I think we have all witnessed some degree of bravery and probably even been brave in some way ourselves. I think of little moments I have witnessed like my wife giving birth determined to do it without any pain relief (much to my own relief she had a bit of gas and air towards the end). My infant son falling whilst learning to walk, wiping the tears from his eyes and getting up and trying again. These are moments in life that are fleeting albeit not at the time, which may define us. But the highest echelons on the bravery scale are surely reserved for those who understanding that the consequences of their actions may result in injury or even death carry on regardless. One such individual struck me more than most when reading about them recently - Noor Inayat Khan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan).
Noor was a woman who showed bravery on many occasions, individual moments that would have made lesser mortals breakdown and give up. Please read about her on the above Wikipedia link to get a better understanding of this bravest of brave souls. What struck me is that not only was she the first female wireless operator to have entered worn torn France to work with the resistance. Nor that she repeatedly attempted to escape when captured, not even the fact that she refused to give any information to the Germans despite the fact that she would have probably been tortured. No, the bravest thing in my eyes was more subtle. She did all of those things knowing that she was probably viewed by those she was fighting for as a second class citizen. Her father who was a Muslim from India would have no doubt been looked down upon by the Western nations that Noor was fighting for. She would have wondered in the deepest darkest moments of her captivity why she was fighting for countries that still operated under segregation (which her mother an American would have witnessed first-hand). She kept on going regardless.
Noor Inayat Khan was executed at Dachau Concentration Camp in September 1944 almost a year after being captured having given the Germans nothing, she was 30 years old.
We are fast approaching the time when the last veteran of the Second World War will have left us.
Reading through the article on Wikipedia there is a passage advising that Morse Coders can be distinguished by how they tapped out their Dots and Dashes. I remember my grandfather telling me the same thing when discussing his own experiences of WW2. He served as a signaller aboard a Battleship during D-Day and was in contact with SOE agents and resistance fighters in still occupied France. He told me that Morse Code operators had their own distinct accents and that he often wondered what had happened to operators who stopped signalling. I suspect he feared the worse.
My grandfather – Ronald George Russell had previously been serving on HMS Jersey when it was struck by a mine in 1941, 35 of his crew mates were killed. Ron had been in the heart of the ship when the mine hit, one of the harder areas to escape from. He wrote in a letter to his children many years later that this was the day they had come to be.
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| HMS Jersey |
His letter was found years later whilst he lay in hospital, it was hidden in plain sight in a cupboard that was used often. It had laid there undiscovered all this time awaiting the right moment to come into our lives. He left hospital the next day and died two days later surrounded by his children. It was almost as if he intended us to find it in one of our darkest moments.
To my grandfather, Noor Inayat Khan and all the generation who fought in WW2, I thank you. We owe it to them and ourselves to remember bravery can come in all different guises, we just have to recognise it and celebrate it when we see it.
