Our Interview with Mr Green, WW2 Veteran

In Term 3 we were lucky enough to have a guest speaker to our session. It was Mr Green who told us about his wartime experiences. He showed us artifacts from his time as a gunner in a Lancaster bomber during World War 2. One of our students videotaped the session -  a remarkable story of courage and comradeship. We are very grateful to Mr Green for sharing his experiences and we treasure this wonderful oral history record. 

Talking about war experiences is hard we suspected but we learnt that Mr Green had never shared his stories to a group of people before. So we are very privileged to hear his experiences and his thoughts about finding other ways to solve conflict in the world. 

We would like to publicly thank Mr Green for sharing his time, memories and for allowing us to copy the story that was written by a teenage member of his family. Each member of the group has a copy to keep.

The following pictures show some of the session. (SH)

Mr Green reading from his flying log ... 1943

Lots of photos brought Mr Green's story alive for us

Listening and thinking about the information shared-forming personal insights

Lots of questions were asked

It took 60 years to acknowledge the effort and sacrifice of the pilots and crew...

Mr Green mainly was in the top gun turret of the Lancaster

The crew: Mr Green is second from right

We interviewed Mr Green. He was in a bomber in WW2. He showed us lots of pictures. He had an old book. His story was really interesting. (AM & AC)

 One of the highlights towards the end of the war was when Mr Green's plane flew very low over a part of Holland that was suffering and they dropped food instead of bombs to all the adults. They also made little parachutes with chocolates tied to them for the children. (LH)

Our insights:

• war is a very difficult and dangerous business
• it is not an adventure
• it is very difficult to deal with after the experience
• people sometimes do not recognise personal sacrifice (it took 60 years for a newspaper article about the Lancaster pilots and their sacrifices)
• preserving memories is really important
• we need to find other ways to solve problems in the world