Corporal Alfred Wheel, died 14 March 1945
I never knew my Uncle Alf. He died shortly before I was born. The official explanation was that his death was caused by an accident during Army training, followed by complications in his hospital treatment. This Note draws upon family tradition and uses memorabilia to tell a different story, but one that recalls the experience of bereavement shared by so many households during the Second World War.
Alfred Henry Wheel was born in Leyton, Essex in February 1919. He died shortly after his twenty-sixth birthday, on 14 March 1945. His unusual surname is believed to have originated in Wales, where it can be traced today around Swansea: according to family tradition, his great-grandfather moved to London sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. When he was called up, his fellow recruits at first thought his surname was "Will", and from this evolved his Army nickname, "Bill". The family belonged to the skilled working class: Alf's father, Alfred John Wheel (after whom, of course, he was named) was a printer, and they lived off Lea Bridge Road in Leyton on a Warner's Estate – high-quality rental property, its position on the status ladder proclaimed by a bay window in the front room. Alf was the fifth of six children and the second son. (My mother, the eldest, born in 1903, had an explosive relationship with her mother, Edith, from which she escaped by marrying, at the age of eighteen, in 1921. As I well remember, she grieved for her younger brother, but the age difference probably meant that they were not especially close.)
'The Print', as my grandfather's occupation was called, was notorious for its hereditary restrictive practices. In mid-life, he had switched from typesetting to a job as warehouseman distributing newspapers to the breakfast tables of Britain. His elder son, Ernie, had been apprenticed as a typesetter, and was employed by the Stationery Office which entrusted him with the composition of confidential government documents. Alf followed his father's second line of work, and was described on his death certificate as having worked as a "Paper Warehouseman" before he was called up for the Army. Nothing seems to be remembered about his education, which suggests that he endured the standard mass-production Board-School experience that tipped him on to the labour market in his mid-teens. Since he married a school teacher, it is likely that he was an intelligent young man, and one wonders what opportunities might have opened for him had he had access to the wider opportunities of the postwar years.
Alfred Wheel in uniform
By the end of 1940, Alf was in uniform, as a member of the 12th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, which was engaged in coastal defence against a feared German invasion. It was probably mere coincidence that his mother's parents had been born in Tiverton and Exeter – they settled in London in the eighteen-seventies – as there was no continuing family contact with the West Country. In the winter of 1940-1, he was twenty-one and stationed near Teignmouth. It was there that he met his future wife, Anne Dorrington. It is well known that, when War broke out in September 1939, thousands of children were evacuated from London to escape the feared carpet-bombing of the capital. It is less often reported that, in many cases, their teachers went with them. Miss Dorrington had been relocated with her class from south London to Bishopsteignton in Devon, and perhaps her uprooting helps to explain why the two city exiles found so much in common. Anne was three years older, which tends to confirm family memories that Alf was a highly personable young man.
The world around the two young people was falling apart: the London Blitz had begun in September 1940. In mid-November, Coventry was devastated, and Manchester was pulverised through two nights just before Christmas. On 29 December the raiders returned to firebomb the capital, and London suffered its worst conflagration since 1666. Like many other courting couples in this time of terrifying uncertainty, Alf Wheel and Anne Dorrington decided that they might as well get married, given that neither they nor their country might survive for very long. They exchanged vows in a Register Office ceremony at Newton Abbot on 9 January 1941. Their only child, my cousin Tony Wheel, was born four years later, in January 1945: it is still remembered that Alf did at least have the opportunity to hold his baby son in his arms shortly before his untimely death.
Anne Dorrington and Alf Wheel
As it happened, on their wedding day Hitler was concluding a major conference with Germany's military chiefs at his Bavarian mountain retreat, Berchtesgaden. It was the Führer, of course, who decreed the twofold Nazi strategy. The Soviet Union must be invaded and destroyed; Britain would be strangled into surrender by the U-boat campaign. In passing, Hitler noted that unrestricted submarine warfare might provoke war with the United States, but he did not seem troubled by this eventuality. As Alf Wheel brushed the confetti off his battledress, Hitler was in fact committing Germany to losing the Second World War. Nonetheless, it would be a long haul. By the summer of 1943, the danger of invasion had passed and the 12th Devonshires were rebranded as an airborne unit. Alf ruefully commented that they had been "volunteered" – the soldiers were certainly not consulted – but Anne would proudly preserve the shoulder flashes that indicated that her husband had served in a glider-borne infantry battalion that formed part of 6th Airborne Division. (Britain operated two airborne divisions in the European theatre, the 1st – remembered for the assault on Arnhem – and the 6th, which took part in the D-Day landings. The irregular numbering was part of Allied deception strategy: the four intervening divisions existed only on paper, and were intended to fool the Germans.)
