Ben Lowry: The Second World War if anything seems to get closer in time to our own as we become older

​As time moves on public interest in the Second World War seems, if anything, to increase rather than fade.

Allied soldiers approaching Omaha Beach in France on D-Day, June 6 1944. The landings were in some respects not that long ago, yet even those who survived are mostly now ​​​​​​dead through old age. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives

(Click here to read Ben Lowry on how Donald Trump turned a question about God into a boast about himself)

​I have a theory as to why that might be, which is related to our changing perspective on time as we age. With regard to the war, those of us born after it begin gradually to realise how recent it was.

Consider someone of my age: I was born 26 years after the war, in late 1971. When I was a child the World War II seemed in the ancient past. The photographs and newsreel footage from the time was all black and white, which in the 1970s (when all TV was colour) made it seem like a backward and distant and depressing period.

Gradually over time I came to realise that it was not just a conflict that affected my grandparents (who, to a child, seemed utterly ancient, yet I now realise my grandmother was a youthful 58 when I was born) but affected my dad too, who was well on the way to adulthood by 1945.

And now I realise, with amazement, that I was born far closer in time to Hitler than to today (the point of my birth was 26 years in time from the end of the Nazis, but 52 years in time from today).

Consider someone who is a mere 39 and will turn 40 this summer. They too were born closer in time to World War Two than they were to today (39 years after the last days of the war, August 1945, but 40 years from today).

When you get older you come to realise that timespans that seemed enormous to a child, such as a century, in fact go far more quickly than we would want them to go. I now have enough experience of time, in my case more than half a century, to realise that life must have seemed relatively short even to the late Queen Mother, who died aged 101.

Now I understand the clock tower in Ballygowan that my dad always pointed out to us siblings when he drove us to our uncle John in Saintfield:

THE TIME IS SHORT

But there is so much time, I thought, as a boy, when old age seemed as far into the future as 500 years does now. As an adult, that once perplexing message seems chillingly apt. (I now know that the building on which that message is displayed is Trinity Presbyterian Church Halls, and that the message is based on a verse from 1 Corinthians, v29: “But this I say, brethren, the time is short”)

John was born in 1929, too young for the war, and his brother, dad, was born in 1930. I remember John telling me that they wished that had been a few years older and able to sign up. The very youngest world war veterans tend to be people born in January 1927, who turned 18 at the beginning of 1945 and, if they had a very short training of three months, might just have seen some service in Europe in the final weeks of the war or in the Far East in the final months of it.

WW2 veterans are overwhelmingly dead, unless very very old, 97+.

In about 1983, I remember going on a school trip to Belfast City Hall on Remembrance Day, for the November 11 service. There were two groups of world war veterans present. There was a significant contingent, perhaps a few dozen, from WWI, who seemed extraordinarily old and frail. There was also a much larger group from WWII, who, to a boy, seemed to be merely old.

Now I realise, with a sense of amazement, that those very old gents were in fact not much older than President Joe Biden (the youngest Great War veterans were born in 1900, so would have been early 80s at that service). Some of them were perhaps 15 years younger than the very youngest of the D-Day vets we saw in France in recent days.

And the chaps who seemed ‘merely old’ from WWII at that 1983 service, were in fact not much older than I am now, some of them only in their mid 50s.

These links are to interviews I carried out with veterans of D-Day 10 and 20 years ago, on the 60th and 70th anniversaries: from 2004 click here ‘The Spielberg film captured the horror of D-Day,’ and from 2014 click here ‘I looked over our craft and saw bodies all round’. What they experienced as young men was terrible, death all around them.

Many of them had been looking forward to war. When I was younger I thought that it would be agreeable to have been an honoured war veteran but in that fantasy I always survive. Sam Lowry said that his memories of battle were “grotesque” and with time they developed a dream-like quality. He saw hand-to-hand combat. He did not need to explain that such combat only comes to a conclusion when one man has stabbed the other to death.

Seigfried Sassoon, a veteran of the previous world war, wrote in one poem of the horror of death in the the trenches, then ended with the verse:

‘You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye, Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you'll never know, The hell where youth and laughter go’

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor