大象传媒

This is the brief story of my Grandfather's war. His name was Frederick Bottrell and he was born and bred in Leicester. In civilian life he was a chromium plater. In 1943, at the age of 30, and with a wife and very young children, he was called up to the Leicestershire Regiment, and served in the 2nd/5th Battalion. Only recently, I discovered a group photograph of his draft in an excellent book detailing the history of The Leicestershire Regiment, and he is grinning broadly. My Grandfather's army record reveals that his first action must have been in September 1943 at the Salerno landings. His record indicates he was wounded several times during the Italian campaign. As many books record, the bloody fight up the length of Italy was perhaps the closest conditions to those of the First World War trenches, and the shell-shock effect on soldier's minds was much the same. We know that on one period of home leave, when he was recovering from wounds, he returned from a shopping trip without one of his children, whom he'd left in a pram on a busy shopping street in the city. When VE day came I'm sure all the family must have rejoiced, and my Father who was 8 years old at the time still vividly remembers it. Unfortunately, on the 7th February 1946 my Grandfather committed suicide by jumping of the roof of the Military Hospital in Klagenfurt, Austria. A few days previously, his mind obviously in pieces, he had tried to stab himself to death. These facts were only officially revealed after my Grandmother tried and failed to receive any type of pension after his death, and even then she kept them to herself for 40 years. The resultant effect was that my Father was raised in a separate household to his two younger sisters due to the financial burden. I am now the same age as my Grandfather when he died, and I have two very young children of my own. I was the first of the family to visit his grave in Austria about ten years ago, and since then I have taken my Father to visit the dad he has always missed.

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