Thinking about my dad today and that is rare. He died when I was 7 and was a hands-off parent so I don't have many memories. He had just qualified as a doctor in London when WW2 broke out so he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, this young man of recent Maori descent from Russell. - ThreadSky

tikorangi.bsky.social • 4 days ago

Thinking about my dad today and that is rare. He died when I was 7 and was a hands-off parent so I don't have many memories. He had just qualified as a doctor in London when WW2 broke out so he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, this young man of recent Maori descent from Russell.

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tikorangi.bsky.social•4 days ago

Identifying NZers in post war autopsies on the dead by their false teeth. Having to find shelter for his troop when they landed in Naples and managing to find an abandoned monastery. Fighting off Italian children desperately trying to steal supplies on the same campaign.

grumpyyetamusin.bsky.social•4 days ago

Bloody horrifying. Just awful.

tikorangi.bsky.social•4 days ago

He spent much of the war running a field hospital just behind the front lines and ended up as a Major in the Britsish army. And he never spoke about the war, not even to my mother who was hunkered down in the English countryside with her first born.

tikorangi.bsky.social•4 days ago

The only war anecdotes were of an impersonal kind - The development if the travel sickness pill for the campaign launched from North Africa, where troops were packed on ships like sardines and they couldn't risk seasickness.

tikorangi.bsky.social•4 days ago

Nothing personal, nothing emotional but years running a field hospital must have meant he dealt with so many horrors. I vaguely wondered why he, an eminent medical research scientist when welater returned to NZ, joined the territorials. Now I think it was to find people who understood.

tikorangi.bsky.social•4 days ago

Not so much a case of 'lest we forget'. More a case of 'lest we remember'.
That unspoken bond between survivors.

It also put a new perspective on his relationship with his own father, from whom he was estranged.

tikorangi.bsky.social•4 days ago

Dad would have been a small boy when his father left Russell to head to the battlefields of WW1, maybe 10 years old when he returned. Maybe his father was not the awful man Dad spoke about but just another casualty of PTSD.

grumpyyetamusin.bsky.social•4 days ago

Sounds like my grandfather. Never spoke about his personal experiences, never really wanted to acknowledge what had happened to him and his contemporaries on all sides. His father had survived being gassed in WW1. PTSD all the way down.

baxtermack.bsky.social•4 days ago

PTSD must have been so common and people would just be told to "Harden up". Thanks for sharing it Abbie.

occasio.bsky.social•4 days ago

Very moving thanks Abbie. 🕊️🌿♥️

tangatatiriti.bsky.social•4 days ago

oof. beautiful. 💔 ngā mihi for sharing that.

patrickherd.bsky.social•4 days ago

The only thing I remember my grandfather telling me about the war was some radio stuff. Absolutely nothing about all the RADAR r&d, which still is of great interest to me.

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