Actors, Politicians, and Celebrities

Discussion in 'General' started by morse1001, Mar 24, 2006.

  1. canuck

    canuck Closed Account

    I've always had some admiration for Niven after reading this quote about his WW2 experience:

    “I will, however, tell you just one thing about the war, my first story and my last. I was asked by some American friends to search out the grave of their son near Bastogne. I found it where they told me I would, but it was among 27,000 others, and I told myself that here, Niven, were 27,000 reasons why you should keep your mouth shut after the war.”
     
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  2. Vintage Wargaming

    Vintage Wargaming Well-Known Member

    Am I imagining it or was the same photograph posted some time ago? I seem to remember a similar photograph and discussion, though I can’t be sure it was here.
     
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  3. TTH

    TTH Senior Member

    Yes, they did.
     
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  4. MongoUK

    MongoUK Junior Member

    Yes it was, I was trying to pinpoint who may be on it. This was mainly for reference.
     
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  5. Vintage Wargaming

    Vintage Wargaming Well-Known Member

    Thanks. It’s definitely an interesting photo. Leslie Howard’s moustache...
     
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  6. timuk

    timuk Well-Known Member

    Spot The Actor....

    Tim
     
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  7. Guy Hudson

    Guy Hudson Looker-upper

    Screen Shot 2020-04-24 at 17.36.23.png
    Manchester Evening News 31st July 1944
     
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  8. Charley Fortnum

    Charley Fortnum Dreaming of Red Eagles

    Here is one of a couple of references to his visit to Belsen.

    This is taken from Snakes & Ladders.

    Only during really bad thunderstorms would I remember Belsen, and the girl, shorn head covered in scabs, face cracked with running sores from which she carelessly waved away the April flies, who grabbed my hand and stumbled with me along the sandy tracks amongst the filth, talking, crying, singing all at the same time, pointing me out proudly as we went, her filthy striped skirt flapping, breasts swinging like empty pockets against her rib-lined chest. A Corporal, red faced and gentle, took her from me and pulled us apart, thrusting her away. She stood appalled for a moment, and then with cascading tears pressed both hands to her lips and threw me kisses until I had gone from her sight.

    “Sorry, Sir,” apologetic, careful. “Typhoid. The place is full of it … I reckon they’ll all go.”

    Outside the camp, in the pale April sun, the larches shadowy with spring, larks high above the rolling, sandy heath. Help had come, trucks and jeeps and cars still bumped slowly across the tracks through the huge wire gates into hell. I drove away.”

    “And the wood outside Soltau … the dark pines and the earth below squashy, so that tent-pegs driven in slid into slime. The stench then, and the massed grave … legs and arms and swollen heads, the bloated, the rotten, liquefying, death beneath the pine-needles and moss. They had forced the people from the village to march past. Old men and women mostly, dragging, or carrying children. Some, the oldest, sobbed into handkerchiefs, the younger ones, white faced, spat, pointing out putrescence to unaware babies slung around their hips. Laughing, spitting into the grave, proud still, Germans.

    That was terror. Because it was so completely incomprehensible. Being dive-bombed on the airfield, shot at crossing a July field of buttercups, chased by tracer-bullets at night among the dykes and ditches of Holland, getting lost in a minefield, staggering up the beach at Arromanches, seeing my very first battle casualty, a man in a kilt lying indecently sprawled among the cow-parsley, the Daily Mirror plastered, considerately, across his blown-away face, holding the shaking shoulders of a woman stretched out under a shattered roof, while three older women delivered a child induced by shell-blast and terror … they were not Terror for me, because those things, however bizarre and strange, however unexpected, were, in fact, to be expected in a war. Those things, because I could understand them, terrified me less than the terrors which began to emerge from a new kind of war. These things had not been in a textbook, and no one had been able to tell us that we should find them strewn along our victors’ path, no one had ever said that perhaps this was what growing up entailed. If they had, I doubt very much that I would have believed them, for I tend to disbelieve anything remotely beyond my comprehension.

    A limiting fault.

    JC-belsen-db-in-eindhoven-c.19453030.jpg
     
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2020
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  9. idler

    idler GeneralList

    There we were trying to work out the identity of the vaguely familiar tramp in To The Manor Born, and it was him.
     
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  10. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

    Yep. He graduated from college in 39 and was an ensign on a sub chaser

    Douglas joined the United States Navy in 1941, shortly after the United States entered World War II, where he served as a communications officer in anti-submarine warfare aboard USS PC-1139.[28] He was medically discharged in 1944 for injuries sustained from the premature explosion of a depth charge.[29

    Kirk Douglas - Wikipedia.

    I just watched Seven Days in May all the way through for the first time and it is the best movie I've seen in years. Just terrific.
     
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  11. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

    Walter Pidgeon. He was 16 in 1913.

    Pidgeon ran off to join his brother, Don, in the Canadian Army, but his young age (16) was discovered and he was sent back home. He eventually enlisted in the 65th Battery of the Royal Canadian Artillery during World War I, but he was injured during his training when he was crushed by two gun carriages at Camp Petawawa and also caught pneumonia. As a result of these, he spent 17 months recovering at an army hospital in Toronto, having never been sent overseas.

    Walter Pidgeon - Biography - IMDb
     
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  12. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

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  13. Robert-w

    Robert-w Banned

    Unless I've missed something nobody has mentioned that Humphrey Bogart served in the USN in WW1 - on vessels somewhat larger than the African Queen.
     
  14. Harry Ree

    Harry Ree Very Senior Member

    Some members of the forum might remember Sabu,the young Indian actor who played a boy in films of the days of the British Raj.

    Finally became a US citizen during the war and served as aircrew in the USAAF with a number of ops under his belt.
     
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  15. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

    Another Casablanca cast member who was a WW1 Veteran was Claude Rains.
    Claude Rains - Wikipedia
     
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  16. Charley Fortnum

    Charley Fortnum Dreaming of Red Eagles

    Peter Sellers in the RAF. I'm afraid I don't have the particulars beyond the fact that he moved into entertainment and was in the Far East. Anyone?

    EmTHj53WEAAXawM.jpeg EmTHkDFWEAECE7f.jpeg Efc71HCWoAQIqLq.jpeg Efc71grWsAA9vAW.jpeg Efc71uLX0AAaUdz.jpeg
     
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  17. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

    Group Captain Mandrake! :)
     
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  18. Grasmere

    Grasmere Well-Known Member

    Honor Blackman, who served as a despatch rider in WW2.
     

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  19. A-58

    A-58 Not so senior Member

  20. Chris C

    Chris C Canadian

    Has anyone come across photos of Harry Secombe from the war?
     
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