Anne Wheel carefully preserved her husband's "Airborne" shoulder flashes.
Airborne troops faced very dangerous assignments. Fragile and slow-moving, gliders were alarmingly vulnerable to ground fire. Deployment in action required accuracy and split-second timing, to follow paratroopers and land on ground they had cleared in near-instantaneous occupation of pre-arranged positions. The 12th Devonshires trained to be dropped into Normandy a few hours before the Operation Overlord hit the beaches. Their task was to seize bridges across the River Orne, at the eastern end of the landing grounds, thus preventing the Germans from bringing up reinforcements. In the event, the 12th Devonshires were not used, and it was another unit in the 6th Airborne Division, the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, which famously captured Pegasus Bridge in the early hours of 6 June 1944.
What caused the change of plans? One explanation is that aerial reconnaissance had identified German anti-glider defences, forcing the operation to be cut back to avoid the casualties that would be caused by collision with obstacles on the intended landing grounds. But a more serious problem was the Army's lack of suitable aircraft. Shortly before D-Day, there had been a major rehearsal of the airborne landings in Gloucestershire: Alf told his wife that they managed to smash up so many of the gliders that they simply could not be flown into France. Instead, the 12th Devonshires crossed to France on D+1, 7 June, pitching across the Channel in landing craft like most of the other assault troops. (Other accounts confirm "shortage of aircraft" as a reason for the decision not to deploy the 12th Devonshires in glider-borne assaults.)
Troops involved in the Normandy landings were subjected to a complete isolation in the days before they were sent into action. Their families simply did not know where they were or whether they were alive. For Alf's relatives and friends, the simple ordeal of waiting for news was very stressful. For his wife Anne, the strain must have been particularly hard to bear, all the more so because, by this time, she was pregnant. The silence was broken, probably about ten days after the invasion, by receipt of a Field Service Post Card – her first contact with her husband in over a month. The printed card contained a series of brief news items, for instance informing the recipient that the sender was in good health, or wounded and in hospital, that he had received a parcel or had not had a letter for a long time. Soldiers were required to delete all the statements that did not apply, and then sign and date the postcard. Since no comment of any kind was permitted, the family back home knew only that their loved-one had been alive on a particular day (or, at least, for part of it), but had no idea where he was or whether (as was all too likely) he was in danger. The survival of the Field Service Post Card among Alf Wheel's memorabilia is unusual. It is also a rare example of his handwriting, which was elegantly ornate – an achievement, since the only writing implement available on the front line was a blunt pencil.
Soldiers were required to use the Field Service Post Card when security considerations made it necessary to withhold their location. This card, dated one week after D-Day, would have been Anne Wheel's first intimation that Alf had survived the Invasion of France. By deleting the references to hospital treatment, he was able to assure her that he was safe and would write soon. No comment or additional information could be added to the card. The recipient was reminded that she must use a stamp if she replied.
The anonymity of the Field Service Post Card seems to have given way to more relaxed communications between families and their fighting men. On 13 June 1944, one week after D-Day, the Germans began to attack London with V1 flying bombs, an unguided form of cruise missile. Having moved from the inner city to the suburb of Hornchurch, my parents were under the flight path of this new menace, and the 'doodlebugs', as the weapon was nicknamed, often fell short of their city-centre targets. (My father was in his forties, the top end of the age-group eligible for military service and, as a hospital administrator, he was in a reserved occupation. During the Blitz, he had been in charge of an emergency refuge for bombed-out families in the West Ham docklands as they were hammered by the Luftwaffe: the Home Front in the Second World War was no soft option.) From Normandy, Alf wrote to my mother to report that British troops were being bombarded by German propaganda, presumably through English-language broadcasts specifically targeted at them. They were told that London was under relentless attack from a new terror weapon, and that their families were being annihilated while they fought in France. Was it true, he asked? My mother was proud to reply that the V1 menace was a problem, but that the civilian population was determined to stand firm in support of the soldiers in the field. It is surprising that such explicit statements could have got through Army censorship, but perhaps conditions in those early weeks of the Normandy campaign were too pressured for such procedures, and morale was better served by ensuring free communications with families back home.
Using highly trained airborne troops as infantry on the ground did not make sense, and in September the 12th Devonshires returned to their base at Bulford on Salisbury Plain to resume training, this time with the aim of establishing bridgeheads across the Rhine, for it was expected that, once the Allies had broken out of Normandy, the German armies in the West would be quickly pushed back to their own territory. In the event, the rendezvous with the Rhine was delayed by a Nazi counterattack through the Ardennes in December 1944. Alf's battalion was rushed to the continent to help stem the break-out, and remained in action until February 1945.
Sometime that winter, he suffered severe burns in what was described as an accident and he became a patient at the Connaught Military Hospital at Knaphill near Woking. The Connaught Hospital had been handed over to the Canadian Army: their medics ran it, but by 1944 it was caring for a wide range of Allied casualties, who were airlifted from France to the aerodrome at Farnborough and thence distributed by ambulance around the network of military hospitals associated with Aldershot. Since the 12th Devonshires' English base at Bulford was sixty miles away, it seems likely that Alf Wheel had suffered his injuries during the emergency deployment to the Ardennes. For his family, the news would have been distressing and deeply worrying, but – in the context of the chaos of a world war – the initial explanation of an accident would probably have been all too easy to accept.
On 15 March 1945, the Army's Infantry Record Office issued a copy of Form B.104.82B, addressed to Anne Wheel, who was hailed, in spidery handwriting, as "Madam". The signatory, an unknown pen-pusher acting on behalf of the Officer in Charge of Records, conveyed his (or her) "painful duty to inform you that a report has been received from the War Office of the death of" – and here followed in longhand the details that summarised a soldier's life – Army number, rank, name ("WHEEL, Alfred Henry") – and the bald information that he had "died of jaundice" the previous day. The military bureaucracy was at least quick in conveying the terrible news. Form B.104.82B closed with the cold formula: "I am to express the sympathy and regret of the Army Council at the soldier's death in his Country's service."
Army Form B.104.82B was a remarkably cold device for informing a woman that her husband had died in hospital.
But how could it be that a man admitted to hospital with severe burns had died of liver failure? Alf Wheel's death certificate contained further information, but confirmed that the doctors treating him simply did not know what had gone wrong. Cause of death was specifically attributed to two conditions, cholaemia and toxic hepatitis, the first indicating excess bile in the bloodstream, the second inflammation of the liver. The medics were sufficiently puzzled by the outcome to conduct a post-mortem examination, but the results were inconclusive. They had no explanation for Alf Wheel's catastrophic liver failure, and the double diagnosis was followed by the stark comment, "cause unknown".
It will be noted that there was no mention in the death certificate of the fact that the deceased had suffered severe burns, something that non-specialist opinion might have regarded as potentially relevant. Family tradition says that Alf Wheel was being treated with penicillin to counteract infection in his raw wounds, and that he suffered a negative reaction to the medication. Penicillin was a relatively new discovery and, under pressure of wartime requirements, its apparently miracle-working properties had fast-tracked it into large-scale production, possibly before the medical profession understood its limitations. Accordingly, it is not surprising that Alf's family should have believed that it had been used in his treatment, but the balance of probability is that the tradition was well-founded. Those of us who lack medical qualifications should be cautious about culling information from the Internet, but I present here a few gleanings based upon twenty-first century knowledge. Some semisynthetic penicillin derivatives can indeed cause liver damage, including jaundice. However, fatal cases of liver failure associated with penicillin are rare, and usually associated with a skin disease called Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which causes damage similar to burns. Hepatitis and shock may be contributing factors: through his accident, Alf Wheel had experienced a major trauma. Modern research argues that systemic antibiotics should not be given to patients with severe burns, since the uncertain benefits of the treatment do not outweigh the risks of adverse reaction. On balance, it seems that twenty-six year-old Corporal Alfred Wheel was a sacrifice to the hit-and-miss process by which medical practitioners discovered the limitations of their new wonder drug. Perhaps he would not have survived his ordeal anyway, but it is appalling to think that he suffered such a terrible death.
Alf Wheel was buried at Queen's Road Cemetery, Walthamstow, close to his parents' home in Leyton. The funeral would have taken place within a few days of his death on 14 March. It was a grim time for any family funeral, let alone the burial of a young man who had so recently become a father. The V1 missile that had shaken military morale in Normandy the previous summer had been succeeded by the even more terrifying V2 supersonic rocket. The doodlebug had given some warning that it was about to drop from the sky, but the new weapon flew so fast that its victims never knew what had hit them. Across the south-east of England in the month of March 1945, 792 people were killed. The V2 respected no deathbed. It turned aside from no funeral. The mourners gathered as the Allies advanced towards the Rhine, but nobody knew how hard the Germans would fight in defence of their homeland. In the Far East, the war against Japan continued.
In due course, Corporal Alfred Wheel's grave would be marked by the clean, white headstone of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Whatever may be our response to the inscription that it bears – "Though Death Divides Sweet Memory Clings" – we should respect the grief that lay behind Anne Wheel's selection. She had been left a widow with a very young baby. The week after the funeral, on 25 March 1945, she took her two-month old son to a local Anglican church for his christening. Alf and Anne had presumably felt no qualms about a Register Office wedding in the confused circumstances of wartime but, in that era, it was standard practice for people who entered themselves as "C. of E." on official forms to arrange for their children to be baptised. Enlisting friends or relatives as godparents formed part of a passage rite that welcomed the infant into the community, whether or not a religious upbringing was intended. For Anne Wheel, the baptism of her little boy (he was named Anthony but subsequently preferred Tony) – would have been both a token of hope for the future and an assertion – as her chosen epitaph would indicate – that Alf's memory would live on.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone in Walthamstow's Queen's Road Cemetery. Anne Wheel later remarried, but she left instructions after her death in 2000 for her ashes to be scattered on her first husband's grave.
In addition to the oddly stilted condolences of the Army Council that had accompanied the announcement of her husband's death, Anne Wheel received other formal expressions of sympathy. From Buckingham Palace came a printed scroll. "The Queen and I offer you our heartfelt sympathy in your great sorrow. We pray that your country's gratitude for a life so nobly given in its service may bring you some measure of consolation." It bore the facsimile signature of the King, "George R.I.", in his double capacity as Britain's monarch and Emperor of India. George VI and his consort Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) earned enduring respect and affection for their decision to remain in London (and Windsor) during the Blitz, and for their morale-boosting appearances after major air raids. Eighty years later, we may perhaps query the assumption that Their Majesties were aware of the fate of Corporal Wheel of the Devonshires but, so great was the awe inspired by the monarchy in that era, we may assume that the sentiment was appreciated. Far too many households must have received such a scroll, but I have never before seen one myself.
The King and Queen offer their sympathy. Tens of thousands of households must have received this simple scroll.
Sometime after the War, Anne Wheel received her husband's campaign medals, which she also cherished. They were accompanied by a further remarkably cold printed message on behalf of the Army, which began: "The Under-Secretary of State for War presents his compliments". The name of Cpl. A.H. Wheel was typed into the statement that the military authorities shared her regret that he "did not live to receive them". Since we may be sure that the Under-Secretary of State for War did not package up Corporal Wheel's medals and take them to the post office, it is permissible to wonder why such precious tributes to a life that had been lost were despatched in the name of an obscure and anonymous official. Surely the honours of war could have been sent with a grateful message from Mr Churchill or Mr Attlee?
Alf Wheel's campaign medals. The accompanying message from the Army bureaucracy seems inadequate.
Anne Wheel could focus on her infant son as a connection with her lost husband but, for Alf's mother, there was nothing. Edith Wheel had lost a favourite brother in the First World War – a gentle bachelor coarsened by the trenches, he had been killed in August 1918, as the Allies began to overwhelm the German armies. Now, as another war dragged towards its close, she had lost a son, just weeks before the fighting would finish. Grannie Wheel was a forceful personality – rearing six children with very little money, she had needed to be tough. She liked to be in control, but the iron self-discipline that she displayed after Alf's death frightened her children. Sharing the widespread belief among working-class women that most problems could be eased by a cup of tea, she was affectionately remembered in family tradition for stalking her home with a teapot tucked under her arm, rather like the ghost of Anne Boleyn in jocular legend. Mourners at Alf's funeral were invited back to the house at Leyton, where she dispensed her favourite beverage, pressing refills upon the guests without giving any sign that she had just witnessed her son's body being lowered into a grave. When Anne subsequently brought her baby grandson to visit, Edith set an additional place at table – for Alf.
Mother and son. A forceful personality, Edith Wheel found it difficult to overcome her iron self-control and openly grieve for Alf.
The inner conflict proved too much and, several years after the War, her mind gave way. As with physical illness, medical knowledge of mental distress was comparatively rudimentary in the nineteen-forties: I do not know whether she succumbed to dementia or to some form of breakdown.As a child, I was taken to visit her in Claybury, a Victorian complex that was still insensitively called a lunatic asylum, and I retain hazy memories of an old lady in a ghostly white nightgown, an iron bedstead and an echoing ward. Since she died early in 1949, I can only have been three years of age. I cling to the belief that Edith Wheel found some contentment in her last days, as she wandered in a universe of fantasy. Sometimes the asylum was a factory, and she was supervising the production. At others, it was a country house, where she was the chatelaine reprimanding idle servants. There can be no doubt that she, too, was a casualty of the 'accident' that had killed her son Alf.
It was almost certainly Edith Wheel who commemorated Alf by creating an icon of him, a hand-coloured photograph of a young man in battledress. In due course, the picture was inherited by my mother and, for a time, it hung in our house. As a teenager, I was never comfortable with it. The colouring seemed exaggerated, for it gave the mythical Uncle Alf lipstick and rouged cheeks. Fundamentally, this pensive and saintly figure did not resemble any of my cheery, workaday relatives, and I could not credit the person portrayed. By contrast, to my mother, the coloured photograph was all-too-real. It was as if Alf was there, in the room watching her, and she soon gave the portrait to her youngest sister. And, as my account draws to a close, I introduce a new character to the cast.
Impossibly idealised or too realistic? It is believed that Edith Wheel had this coloured photograph created, as an icon in her son's memory. In 2025, it is owned – and honoured – by a cousin.
My mother's youngest sister had grown up with Alf, there being just two years between them. Christened Irene, she was known as Rene, usually in two syllables but sometimes informally and affectionately telescoped into one. Rene was a matter-of-fact person who did not parade her feelings: her daughters recall that only when she talked about her dead brother did she ever give way to emotion. For me, she held the position of Favourite Aunt, although I hastily add that it was a close contest with my mother's other two sisters. (My father's relatives were few and peripheral.) Over the decades, the relationship of aunt and nephew gradually evolved into a gruff amity: Rene was the last person on the planet with whom I conversed, not in the educated tones of Cambridge, but in the pidgin Cockney of the mid-century Essex suburbs that has since been largely swept away by the cruel sounds of Estuary English. It was through this friendship that, in her later years, she told me the real story of Alf Wheel's death, a tale that she had never shared with other members of the family. No doubt she assumed that, as a historian, I would find some way of passing it on.
Rene had a tough war. During the crisis year of 1940-1, although she was only nineteen, she and her boy-friend Doug decided to marry, hoping – like Alf Wheel and Anne Dorrington – to share some life together, however brief it might be. Their resolve was strengthened when Edith Wheel seized her daughter's love-letters and proclaimed her intention to put a stop to the romance. On grounds of solid worth, reliability and good humour, no mother could possibly have objected to Doug as a son-in-law. Edith Wheel chose instead to concentrate on the fact that he had fair hair which, in her eyes, made him look like a German. In the context of 1941, this was a low blow but it is not surprising that it proved insufficiently compelling to derail the nuptials. Two years later, with a young baby and her husband overseas, Rene was welcomed back into the parental home, and it was there, in September 1943, that she received the Army's curt notification that Doug was missing in action at Salerno, following the Allied invasion of the Italian mainland. Determined to stiffen her resolve, my grandfather took charge, drawing upon his own experience of the Army in the First World War to elucidate the military mind. (He had been assigned to the Catering Corps and did not set foot out of England, much less hear a shot fired in anger. Family legends of his service to King and Country were closer in spirit to the scripts of Blackadder than to the poems of Wilfred Owen. Suffice it to say that the Wheel family did not suffer from the rigours of food rationing.) Formally addressing his daughter as "Irene" and adopting the persona of a seasoned warrior, he lectured her that "missing in action" was a standard phrase used by the Army when a soldier could not be located on the battlefield. She must maintain hope, for it was more than likely that they would soon hear that her husband had been captured and was safe, even if in enemy hands. Such reassurance as she received from this homily was notably dented when she overheard a worried conversation between her parents immediately afterwards, in which her father announced: "Doug's a goner. We won't see him again." Decades later, Rene told the story to emphasise its comic element. This use of the satire of sarcasm was a common device among survivors to assimilate and take ownership of their terrifying wartime experiences, but we can still catch the despair of a twenty-one year-old woman with a small child facing the all-too-likely grief of widowhood. In fact, Doug had indeed been captured and would spend the rest of the war behind barbed wire in eastern Germany. He was still a prisoner of war when Alf died, with the additional nightmare that his camp was in the path of the advancing Soviet forces, and he might fall into the hands of the Russians.
