As is its fundamental nature, time passes. Or, perhaps, we pass through time.
Either way, we rush ever onward toward the blankness of the future, never attaining the goal but rather suspended in an eternal present moment, which in itself is gone as soon as we acknowledge it.
And all the while, the past becomes a more distant locus as our anchor memories fade and sigh away.
Humans, however, have more power than we realise, for the past is never truly lost. There are special ways in which we can not just revisit the past but context it with our present time. In this manner, we can not just remember what’s gone before but experience it in comparison and perhaps contrast with how we live today
Henry Bodden, a Texas-based author and son of Cayman, has put together an extraordinary book that does just that. In the Footsteps of Valor is a full-colour coffee table book tracking sites of the Second World War across the world, including archival pictures and new photos of how the sites look today.
“The war affected Cayman even though it is a mere speck in the ocean,” Henry tells us. The genesis of the book came, he says, on a family holiday.
“My son lives in Germany and when I went over in 1994, we visited Nuremburg where the Nazis had the rallies. He had an archive picture so we took a contemporary one and had before and after pics.
“Well, that rekindled my interest in World War II; I have always enjoyed history. So, I then did a Battle of the Bulge tour with my son to Belgium and Luxembourg, taking photos. On my third trip I went to Normandy and then Berlin.”
Subsequently, the author and photographer went to Philippines on a military tour.
“The war in the Pacific was very different to that in the West; very savage,” Henry notes. Other sites in the book include Pearl Harbour, Guam and Iwo Jima, all with before and after photographs.
His aim is to bring a horrendous part of the world’s history back into the minds of a new generation.
“People aged about 35 and below don’t have a concept of World War II. I wanted to do something about how it affected everybody, from Caymanians to the London Blitz – an indiscriminate bombing of citizens where 40,000 people died.
“And I found out lots of surprising things such as the attack at Mers-el-Kébir, where Winston Churchill bombed a French fleet at Algeria to avoid it getting into German hands. Over 1,200 French servicemen died in the attack.”
How it affected Cayman
In the Footsteps of Valor pulls few punches and tells many stories of the individuals as well as the events. It is available at Books & Books and on Amazon.com.
Needless to say there are some remarkable tales therein; Henry has met the individual who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and was even present during the assassination of JFK. The author says he spends a lot of time visiting schools and libraries in order to keep these stories alive.
One of those is how the war affected Cayman; a host of German U-Boats were looking to cause havoc in the area.
“My father was dispatched in the Caribbean; his petrol ship had to have destroyer escorts. My uncle got torpedoed off Trinidad – the Germans sank 55 or 56 ships. And my uncle Dalkeith was the only Caymanian to join the RAF and survive. He fought in East Africa and Egypt. My dad’s sister married Captain Tracy Bodden – the youngest captain in the Merchant Marines during the war.
“My uncle Wil T Bodden, right after the war, founded the first ever print shop on the island with Arthur T Bodden and printed Kingdom of the Gospel – a religious gospel paper. That building still stands today, overlooking the harbour in which the Germans sank a United Trust Company boat en route to New Orleans. The Cimboco happened to be in port and helped the survivors,” Henry says.
The book truly is a work of some repute and costs $29.95. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it; time should not be allowed to reduce the true humanity to mere statistics and this tome goes a long way to alleviating that possibility.
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