What we can all learn from war veteran Jim

Mr Duplock is returning to Arnhem for the first time – 70 years after he parachuted in, under heavy gunfire, during the Second World War.

And the Lutterworth pensioner is still haunted by what he saw.

“Do you ever think about those days?” I ask him, during our interview, in the lounge of a quiet Lutterworth retirement home.

“Ye-e-e-s,” he says. “Every day. And every night.”

“Really?” I say, “Doesn’t it fade over the years?”

“No,” says Jim. My brother was just the same.

“He fought the Japanese. He was the same.”

And then he turns to an Age Concern friend Alison Anderton who’s known him for six years and says: “I don’t get much sleep at all, do I?”

She looks shocked and says: “I never knew that was why.”

For those that don’t know, the Battle of Arnhem was a bloody defeat for British paratroopers cut off by the Nazis after they were dropped into the Netherlands to try to secure key bridges and towns.

Mr Duplock’s own battalion – the 11th Parachute Battalion – sustained such heavy casualties it was disbanded following the battle.

But, 70 years on, Mr Duplock still can’t talk about it very much.

“It must have been frightening, dropping into enemy territory under fire?” I ask him.

“Well... you heard bullets,” he says. And then, after a pause, “some of them hit, and some didn’t”.

It was Mr Duplock’s friend Alison, from Age Concern Lutterworth and District, who has organised the 820-mile round trip to Arnhem.

She and husband Jerome will accompany Mr Duplock on the journey.

Funds for the trip have been raised by the The Lutterworth Lions, Lutterworth Inspire, Lutterworth and District Round Table, the Rotary Club, the Lest We Forget Foundation and the Four Seasons Charity. The Lutterworth Community Transport group has also lent its adapted “chair link” car.

Mr Duplock fought throughout the war; in North Africa and Greece, as well as western Europe.

But it’s Arnhem that still sticks in his mind.

One of the few survivors of his battalion, he was captured by the Germans, along with his commander, Major David Gilchrist.

He spent the last year of the war in the Stalag 12A prisoner-of-war camp at Limburg in Germany.

“We had to go to work on the German railways,” he explained.

“One of my jobs was as a mechanic, working on things like the piston rods. We never did the nuts up enough, so they soon took us off it.”

He’s had a chance to go to Arnhem once before but “didn’t want to then. It was too soon.”

But recently he met a Dutch author – Gerrit Pijpers – who has written about Arnhem, and he persuaded Mr Duplock it might be good to go back.

“I want to go back for him,” said Mr Duplock.

“I’m ready to go back now.”

And what’s the one thing he wants to see when he returns to Arnhem, 70 years later?

Mr Duplock thinks for a while. “The cemetery” he decides. “Because I know so many people who are in there.”

After the war, Mr Duplock lived with his wife, Nancy, in Frolesworth, and worked as a carpenter and narrowboat builder.

He then moved into sheltered accommodation in Lutterworth after his wife died.

But throughout his civilian life he has been haunted by his wartime experiences.

An American Civil War general called William Sherman, writing about war, said: “Its glory is all moonshine. War is hell.”

One hundred years on, James William Duplock, aged 94, tells us the same thing, from a retirement home in Lutterworth.