Fowler How to Research your Second World War Ancestors

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80399-450-5
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 276 Seiten

It has never been easier to research what your parents and grandparents and family members did in the Second World War - whether they were in the armed forces, the Home Guard or worked in factories on the home front. For anyone looking to learn more about their family's past, this book provides all the tools and information to get started, explains what is available online (as well as what is not) and outlines the pitfalls to avoid. A wide range of background information on the war itself will also help place your ancestors' experiences within the wider context of the Second World War. This book provides a comprehensive review of all the available resources, where they are to be found and how to make the best use of them; not just for the United Kingdom, but also for the Commonwealth, Europe and the United States. An essential guide, it makes an increasingly important aspect of family history both interesting and accessible to anyone looking to learn more about their past.

Since taking early retirement from The National Archives, SIMON FOWLER has been a professional researcher specialising in military history of the two world wars and the records of central government since 1800. He has written two dozen books, mainly for Pen & Sword. Simon teaches a course on military archives at Dundee University, and teaches family history courses, including several on military genealogy, for Pharos. He is a very experienced lecturer and has done many radio interviews.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fowler, Simon

Leseproben

1

INTRODUCTION

The Second World War was one of the most traumatic events in modern British history, probably in world history. It profoundly affected the lives of every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom. And not only in Britain of course. Tens of millions of people were involved in the war across the globe. For most it was a catastrophe. After the Fall of Singapore in February 1942, for example, the peaceful civilian population was treated almost as badly by the Japanese occupiers as the British and Allied service personnel who became their prisoners. Innocent Europeans from Biarritz to Bucharest, Newcastle to Naples, lost their lives, endured incredible hardships or were forced to flee towns and villages where their families had lived for generations.

We like to think of the Second World War as being just one worldwide conflict. In effect, however, there were three separate wars with relatively little linkage between them. The British were largely involved in the war in Western Europe between 3 September 1939 and 8 May 1945. Some historians see this as a continuation of the First World War, with a twenty-year truce between the two conflicts.

The Russians fought Germany on the Eastern Front, in a horrific war of destruction between 22 June 1941 and 9 May 1945. And, although Britain, America and the Soviet Union were formally allies, this did not mean very much in practice. The West was hardly involved on the Eastern Front, although it supplied large amounts of equipment and munitions. And, in reality, Stalin did what he liked, with little regard to what Churchill and Roosevelt thought about it.

The war in the Far East began in July 1937 with the Japanese attack on China and concluded dramatically with the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The Germans and the Japanese were allied, but there were very few ways in which either nation could help each other in practice. Britain was very much the junior partner to the US in the war with Japan.

The war devastated much of Europe and Asia and it took many years for the world to recover. In Britain there was rationing for almost a decade after VE-Day and shortages of material and labour hampered recovery. Much of Central and Eastern Europe had been destroyed to an extent that shocked British visitors. It is not for nothing that the year 1945 is called – Year Zero – in Germany. Six million Jews, Roma and Sinti people, LGBTQ+ people and political prisoners had been murdered by the Nazis. Millions of people became refugees, fleeing vengeful occupiers or devastated cities. Millions of others were traumatised by their experiences in the front line, on the home front, or from being imprisoned in camps. It is little wonder that the peoples of Europe decided that they did not want to go through another war. Churchill and other politicians across Europe discussed how to prevent another war destroying the continent for a third time.

NATO was formed in 1949 to defend Western Europe from Russian aggression. What became today’s European Union started with the integration of steel and coal industries in the early 1950s, leading to a more formal union as a result of the Treaty of Rome in 1957.

