June 2004 "I was too young to have a rifle. I had a brush stick instead..!"
Peter Strachan and Gerry Briscoe in 2004...Sixty years after they landed on the D-Day beaches
Sixty years ago Bradford's Gerry Briscoe and Peter Strachan (left) were young, fresh-faced...and about to go to war in the biggest land battle ever seen in the history of the world. Sixty years on, they tell us what it was like to be a teenager going into war.
These days Peter and Gerry both go into schools in West Yorkshire and beyond to talk to today's kids about what it was like to be hardly older than them and, literally, fighting for their lives...
"THEY GLAMOURISE IT TOO MUCH"
"It's beyond comprehension now with all the games and that"
GERRY: They do glamourise it too much. We know what happened in the First World War and how bad it was there. The Americans had it bad just like we had But it's beyond comprehension now with all the games and that...When I was a kid we always fought the Germans and, I think, they still fight the Germans. Don't know what the kids are fighting now with Star Trek and stuff like that but they still do fight the Germans and it's incredible.
What about talking about the more difficult stuff, like the concentration camps? How do you deal with that?
PETER: It's surprising who does understand this because one place I went to I was going to skip it out the stuff about the concentration camps and the teacher says: "No, don't" and I say: "I can't tell them that!" But she said: "No, tell them because that's what they want to hear," and it is surprising how many kids ask various questions about it.
