Interesting thread.
My father was born in 1926 and, although he joined the navy in 1944, I don't believe that he really saw true active service, as peace had more or less broken out by the time he finished training. As a teenager, he was in Bristol for a time, including several periods during the Blitz when the Docks got a pounding, which was, erm, interesting, I think. In the navy, he saw service in MTBs, as part of the Coastal Forces, and then went to the Far East and Australia in HMS Trafalgar, a destroyer, to help with the sorting out of surrendering Japanese ships and the like. He also visited Nagasaki and talks of picking up bits of rock to examine them - though luckily he didn't bring any of them back home
My maternal grandfather was a career soldier and did some interesting things that we only found out about after he died, because of the Official Secrets Act. He was in the Signals Regiment and saw service in the trenches during WW1. Later on, after spending time with the British Army of Occupation in Palestine between the Wars, he ended up peripherally involved (we think) in the development of radar in the 1930's. What we do know for sure is that he spent most of WW2 at Bletchley Park and ended up as Head of the Japan Section - I found his details on the Bletchley Park website - but he never spoke of it whilst he was alive, and died in the 1960's before the 30 year period under the OS Act had expired. After the War, he continued working in Military Intelligence until he retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. His brother in law, who also worked at Bletchley Park, told us a little about all this before he died in the late 1970's but I would love to have been able to ask my grandfather about some of the things that he did. Not that he'd have told me anything, of course, he was a very proper, "old school" type and I was only a child when he died.
