Lineker’s salute to his grandad and the heroes of Murder Mountain
At the end of his pilgrimage to Italy, retracing his grandfather’s brutal experiences with the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II, Gary Lineker choked up.
he wished his late mother could have watched the documentary, My Grandad’s War (BBC1), to help her understand what her father Stanley went through.
I wish my own mother’s dad could have seen this, too. Like Stanley, he was one of the so-called ‘D-Day dodgers’, who missed the Normandy landings in June 1944 on account of being unavoidably detained by months of fierce combat and heavy shelling between Naples and Rome.
As a boy, I badgered my adored grandpa to tell me about his wartime experiences with the eighth Army so much that he eventually relented. he took out a photo of his regiment, the Royal West Kents, taken before the invasion of Italy. two-thirds of the men were marked with crosses in blue ink. I was too young to understand quite what that meant, and he couldn’t say it out loud.
In old age, he sometimes talked about the war, but to the day he died, aged 94, he was never able to speak about the battle for Monte Cassino. Nor could Lineker’s grandfather, and this muted, loving
DANGEROUS LESSON OF THE WEEK: Prizes for all, and no cheering for your own child — Motherland (BBC2) ruthlessly mocked the ban on competition in sports at today’s ‘snowflake academies’. How dishonest to teach children that life has no winners or losers.
tribute to his memory could do no more than sketch an outline of a savage stand-off between the Allies and the Nazis.
the presenter began at a restaurant overlooking the sea at Salerno, before taking a trip in an elegant vintage motor launch out into the bay, to look at the beach-head from the water. Later, Lineker sat in a streetside cafe, chatting to a 104year-old veteran, before paddling down a river that saw some of the heaviest fighting.
It was a gentle investigation with a deliberate lack of drama, and that was the most respectful way to do it. the men who survived Monte Cassino — and an estimated 55,000 did not — rarely spoke of it, for good reason. they cherished that ironic nickname, ‘D-Day dodgers’, because they knew the truth.
Lineker wasn’t trying to evoke the horror of the campaign. he simply wanted to remind viewers that, while hollywood often focuses on northern europe, on Dunkirk, D-Day and Arnhem, a battle just as bloody was raging in Italy.
the stars of the hour were the old soldiers who shared their memories, still raw after 75 years.
William earl, who served like Lineker’s grandad in the RAMC, looked up at the sheer slope that British troops once dubbed Murder Mountain. ‘I really could cry to be here,’ he said.
tough nut Dom Littlewood was seeing combat of his own as the consumer rights champion trained to be a prison guard or ‘correctional officer’ in texas on Dom Does America (BBC1).
every morning this week Dom, a pugnacious bloke with a bald head and the physique of a miniature bodybuilder, is tackling some of the roughest jobs in the States. he’s best known for confronting crooks and conmen, but he admitted before donning his sheriff’s badge that he’d never set foot inside a prison before.
he hadn’t been in Randall County jail five minutes before the inmates started goading him. ‘We’re sharks,’ said one. ‘Little fish gets thrown in here, sharks attack.’
But Dom has a genuine journalist’s instinct for stories, and he quickly put prisoners at their ease by encouraging them to talk. One woman, aged just 19, revealed she was doing 20 days for unpaid speeding tickets.
Dom looked around the hellhole she had landed in.
‘Buy a slower car,’ he advised her earnestly.