Hi Babs,

I suspect that when we were kids - especially having no experience of war living in North America (Vietnam coverage not being the same as living through bombings) - our father's didn't really want to give us too much that would be hard to assimilate. That was probably combined with the number of people who didn't want to hear about their experiences after they came back - not unless they were the hero of something spectacular, and even then the average person here would only want to hear about it when they asked for the memory; not when they felt the need to tell it. There is a fine line sometimes between the healing process and the educational telling about ones traumatic experiences and remembering in such detail that it becomes a reliving of the experience which causes psychic pain. Hopefully, we'll all remember when we talk with veterans of WWII, the wars after, and those in which our soldiers are currently fighting.

re Secrecy oaths, I don't know if it was common practice to have all soldiers sign secrecy oaths. Perhaps someone else on the forum knows. Being a private wouldn't necessarily have kept him from being privy to some secrets just as being a civilian sometimes makes people privy to secrets of the government depending on the job they were required to do at a specific time. Actually, when you think about it, the common soldier was the guy who knew he signed a secrecy oath but didn't always know what distinguished something he didn't think he should talk about from the "big" secrets; whereas, the political leaders and very high ranks did.

The higher ranks were the ones who wrote their memoires etc within a few years of the war, which often influenced the way history records the war - and the attitudes and beliefs with which at least a generation still mostly live. We now know that there was so much they didn't or couldn't tell. Generals who said they made certain decisions for contrived reasons, since they couldn't divulge sources of secret information. There is a thread that discussed revisionism, so I won't go on further!

Michelle

PS Hawkerace, I don't know I said thanks for your welcome to me as a fellow Prairie Canadian - so, Thanks!