I think those of us whose parents lived through WW2 have very little idea of the effect that it must have had on them.
My mum was conscripted into the ATS where she learned to drive large lorries in the blackout. She lived in London but was based in Cornwall and I would have known nothing about what she went through had she not made contact with a friend she made at the time. They were then both widowed and wrote down some of their experiences. They never spoke of them to me but to each other when I was around.
Mum was dad’s second wife and he died when I was seven so I never knew him well but he was in France in 1918 in time for “Operation Michael” the last German push to win the war before the Americans got in (He was on the allied side!) Mum said he never spoke of that and I’ve been trying to piece together his service then, he was wounded or gassed, and in WW2 when his first wife died.
They seemed to want to protect their children from what they’d seen and experienced which can’t have been easy when all us little buggers were running round playing “armies” and pretending to machine gun each other.
My maternal uncle died a few years ago and his family managed to prise out of him the fact that he was in a reserved occupation actually working on putting flamethrowers in tanks, which he hated but thought was necessary.
Talking to my cousins we all felt that although loving our parents had a “distance” and were definitely authority figures until we were adults. We don’t have kids but my cousins do and while they seem less distant as parents they still regard their children as children not as seems the case today as their friends.
I think we were all lucky in that their experiences didn’t leave them with serious mental health issues but I’m sure they would have been very different people and parents if they hadn’t had to go through it.
Those were two effing tough generations.