Veteran says the living should be remembered as well as the dead

There were several veterans in the crowd at the special D-Day ceremony in front of the Regina Cenotaph on Thursday.

Many were wearing uniforms, but it was the small medal on Jeanne Tweten’s shirt that showed she had been a part of the Second World War.

Tweten is 96 now but said she was just 16 or 17 when the war started.

She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1941 and became a radar operator in the spring of 1942. Tweten said she was stationed on a cliff on the very eastern point of the Isle of Wight and the radar caught the edge of France.

“They swept from east to west, west to east, the whole time. And they were not done mechanically, we had to do it by hand, and you better not stop doing it, either. Otherwise, you got in trouble,” Tweten said with a little laugh.

They were in the middle of a war, but Tweten said she and the others were able to have fun.

“When we were off duty, some of us would explore the island, this tiny little island, but (there were) many historical things on the island. The only thing you couldn’t do, of course, was go swimming in the sea because they had concrete blocks and barbed wire in case of invasion,” said Tweten.

There weren’t many bombings where she was. Tweten said there was a raid off of Southampton that woke her up but she thought it was a thunderstorm so she went back to sleep.

By the time D-Day happened on June 6, 1944, Tweten wasn’t in the air force anymore; she was married and had had her baby.

“I remember when we switched on the radio in the morning — or the wireless as we called it — that was the main piece of news, that they’d landed in Normandy,” she recalled.

She said the invasion was a good thing, but it’s a pity so many people were killed. When she went home, Tweten said she went to a war memorial and saw half a dozen names on the cenotaph of boys she’d known when they were all kids.

When she’s at memorial ceremonies now, Tweten said she thinks of what some of her relatives went through.

“My cousins and my brother — they’ve all died but quite a few of them survived (the war). My brother was at Dunkirk, and my one cousin was in Colditz prison, and then there was one or two that were killed during the war, of course,” said Tweten.

Tweten went on to say it’s good to remember those who died, but we should also remember those who are still alive.

“Because some of them are not in very good shape either financially or physically,” she said.

Tweten said she knows another veteran of the war, but he wasn’t fit enough to go to the ceremony on Thursday.