ARmy Rumour SErvice

One grandfather lied about his age and joined up into the signals service part of the RE in 1914.

He spent the entire war in France and the only story he would ever tell was about being sent headlong into the mud after being knocked over by a horse.

He stayed in the territorials afterwards while working for the GPO and was one of the originals on the forming of the RSigs.

He did the whole of WW2, mostly in the UK but went back to France after DDay.

Absolutely no stories about that adventure. He came out as a Major and, as he put it, 'went back to work for the Post Office'.

It was only when I was reading Spycatcher, in which he got a proper name-check, that I realised he was up to his neck in the secret squirrel comms world and even when I'd got him bang to rights with the book he still just span the Post Office line.

Tother GF was WW1 Linconshire Regiment infantry in France. He had a better sense of humour and used to wind me out of my tree when I was trying to get stories out of him as a child.

'I always had my eyes shut, runaway and live to fight another day was our motto'.

Oh no it wasn't, you bloody liar.

I think as time passed men from that era had a better record of opening up to their grandsons rather than their sons, but those two simply stayed schtum for the rest of their lives.

to be honest the state of Germany at the end of the war I'd be surprised too many relatives were left around to claim the remins.

Originally Posted by A_Brace_of_Buns

It's too late now, but my Mum would have been pleased to possibly find out where her brother had been buried. According to his Platoon Sergeant he caught a bullet in the head and died instantly – but if you talk to enough people who lived through the times, you'll soon find that, allegedly, most Reichswehr soldiers on the Eastern Front died that way. Who'd a thought the Russkis were so good with their Kalashnikovs!

And who'd have thought the Red Army had time machines!

I don't know how many of the bones that the Germans are burying are actually theirs, judging by the latest story I've heard in Russia. When organised crime started tearing up the battlefields with JCBs in order to sieve out trinkets to sell in the international militaria markets, they'd simply dump or burn the accompanying bones (German and Russian). The Germans apparently responded by offering a bounty for German bodies (i.e. those that are now being reburied in cemeteries). Latest development is that apparently the crims - with an eye on this limitless bounty money - have obtained lists of missing and the approximate region, and are now manufacturing dog tags to match any old set of bones (German, Russian, civilian, etc), some of which are being looted from existing civilian cemeteries....

The only concession the Russians made when policing up the battlefields was that they'd try and ensure Russian and Germanski bodies weren't dumped in the same shell holes.
There seems to have been nothing in the line of formal grave registration units etc, not that it would have made much difference, as Russian soldiers by and large had no formal ID on them… it was just - Comrade Captain of the 1767th Pioneer Unit, dispose of all the bodies by the morning.

Was reading "The Kindly ones" a while ago and he has some stats for losses on the Eastern Front and I think it came down to something like one death every 4 seconds and that 24/7 for however long it went on for.

That along with the fact that after D-Day it was something like 17 German divisions in the west and 157 odd in the East make you realise that our bit of the war was relatively small in comparison to what went on over in the East. (Some 90% of all German soldiers were based on the East IIRC).

If anyone is interested this is the excerpt from the book.

Now for the math. The conflict with the USSR lasted from June 22, 1941 at 03:00 until, officially, May 8, 1945 at 23:01, which adds up to three years, ten months, sixteen days, twenty hours, and one minute, or, rounding off, to 46.5 months, 202.42 weeks, 1,417 days, 34,004 hours, or 2,040,241 minutes (counting the extra minute). For the program known as the “Final Solution,” we’ll use the same dates; before that, nothing had yet been decided or systematized, so Jewish casualties were for the most part incidental. Now let’s average out one set of figures with the other: for the Germans, this gives us 64,516 dead per month, or 14,821 dead per week, or 2,117 dead per day, or 88 dead per hour, or 1.47 dead per minute, on average for every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year for three years, ten months, sixteen days, twenty hours and one minute. For the Jews, including the Soviet ones, we have about 109,677 dead per month, which is 25,195 dead per week, 3,599 dead per day, 150 dead per hour, or 2.5 dead per minute, over the same period. Finally on the Soviet side, that gives us some 430,108 dead per month, 98,804 dead per week, 14,114 dead per day, 588 dead per hour, or 9.8 dead per minute, for the same period. Thus for the overall total in my field of activities we have an average of 572,043 dead per month, 131,410 dead per week, 18,772 dead per day, 782 dead per hour, and 13.04 dead per minute, every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of the given period, which is, as you will recall, three years, ten months, sixteen days, twenty hours and one minute. Let those who smirked at that admittedly somewhat pedantic extra minute please consider that it is worth an additional 13.04 dead, on average, and imagine, if they can, thirteen people from their circle of friends killed in one minute. You can also calculate the length of time it takes to generate a fresh corpse: this gives us on average a dead German every 40.8 seconds, a dead Jew every 24 seconds, and a dead Bolshevik (Soviet Jews included) every 6.12 seconds, or on the whole a new dead body on average every 4.6 seconds, for the entirety of said period. You are now in a position to carry out, based on these numbers, concrete exercises of imagination. For example, stopwatch in hand, count off one death, two deaths, three deaths, etc., every 4.6 seconds (or every 6.12 seconds, or every 24 seconds, or every 40.8 seconds, if you have a marked preference), while trying to picture them lying there in front of you, those one, two, three dead. You’ll find it’s a good meditation exercise. Or take some more recent catastrophe that affected you strongly, and compare the two. For instance, if you are an American, consider your little Vietnam adventure, which so traumatized your fellow citizens. You lost 50,000 troops there in ten years: that’s the equivalent of a little less than three days and two hours’ worth of dead on the Eastern Front, or of some thirteen days, twenty-one hours, and twenty-five minutes’ worth of dead Jews. I obviously am not including the Vietnamese dead; since you never speak of them, in your books or TV programs, they must not count for much to you. Yet you killed forty of them for every single one of your own dead, a fine effort even compared to our own, and one that certainly speaks for the value of technical progress.

Originally Posted by supermatelot

Probably not well known because all Germans who died in the war are often wrongly equated to NAZIs. So it's probably been kept quiet due to modern day embarrassment of what people before us got up to.

I never had the thought, or the time to ask my grandad about "his" war. I thought I was living one of my own only a few years after joining up. I remember him once saying though, in response to I can't exactly remember...: "They were sailors, not nazis". I think I asked him if he hated them or something like that. Dunno, I was young and can't remember exactly.

Wish I could ask the fucker a few questions now though...

True that not all Germans were Nazis but on the other hand it's important to realise that it wasn't just the SS that took part in the mass murder of POW's and civilians. Nor did the war in the east somehow degenerate into a bloodbath over the months and years of the German occupation. There are radio intercepts dated from 25/26 June 1941 in which a German panzer general berates Wermacht infantry for murdering too many Russian POW's with the result that instead of encouraging mass surrenders, the remaining Russians instead put up stiffer resistance, knowing their fate if captured. There are also academic studies of the composition of SS police battalions which demonstrate that far from being swivel-eyed Leibstandarte types, the men that carried out the majority of the atrocities against the civilian population on the Eastern front were overwhelmingly not party members, but drawn from the general population.

Originally Posted by Micawber

I think as time passed men from that era had a better record of opening up to their grandsons rather than their sons, but those two simply stayed schtum for the rest of their lives.

this seems to have been the case with me, previously when i've asked my dad to expand on what i already knew about grandads war and it seems he spoke to me about it a lot more than he ever did to my dad or my uncle. i used to regret not asking him more but now just think that if he'd wanted to tell me he would've.