BOOJUM!: A Quick Look Astern

Sunday 6 June 2021

A Quick Look Astern

For Lo! It Is the 77th Anniversary Of D-Day

And Your Humble Scribe needs to get another batch of laundry in, manage a pseudo-Bigos stew, commit to at least the start of tomorrow's blog and, most importantly, WATCH "THE LONGEST DAY". This is an unusual military commemoration in This Sceptred Isle, since we are rather fond of concentrating on failures, not victories. Because we are so understated and modest about stuff, before you ask. Anyway, let us have a picture of that day's only VC. Art!

CSM Stan Hollis. Bad teeth, good aim.

As a Company Sergeant Major, Stan would have risen up the ranks to be the effective second in command of his company, having managed to collect four wounds along the way. We need not go into his history here, because this Intro is supposed to be only a couple of paragraphs long, but he had to beat journalists away from him with a barbed-wire stick to stop them writing his biography - some people take "understated and modest" very seriously. You tend to get this kind of attention when you win a VC and live to tell the tale.