Courage

I spoke in The Job To Be Done about how I feel that all history is connected at some level, that if you look close enough you can find threads of connection running everywhere. With that in mind I wanted to pull on some threads this month that may seem unconnected, but perhaps if we look closely enough....I hope you will bear with me as I try to find a thread running between my hobby of plastic scale modelling and my Dad’s contribution to the fight against Nazism.
When I began researching my Dad’s time with Bomber Command I had to do a deep dive into the ground war in Normandy and the tactics and weapons used. Without this groundwork of understanding, Dad’s logbook often made no sense. Why in the world would he and his crew be sent to bomb a village in France called Villers Bocage? Or a road running in the countryside south of Caen? Once I had read a few books on the subject I began to understand the difficulties that the Allied armies in France faced in the summer of 1944, and why Lancasters and B-17’s were tasked with assisting the army with tactical bombing, a job neither was designed for. One of the lingering results of my research was a new-found fascination with Second World War armoured vehicles. Sherman tanks, Fireflies, Tigers, Panzer IVs, Stugs....I found them all fascinating and when I decided in 2023 to rekindle my interest in my childhood hobby of scale modelling, it was a natural to pick a WW2 tank, something I had never done before. As a kid I was besotted with airplanes, and never expanded beyond that, from WW1 biplanes to modern jet fighters. When I moved away from home I gave up the hobby – it’s for kids I decided. When it came to renewing my hobby some 45 years later, I really didn’t know where to start. Well, when in doubt, check the interweb, right? YouTube is an amazing resource, full of insightful and educational material, although it is certainly possible to waste time down silly rabbit holes. When it came to scale modelling advice, one of best channels I landed on was SpruesNBrews, hosted by a cheerful and personable young American named Hank.
Hank is a very talented scale modeler, with an eye for detail and for history, and I am often left awed by the results he achieves in his workshop. He has loads of advice for us newbies in the hobby, and based on one of his videos I purchased a 1/35 scale Churchill tank as my first kit and even made my first ever diorama, depicting my Churchill on a cobblestone road in Normandy, beside a brick wall and dead tree. Hank's work even inspired me to include the British tank crew – painting figures had never before worked out for me as my previous attempts had ended up looking like extras from a second-rate zombie movie.
I subscribed to the SpruesNBrews channel and have been enjoying the videos Hank produces ever since. Now, Hank is pretty good at sticking to the point – his videos are well paced, focused and very well produced. However, Hank has taken a stand on several occasions, producing videos that talk about the current political situation in his country and it is the courage I believe he has shown doing so that has inspired me to write about those threads I mentioned.
Recently Hank recorded a brief video about the situation in Minneapolis and how disturbing it was to him, to see his country being terrorized by bully boys in masks, and of toddlers being used as political pawns in an ugly game. It was a moving plea, and one I have had difficulty getting out of my mind. Is history repeating itself? Here is a link: Is This Great? I have been guilty at laughing and mocking the current President, but I am not laughing anymore. I remember vividly, as a teenager, mocking neo-Nazis I saw marching on the T.V. news in Skokie, Illionois in the 70’s. My mother caught me laughing and told me in no uncertain terms to knock it off: “they laughed at Hitler in the beginning too, son”. Prescient words of wisdom.
I am supremely proud of my Dad and the millions of young men like him who risked everything (and in tens of thousands of cases lost their lives) to fight an evil empire that was hell-bent on world domination and murderous ethnic cleansing on a scale no one before (with the possible exception of Josef Stalin) had dreamed of. Hitler’s rise to dictatorship was built on skillfully manipulating people and power, and he was facilitated by ruthless, unscrupulous thugs – men, like Himmler and Roehm, filled with ugly ambition and without morals. These men in turn set in motion their private armies of brown-shirted thugs, who marched in the streets across Germany and terrorized all and sundry with clubs and torches.
I can’t help but agree with Hank that we are seeing a new breed of Brownshirts in motion. I hope that in 20 years from now, the young men in ICE will hang their heads in shame, like the men of the Gestapo and S.S., who burned their I.D. cards at the end of war and would later mutter denials, saying that they were Austrian, and that they served in the regular Army.
We live in dangerous times and I hope our neighbours can turn back from the brink. I gives me some hope that there are those who are willing to speak out from whatever platform they may have.