'Horror of war can never be forgotten,' says Swansea veteran

A VETERAN who took part in one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War said it was "heartbreaking" to see young British soldiers still giving their lives in combat more than 60 years later.

Harry Launder was just 20 years old when he took part in the Monte Cassino campaign.

The desperate fighting to capture the Italian hilltop monastery in 1944 has been described by military historians as similar to the horrific scenes of trench warfare seen in the First World War.

 

Battle of Britain Heartbreak of World War Two fiancee forced to listen as her Battle of Britain hero's plane went down:
From: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/heartbreak-world-war-two-fiancee-6383708

Good enough to archive here for Posterity. Dang newspapers keep erasing their articles after a few weeks / months / years...



Heartbreak: Edith Kup, who served in the WAAF plotting the movements of aircraft across the Channel during the Battle of Britain.

The words tumbled across the airwaves thick and fast: “I’m bailing out. Enemy aircraft on your tail. Behind that cloud.”

To outsiders they would sound calm, in control.

But the women who listened every day knew that behind those clipped, stoic voices were a band of brave young pilots overcoming the most stomach-churning fear.

This was the heart-stopping commentary on the Battle of Britain heard by the RAF’s dedicated “plotters”
– members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force who calculated the positions of our boys as they repelled the biggest airborne assault the world had ever seen.

On November 11, 1940, one of those pilots was 20-year-old Dennis Wissler, whose fiance Edith Heath, then 21, was one of the WAAF plotters back at base.
Edith is 96 now and the memory is 75 years old, but she will never forget how she heard the most devastating news of her life over her headphones.



Hero: Dennis Wissler was killed in action during World War II

“I suddenly heard a pilot say Dennis was on fire,” recalls Edith.

She pauses, reluctant to summon the moment back, before adding:
“They said he hadn’t bailed out, the plane had come down in the Thames Estuary and had gone straight to the bottom.”

She adds, quickly, almost angrily: “I couldn’t do anything, could I? I carried on with my work because that’s what we were there for.
"I had a responsibility. But I knew that was it and it wasn’t a mistake. Of course I was devastated.”

Edith and Dennis would have married within weeks adding: “you didn’t wait in those days” she says, with sad irony.
They had written to each other every day of their courtship although being based closed together in Essex.



Despite it being 75 years on, Edith still reads those letters which are tied in bundles with ribbons.
“On his birthday, and other times,” she says. “I can hear his voice. When I die I want them burnt.
They were our letters, his and mine. I never want anyone else to read them.”

Edith did eventually marry another, after the war, and had two children. But they later divorced.
“No one ever came close to Dennis,” she explains, softly.

The Battle of Britain officially raged over southern Britain from July 1940 to October 31, with the most concentrated
single day-long Luftwaffe attack taking place on September 15th – now christened Battle of Britain Day.

Around 1,500 aircraft took part in the air battles which lasted until dusk.
In all, 3,000 young pilots overcame near impossible odds to fight the Nazis and save Britain from Hitler’s planned invasion.



Flying hero: Denis Wissler in 1940 with his plane He cancelled Operation Sealion - his plan to invade from the French coast – because of Britain’s might.
Around 550 of Brits were killed and 600 wounded – but that was in comparison to 2,600 German pilots who plunged to their deaths.

Winston Churchill famously hailed our pilots heroes, announcing: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Edith played her part as a plotter and Dennis as a pilot from the very beginning.

“I wanted to be in at the sharp end, I wanted to help,” she says, from her home in Likely, Yorkshire.
Initially, along with many women, she drove vehicles – from coal lorries and tractors to “the 60ft-long articulated lorry they took aircraft pieces around on.”
“It was new and adventurous, exciting, we didn’t think about the actual war,” she says.

Tragically, the reality soon sunk in.



Still grieving: Edith Kup, 96, from Ilkley Yorkshire, who was an RAF Plotter during the Battle of Britain and lost her pilot fiance Denis Wissler Some of the women began to work as plotters, bringing the reality of these aerial battles to home.

“We could hear the pilots talking to each other, the orders going out, it was like having a running commentary on the battle, you got very anxious, it was emotional,” she says.

They couldn’t hear the roar of the engines or the rattle of guns, just an eerie silence behind the words that told them of imminent danger, of near-misses
– and news of those plummeting to their death.

First came the Dunkirk evacuation
- “a desperate, anxious time, we were working very hard because our pilots were working very hard.
The ones coming back from France had no kit, nothing”.

And then the Battle of Britain.
Although officially it ended in October, before the start of the Blitz, veterans say the length is underestimated.
“It went on through October, November right up until Christmas through the fog and the cloud.”



Loving letters: Edith Kup, 96, from Ilkley Yorkshire, who was an RAF Plotter during the Battle of Britain and lost her pilot fiance Denis Wissler Edith quickly met Dennis, then 20, in 17 Squadron.
“We used to go out with the boys, they would ask us out for dinner,” she smiles.
She recalls his blatant attempt to win her attention.

“I did a lot of fly path laying.
"If you stop a tractor it’s difficult to start it again and Dennis threw a handful of sand under my fan belt one day
and stopped it, so I made him start it again, that’s when I remember meeting him,” she admits.

“I found him very attractive.”
They began writing daily. “We wrote about what we felt for each other,” she smiles. “We were in love.”
They met as often as they could between shifts.

“We always went out for dinner or danced and just talked to each other,” she says. “
We used to go up to my room or his and just talked.
Later we would make arrangements for our wedding. We set a date, before the end of the year. We wanted to be together.”

Nicely done http://www.mirror.co.uk/
Nicely done!