大象传媒

This story was submitted to the people鈥檚 war site by Becky a pupil from Cedars Upper School on behalf of Mr. McDowell and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr. McDowell fully understands the sites terms and conditions.
I was born in 1940, in Dublin. My father was a small time draper in the city.
It is often thought that Ireland gave no support to WW2; however, more young men from the Republic of Ireland joined the army than they did from Northern Ireland.
I remember one of my school teachers telling me years later, that when he took a party from the school to Belfast, during the war, he had a hard job keeping the senior boys away from the recruiting offices.
After the war my uncle Jim, wrote almost unreadable letters to us, and this was because as a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps. his right had was seriously damaged, during the allied landings in North Africa.
My uncle Eddy was Sandhurst trained and fought in the Burma Campaign but never liked to talk about it.
My personal memories of war time included rationing (where we were better off than Britain); but fruit was scarce. I remember on my way to school the day after V.E Day, somebody had carved on the pavement that war had ended, in the middle of the pavement.
For the duration of the war my dad鈥檚 Morris 10 was sitting on bricks in the garage. I still possess a Sun bicycle 鈥� state of the art at the time 鈥� which was built pre-war in Britain and bought in 1941. My wife rejoices in calling it 鈥淩ick-oh-shay鈥�.
Although Ireland was officially neutral the war was never far away. For example there was one stick of bombs dropped on North Dublin. The pilot had apparently got lost.
Occasionally you could see the British and German pilots dog-fighting over Dublin.
It is my firm belief that the Irish people as a whole were aware of the evils of Nazism, and with the exceptions of a few extremists, were sympathetic to Britain鈥檚 cause.

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