Most of what I know about that grandfather's service I learned, ironically, from his Harvard Business School application. My mom looked it up and they sent her the original file. Since this was like 1949, the entire application is about your military service, because of course you served. So his essays were about how being a quartermaster in the war has taught him many important things about leadership.
The only time I've ever been to England I was eight (it was 1989). I do remember seeing a bombed room in Westminster Abby. But I think it's only in the last couple of years, as I've learned more about history, that I've begun to grasp how devastating the war was to England. Growing up a fan of Monty Python and knowing about the Beatles and things, I'd always assumed, with the amount of cultural exchange, that England was just like the US in the second half of the twentieth century. Never really thought about it. Then someone told me that food rationing didn't end until 1954 and I went o.O.
I mean, it all seems terribly obvious, but I never thought about it much--that America's industries were not devastated by bombing raids, and so the 1950s here was a boomtime.
I don't know--one of those separated by a common history kind of things. I'm always fascinated by the difference between what stories different countries tell about WWII. US? The Holocaust and D-Day. England? Dunkirk and the Blitz.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-07-16 08:31 pm (UTC)The only time I've ever been to England I was eight (it was 1989). I do remember seeing a bombed room in Westminster Abby. But I think it's only in the last couple of years, as I've learned more about history, that I've begun to grasp how devastating the war was to England. Growing up a fan of Monty Python and knowing about the Beatles and things, I'd always assumed, with the amount of cultural exchange, that England was just like the US in the second half of the twentieth century. Never really thought about it. Then someone told me that food rationing didn't end until 1954 and I went o.O.
I mean, it all seems terribly obvious, but I never thought about it much--that America's industries were not devastated by bombing raids, and so the 1950s here was a boomtime.
I don't know--one of those separated by a common history kind of things. I'm always fascinated by the difference between what stories different countries tell about WWII. US? The Holocaust and D-Day. England? Dunkirk and the Blitz.