Veterans Day, known as Remembrance Day in several other English-speaking countries, carried a somber note this year. Some veterans have questioned whether the nations they fought for have lived up to the sacrifices made by them and their fellow service members.
Alec Penstone was 15 and working in a factory when World War II began. After German bombing raids hit London, he volunteered as a messenger for air-raid precautions. At times, that meant pulling people from the rubble.
Penstone later joined the Royal Navy. He served as an able seaman on D-Day and went on to serve on submarines and an escort aircraft carrier. He also took part in Arctic convoys before being sent east to fight Japan. His father had been badly wounded by friendly fire in the trenches of World War I.
In an interview with “Good Morning Britain” last November, when he was 100, Penstone spoke with sadness about the state of the country he had fought for and the friends he had lost.
He recalled rows of white gravestones marking the dead and questioned whether their sacrifices had been worth the country’s present condition. They had fought for freedom, he said, but he felt the country had since moved in the wrong direction.
Penstone died in May at 101. The U.K. Veterans’ Foundation said he represented a generation whose service and sacrifice should not be forgotten. On Wednesday, clips of his comments began circulating on social media again.
Penstone was not the only veteran to express doubts about what became of the West after the war.
Don Poole, 102, served with the British Home Guard during World War II and later with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in India. In an interview published Wednesday, journalist Steven Edginton asked whether the war had been worth fighting, given the United Kingdom’s current condition.
Poole said the war had been worth fighting to defeat what he regarded as an immense evil. But he felt that what followed had not been worth the sacrifice, adding that he would not consider the country worth fighting for if war broke out now.
Earlier in the interview, Poole criticized the U.K.’s acceptance of millions of migrants from India, Pakistan and other developing countries. He also argued that crime committed by people from abroad had contributed to his view that the country was no longer worth defending.
Carl Spurlin Dekle, a U.S. Marine Corps sergeant who fought in the Pacific, also spoke publicly about his disappointment with changes in his country after the war. A Silver Star recipient, he said in a television interview before his death in 2022, at age 100, that people often failed to appreciate what they had.
Dekle said he was upset that the ideals he and his fellow Marines had fought for seemed to be slipping away. The country, he felt, was no longer the place he had known growing up.
He also worried that younger Americans would not have the same opportunities or experiences he had. At one point, he began to cry and said that was not what the men who died had given their lives for.
