‘We haven’t gained anything’: Regina woman reflects on Second World War

Eighty years after the start of the Second World War, a Regina woman regrets that world leaders today have learned little about war’s futility.

Joyce Peacock was just 11 years old on Sept. 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started the Second World War.

“We don’t have to fight one another. Surely we can sit down and discuss it — and that seems like something that even world leaders are having trouble doing,” she said, looking back on world history since that time.

Peacock is now 91 years old.

When the Germans invaded Poland, she was a student at Regina’s Connaught Elementary School.

Leading up to that date, she said people “knew that war was imminent.”

“At that time, there were newsies, newspapers sold on the street, and of course they were out (with the headlines): ‘War declared.’ I remember that quite vividly,” Peacock said.

Boys at her school were eager to finish and join the military as soon as possible. However, the outcomes for those who joined were grim — especially as the war dragged on.

“The pictures began going up on the halls at the school: ‘Missing in action’ and ‘Killed in action.’ That struck home no matter how old you were,” she said.

“You just wondered what was going to happen next, and who that you knew would be going off to war and wouldn’t come back — and many of them didn’t.”

Those who survived and returned to Regina, like her father, still suffered.

“(He) was hit by a sniper and he carried the bullet for the rest of his life, until the gun powder came out of the casing. (Doctors) weren’t able to get the bullet out. That precipitated heart trouble, and he died before his time,” Peacock said.

She and other young people didn’t know what to expect when they saw their peers leaving to fight in the war; their parents and the generation that preceded them knew what was coming, after living through the First World War.

“But that was a rather gentlemanly war, compared to what the Second World War was, if you can say such a thing is a gentlemanly war,” Peacock said.

Five years later, she and her friends understood what it meant to be fighting a war.

“By then we had lost some of the people we knew,” Peacock said.

She noted little has changed since 1939.

“We now have all these people who are displaced — we have cities in ruins. We haven’t gained anything. There’s nothing to be gained by war, but we’re not getting that message across,” Peacock said. “I hope I’m not around for the next one.”

— With files from 980 CJME’s Greg Morgan Morning Show