Learning from the older generations

Children and young people can learn from the events experiences by past generations. The year 2005 saw the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the remarkable events that led to the Second World War.

This page has bee created with the support of the Home Front Recall Lottery programme and aims at providing information and facilitating the crucial link between generations, as well as acting as a permanent remembrance feature.

The Fair City of Perth celebrated on 14 May 2005 a very special 60th anniversary of the Victory in Europe (VE) day in partnership with the 51st Highland Division Veterans Pilgrimage Association. Surviving veterans of the forces and all wartime organisations headed to Perth from all parts of Scotland with a veterans parade with massed pipers and drums.

  

 

  

Read some of the stories:

"When  you are on the front line, only one thing is certain. That is that your are going to be killed or wounded. The number who survive without injury is very small indeed. I know of two people in the whole division who went from El Alamein to the end of the war without being wounded - that's out of 20,000 to 30,000 people".

"One VE day, we were in the slip trenches. We are attacking towards Bremen and Hamburg, in the last stages of the war. There were no celebrations for us. We were too frightened to move out - we didn't want to be the last casualties of the war. We protected ourselves and came out when we thought things were safe".

"We knew the war was going to end but we didn't know how quickly. When it did end, we were able to get to our objective by truck rather than having to fight our way. On that journey, we went past Belsen and we saw those people standing at the fence in pyjama-like uniforms. Everybody said: 'What is it? Nobody knew except one man who said: 'It 's a concentration camp."

 

"Back home, we were all the more conscious of the beauty around us. we could hear the birds which you never heard during the war, we would see the flowers, smell the smells of the countryside and we would have time to enjoy a meal."

 

"Sixty years later you look back on it and you can't quite remember all the brutality of the war, although you do remember it. You do remember all the friends that were killed at the age of 19. You would never forget that."

To know more about the veterans' experiences, but also experiences during the war, go to Their past Your Future or War Detectives.