A silent generation starts to speak

A series of accidents made me write my book.

My father, like so many of his generation, said nothing of his war time experiences. One day on a family holiday he got out of the car and pointed to some extensive bald patches on the side of an Austrian hillside. ‘That’s where the bombs landed that were supposed to blow up our camp’. He answered a few questions and I learned that the camp was full of Serbian and Russians and was built around road and rail bridges in this Alpine pass. My dad reckoned the US Air Force was trying to block this escape route through the Alps.

It would be another 40 years before I learned the whole story of how my dad had taken over this camp when the war ended while they awaited liberation. The incident in 'The Band of Brothers' might be a dramatisation of the camps eventual liberation. It was certainly 101 Airborn Division troops that liberated my dad.

On one visit to my dad, I picked up some papers and started to read. The story I was reading fitted the very few facts that I had about what my father had done during WWII. To confuse matters, the writer used my father's nick name.

I asked how he had come by the story. He reported a mysterious phone call a few day before. The caller was the company clerk and had seen a photo of my dad in the local paper. With his memory for detail, the clerk was able to find the correct Mr Jones in the phone book and asked if he was Staff Jones from 106 Company Royal Engineers and then hung up. I was now reading what my dad had done in the war for the first time.

Now it was my turn to use the phone book. I found Bill Harvey, the writer of the diary, with my first call. A visit was quickly arranged and a few weeks later, the comrades who had marched away into captivity 50 years earlier were re-united. The bond between these old men was obvious. I spent a day listening. Bill told me that there were some other diaries which he sent me.

I rashly promised to help to edit the diaries together for publication. This was a very rash promise but I don't regret making it.