rover49 wrote:
My grandad felt the same, but we have to remember what they went through. One of my teachers at junior school had been held POW by the Japanese for 3 years and suffered appalling torture and starvation, he had lost the use of one lung, he absolutely hated the Japanese with a passion and told us so in class. I wouldn't be quick to judge those that have suffered things we can only see in movies, to them its like it was yesterday.
I agree with this, I recall a family holiday in Brittany we had when I was a teenager in the early 1970s, as British people the locals couldn't have been friendleir and the bar that myd ad used to take us in every night was run by a Breton who had escaped to London at the start of the war and joined de Gaulles Free French Army, he parachuted back into France on D-Day (apparently).
Later on in the first week of our holiday three German lads arrived on the camp site as as my father tended to be one of those annoying blokes who organised everyone he got them to play football with us during the day then invited them into the bar in the evening - the bar owner refused to serve them at all and physically threw them out even though they were only 18 years old and not even born at the end of the war - he would eventually serve them after some persuasion that he'd lose his English customers too but only if someone else went to the bar for them, he wouldn't be seen fraternising with Germans nearly 30 years after the war ended but then again Brittany was occupied and heavily fortified by the German Army for four years but even my dad, who'd been in Africa and India during the war (not in any combat situations, lucky sod) was surprised by the stregth of feeling against what were just young lads.
