and the prisoners were used as farm labourers, he also mentioned stories of escapes.
Grandpa Wilson
However, Grandpa Willison is not the grandfather that has been occupying my thoughts recently. Grandpa Wilson (a little confusing I know) joined the RAF, but all we know as a family is that he served in Iceland, Ireland, and Burma. By profession, he was a teacher and I guess by joining the Meteorological Branch as a Flight Lieutenant he was able to use some of his specialities. The only other part of his service that I remember is the tanto dagger I inherited from him which he had ‘liberated’ from a Japanese soldier. My sister has just messaged to say the only thing she remembers was a story about a meteorological flight he was on in Burma when Churchill was on the plane too.
A bit of genealogical digging
My Father has tried researching his father’s service and I have done the same in the last few days. Neither of us has found much at all. The only mention of his name was in the 26th of October 143 edition of the London Gazette when he received his commission as an (emergency) Flight Lieutenant in April 1943 at the age of thirty-one. What I thought would also be a useful nugget of information from the Gazette was his service number.
Despite trawling various genealogy websites, there is no real other information about him. Frustrated, I then followed a different tack of searching for books or other literature about the Meteorological Branch and their time during the occupation of Iceland. Unfortunately, there is very little that I could find on this either. I have ordered the only book I could find about it. Still, it appears to be a general history of the occupation rather than anything specific about the RAF’s role or that of the Meteorological Branch, but time will tell. I am currently also researching what the RAF did in the Far East and Ireland.
What else have I been up to?
Now that I’ve eventually finished Colditz, I have been trying to decide which book or books to focus on next. I thought I would try some different authors, so I began Spike Milligan’s, Adolf Hitler – My Part in His Downfall and The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell. Both books appeared strange in their own way. 
I am aware of Spike Milligan’s works as a writer and comedian, but I am no expert, I get the impression that listening to this book would be much the same as having a conversation with the man himself, a little confusing and a little hard to keep up with his train of thought. I guess that’s what you get from a diary of such a comedy great.
After half an hour, I decided to try something else. I had not completely had enough of a ‘different’ take with Milligan, so I turned to Gladwell’s book, Bomber Mafia. More famous for other books such as ‘Outliers – The Story of Success,’ and ‘The Tipping Point – How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,’ a book about an aspect of the Second World War seemed a little strange to me. However, 
I listened to its first chapters for the rest of my walk. It is about the development of the Norden Bombsight but it also covers the post-First World War history of the US Air Force.
So far, I am enjoying this book and will hopefully get it finished this week. Despite being the shortest of the two books by a considerable margin, Milligan’s book might take a little longer. This could be that I do not get his sense of humour all the time and with any comedy that can make it a little hard to stomach, but I will persevere.
Cheers for now
Bigt