In the postwar years, Rene supplemented their household income by taking an office job in London. On discovering that her maiden name had been Wheel, a male colleague wondered if she was related to the "Bill" Wheel whom he had known in the Army. This inconsequential enquiry led to the revelation of a terrible story. One of Alf's nightly duties as a Corporal had been to check that the men for whom he was responsible had emptied the dustbins outside their huts. One evening, some of the squaddies decided to play a practical joke on him by booby-trapping one of the bins with a home-made firework, set to go off when the lid was removed. The sequel may be guessed. Either the pranksters miscalculated the amount of gunpowder, turning a fire-cracker into an improvised explosive device, or they failed to realise that the dustbin was not only full but contained flammable material. The upshot was that Corporal Alf Wheel suffered extensive burns – more than likely severe enough to kill him, even without the attentions of the medics.
Perhaps the only redeeming element in the tale is that there is no suggestion of malice in this stupid prank. Indeed, Rene's tense recital of the events, as they had been reported to her, suggested a high-spirited reaction to the boredom of life in barracks on Salisbury Plain, but it is equally possible that the incident occurred while the Devonshires were fighting in the Ardennes, where there would have been relatively easy access to explosives. The men responsible were probably disciplined, but the pressures of war would have ruled out formal procedures, for the Army could hardly have welcomed a court martial, where questions might have been asked about the security of munitions. It was simpler to bury the episode and probably seemed kinder to relatives to report a tragic accident rather than admit that Alfred Wheel had been the victim of an unthinking criminal act. The subsequent failure in his hospital care provided a further level of cover through the attribution of his death to liver failure.
No doubt Rene discussed what she had been told with her husband. In the early postwar years, Doug combined his day job – in a family metal-working business – with a weekend second career as a Sergeant in the Territorial Army. He would have known that there was no prospect of securing any investigation into Alf's death. Evidently, they also decided not to share the story within the family. No useful purpose would be served by reopening the wounds of grief. Of course, among those who had known him, there would always be an abstract anger against the misfortunes of war and the clumsy interconnections of destiny that had destroyed the life of a son and brother. But to rekindle those feelings of bereavement in the form of rage against those who had so carelessly selected him as their victim could only destroy those who already grieved for Alf Wheel. Revisiting the episode might well also have been pointless in another way. Ten days after his death, the 12th Devonshires had gone into action to seize the long-planned bridgehead across the Rhine. The battalion suffered heavy casualties, with some of its gliders shot down as they approached the landing grounds. There was no guarantee that Corporal Wheel's tormenters had survived. Talking about her brother to her own daughters, Rene told them that somebody had thrown flammable material on to a bonfire and that he had been caught in the explosion that followed.
Eighty years later, the death of Corporal A.H. Wheel may seem very remote. Although the name has experienced occasional minor revivals, few boys are called Alfred in the twenty-first century: by definition, any Alf belongs to yesteryear, and the name conjures a caricatured working-class stereotype from a bygone era. With the exception of the one unconvincing attempt to create a technicolour icon, the surviving photographs place him in the black-and-white world of a yesteryear that we find hard to bring to life. It is also difficult, in modern times, to understand how tens of thousands of young men in the nineteen-forties bowed to the compulsion of spending five or six years of their lives fighting for their country. We must remember, too, that our timeline of hindsight firmly confines the Second World War to the period between 1939 and 1945. Those who were drawn into the armed forces at the time had no idea how long they would remain in uniform, they could not know, and must often have doubted, whether the war would end in victory and – above all – they had no idea whether they would survive. Yet, eighty years after the death of the uncle I never met, the European continent seems to face the same challenges of rampant aggression that Alfred Wheel's generation rallied to resist in the Second World War.
NOTE I am grateful to Jean Wheel for sending me images of the Alf Wheel memorabilia, and for patiently responding to my bombardment of queries about family traditions. Joan Irwin, Yvonne Lucas and David Mills have been similarly helpful. My cousin, the late Tony Wheel, gave me much information on key points shortly before his death: I lament that he did not live to see this tribute to the father he never knew. I have used the following websites for the history of 12th Battalion The Devonshire Regiment: https://www.paradata.org.uk/unit/12th-battalion-devonshire-regiment and https://www.pegasusarchive.org/normandy/unit_12devons.htm. The War Diaries of the battalion for 1944 are briefly summarised month-by-month on the normandywarguide website, giving information of their location and activities: e.g. https://www.normandywarguide.com/war-diaries/12th-Devonshire-Regiment-january-44. A useful source for the Connaught Military Hospital is, https://www.friendsofthealdershotmilitarymuseum.org.uk/garrison.21A.html.