James Holland: evaluation

Transcript context

…What was his justification for that, for joining right back? He just felt completely disconnected to home. He felt that the Gulf of time, his experiences had separated him from all the normalities of life, and he felt that the normalities of the life that he had known, before he’d gone away to war, had just been severed, in a really kind of cruel way, that he didn’t really feel he was able to confront at that particular point. But he decided to rejoin, couldn’t go back to the Third Royal Tank Regiment, so he went back to a different unit. It went from, kind of the Italian campaign, to the European theater. Didn’t see so much action at the end, but a lot of British troops, if you were in a certain division at a certain time, you know, ended up passing very close to Belsen, and you suddenly realize, “Okay, this was the right thing to do. We did have to get rid of Nazism. We did have to do this, because this is the consequence. It’s not just the oppression, it’s not just the secret police. It’s not just the expansionism of Nazism.” It is also the Holocaust, which hadn’t been given its name at that point, but you’re witnessing this kind of untold cruelty. And I’ve always sort of, I think a lot about Sam. I mean, he’s no longer with us, but he was one of the first people that I interviewed, and I interviewed him at great length. And I know you like a long interview, Lex, and I totally, totally get that. Because when you have a long interview, you really start getting to the nuts and bolts of it. One of the frustrations, for me, when I’m looking at oral histories of Second World War vets is usually, they’re kind of, they’re put on YouTube, or they’re put on a museum website. They’re 30 minutes, an hour, if you’re lucky, and you’re just scratching the surface. You never really get to know it, and you feel that they’re just repeating kind of stuff they’ve read in books themselves after the war, and stuff. I always leave, kind of feeling frustrated that I haven’t had a chance to kind of grill them on the kind of stuff that I would grill them on, if I was put in front of them. So tank man. What was maybe the most epic, the most intense, or the most interesting story that he told you?…

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