June
2004 "I was too young to have a rifle.
I had a brush stick instead..!"
Peter
Strachan and Gerry Briscoe in 2004...Sixty years after they
landed on the D-Day beaches
Sixty years ago Bradford's Gerry Briscoe and Peter Strachan (left)
were young, fresh-faced...and about to go to war in the biggest
land battle ever seen in the history of the world. Sixty years on,
they tell us what it was like to be a teenager going into war.
These
days Peter and Gerry both go into schools in West Yorkshire and beyond
to talk to today's kids about what it was like to be hardly older
than them and, literally, fighting for their lives...
"THEY
GLAMOURISE IT TOO MUCH"
"It's
beyond comprehension now with all the games and that"
GERRY:
They do glamourise it too much. We know what happened in the First
World War and how bad it was there. The Americans had it bad just
like we had But it's beyond comprehension now with all the games
and that...When I was a kid we always fought the Germans and, I think,
they still fight the Germans. Don't know what the kids are fighting
now with Star Trek and stuff like that but they still do fight the
Germans and it's incredible.
What about talking about the more difficult stuff, like the concentration
camps? How do you deal with that?
PETER: It's surprising who does understand this because
one place I went to I was going to skip it out the stuff about the
concentration camps and the teacher says: "No, don't" and
I say: "I can't tell them that!" But she said: "No,
tell them because that's what they want to hear," and it is surprising
how many kids ask various questions about it.
