"The greatest evil is always done by those few at the top, who control society."

For the last 18 months, I've pieced together my Dad's Green and Pleasant Land, which was unfinished at the time of his death. It's done apart for some minor adjustments that are required. It covers his life from 1923 to July 1945 concluding with Labour winning the General election. The excerpt below are the weeks leading up to the 1945 British General Election and his impressions of life in occupied Germany.

Like my Dad's 5 other books written during those last years of life, The Green and Pleasant Land is an exploration of his generation during the eras before and after the creation of the Welfare State.

Harry Leslie Smith correctly predicted that without a return to socialist politics- fascism and wealth inequality would destroy not just our society but civilisation itself. 2025 is proof we are living through the birth of a new and more permanent age of fascism. It is no longer possible to prevent his past from becoming our future because we living it today. Now, we must take from his history and those of his generation lessons about how to defeat fascism and a capitalist system run amok because of the greed of the 1%. It’s also interesting to juxtapose the current Israeli created famine in Gaza with the famine in Germany during the early months of occupation which in most cases was a question of logistics rather than intent to exterminate a population.

The book in its beta form is now ready. Let me know if you want a copy, and it will be sent out shortly.

I have also included a tip jar for those, who are so inclined to assist me in this project.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Peace came to Europe, during the spring of 1945, but it was not quiet. It was loud, chaotic, imperfect, and deadly. Yet no one would have exchanged it for any moment in the war.

Even the Germans took peace as a godsend despite the hunger, hardships, humiliations and grief they endured as a defeated nation under occupation.

After the Victory in Europe Celebrations concluded on May 8th, our squadron was confined to the airbase in Fuhslbuttle. There, we repaired the runway and the communication centre that had been sabotaged by the Luftwaffe before the German surrender.

After a week of patching together the airbase telephone exchange, my unit was reassigned to do work off the base. We were tasked with setting up soup kitchens for Germans, forced labour prisoners, and refugees who resided in Hamburg’s downtown core.

Outside of the Bahnhof, Hamburg’s central rail station we erected a tent where undernourished residents in the city were fed soup and small portions of black bread that although freshly baked in the morning turned mouldy by lunchtime. For most, it was the only meal they would eat for the day. It was a starvation diet of a few hundred calories which staved off immediate death from hunger but left the residents of Hamburg in a state of profound malnutrition.

Housing was scarce in Hamburg because most of the working-class districts were heavily bombed during the war. When our trucks drove through the city streets, I’d see people emerge from hovels they dug out from the rubble and now used as their abode. Thousands also lived in the dank, giant, monolith flak towers that survived the city’s devastation from air bombardment.

For the vanquished Germans, their lives were as cheap as chips. Whether a German lived or died depended on luck and street smarts because misfortune was always one step ahead of the defeated master race.

The streets of Hamburg resembled an infected open wound that oozed with half-starved refugees, orphaned children and an emerging criminal class that aimed to profit from the misery of others. During the first year of occupation the only law enforced in Hamburg was that of the Jungle- eat or be eaten.

By June 1945, the city was awash with black markets on every street corner. Cigarettes or bags of coffee were the preferred currency of exchange. But there was also a fast trade in German women prostituting themselves to soldiers for bread to feed their families. We were not generous to the vanquished Germans.

Too much blood was spilled during the war and too many innocents were sacrificed in this conflict for the Allies to be merciful to Germany.

During the first weeks of occupation, I agreed with those who thought Germans, every man jack of them, were evil and deserved their primitive, brutish existence. I hated them for taking the world to war. I despise them for the suffering they had caused in Holland and every other country they had conquered. Our government indoctrinated us to despise them as we were forced to watch endless newsreels which showed us German barbarity towards Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and Russians.

But even at the age of twenty-two, I knew from my own experiences in Great Depression Britain that the greatest evil is always done by those few at the top who control society.

My hate for ordinary Germans was short-lived. I saw one too many malnourished, German bairns dressed in rags begging for food to not be reminded of my own childhood, when I lived, hungry, homeless and hopeless. At one of those black markets, I bought, for the price of two cigarettes, a German phrasebook.

Why did you buy that, asked Robbie? Just point your gun at a German if you want anything from them.

It was impossible to explain to my mate that I never wanted to ever point a gun at anyone again. I wanted to get something from the war other than knowing how to kill another human being. I wanted to change my destiny.

There are five days before rent day and it’s a small SOS because 5 new subscribers will put me over the line.

Your support keeps me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. Your subscriptions are crucial to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it is all good too because we are in the same boat. Take Care, John