By comparison with Germany and Russia, British casualties were light – about half of that of the First World War, although a fifth of these were innocent civilians. But there were no longer really any civilians; everybody from the age of 8 to 80 was expected to play their part in the war effort. In a few memorable words, Winston Churchill summed up the contribution the whole of British society would make towards victory in a BBC radio broadcast on 14 July 1940:

This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age.1

Unlike most family history guides, this book is not about events and the records that describe them, some of which occurred hundreds of years ago. It concerns the recent past, that which historian Juliet Gardiner calls ‘fingertip history’; that is, recalling an age so close that you can still just about touch it.2

Most readers will have memories of stories told by old relations of their wartime experiences, or perhaps, less happily are aware of the nightmares and the physical and mental traumas endured by fathers and grandfathers. The Guernsey journalist Frank Falla, for example, spent nearly two years as a prisoner in Germany for writing and circulating an underground newspaper. Falla’s health was permanently affected by his experiences. Writing in his memoirs , he described how pneumonia left him with spots on the lungs and he became a ‘chronic bronchial sufferer’, as he put it. He also suffered from PTSD for two years, during which he experienced ‘severe sweats at night and haunting hallucinations that I was back again in my prison cell at Naumburg’. Fortunately, he was able to return to his pre-war career and made a very happy marriage. But many of his later years were spent in ensuring his fellow islanders received compensation from the Germans and he later wrote his memoirs; an action that helped him to get the bitterness out of his system.3

It is natural to want to know about our parents’ and grandparents’ wartime careers. They probably told us snippets about their experiences, even if their memories might be rather disjointed. Many veterans felt unable to discuss the horrors they had experienced with their children and, perhaps, even with their wives. This book hopes to enable you to put flesh on their stories. But be warned. It is not unknown for veterans to embellish their tales!

During the war, almost everybody actively participated in the war effort, whether as soldiers on the Normandy beaches, working a lathe in an aircraft factory, or helping in a British Restaurant. Every morning the mother of one of my clients packed first-aid boxes that were given to soldiers, before returning home to cook lunch for her family. Their experiences, of course, vary greatly from unbelievable heroism to unbelievable tedium and everything in between. Some of our ancestors had ‘a good war’, but most muddled through as best they could.

The last veterans are disappearing rapidly. As this book was being written, the deaths of men and women who had taken part in the war were announced almost on a daily basis. Among them there were the deaths of HM Queen Elizabeth, aged 96, who had served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and the last survivor of the Dambuster Raids, Sergeant George ‘Johnny’ Johnson DFM, at the age of 101. Charles Lurcher, believed to be the last survivor of the evacuation from Dunkirk, and Pippa Latour Doyle, who was the last surviving female SOE agent, both died aged 102. Aged 23, Pippa had been parachuted into occupied Normandy to gather intelligence on Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day and remained there until Paris was liberated in August 1944.

To have any clear memory of the Second World War as a child you would have to be now nearly 90.

British records relating to the war are now largely available to researchers. They are reasonably complete, although much ephemeral material was destroyed in the 1960s. So far as is known, there have been no losses comparable to the destruction of the army records in September 1940, which saw the loss of a huge number of personnel and related documents of the First World War.4 Only the Special Intelligence Service (MI6) and to a large degree the Security Service (MI5) have not released their records. In addition, some personal records are closed to public access for eighty-five years or longer. An increasing proportion of the key genealogical material is online with much more to follow over the next few years. All the key sources and their locations (both online and in archives) are described in the book.

It helps that many key sources, such as war diaries, newspapers and war grave records, will be familiar to anybody who has already researched their ancestors who fought in the Great War. The two wars were just two decades apart, after all. In addition, the major genealogical resources – particularly the birth, marriage and death registers and probate records – continued to be kept during the war.

For the first time, however, media other than newspapers, played a major part in both recording the events of the war and interpreting them for audiences at home. On occasion, they can still pack an emotional impact today as well as showing how our parents and grandparents experienced the war. And who knows if your ancestor was filmed in a crowd or appeared in a photograph. Again, there is a section describing the sources you might use here.

The book also suggests ways of researching the servicemen and women who were stationed in the United Kingdom from the Commonwealth, America or occupied Europe, or spent time here as prisoners of war.

Britain also took in tens of thousands of refugees before, during and after the war. The best known were the German and Austrian Jews who were forced to flee the Nazis. And as the Cold War began, Poles and other Eastern Europeans who could not return home for one reason or another settled here. Again, there are suggestions on how to find out more about them.

There is also a section about researching the Holocaust....