wars

I used to believe that there had been eleven world wars, however I was confused why there weren't many movies and stories about 2, 3, 4 etc

I assumed that they hadn't been very good wars.

(Pick the child of the seventies watching all the bad 60's TV shows - Desert Rats, Combat, Baa Baa Black Sheep etc etc)

Adar

My Grandma (who lived through WW2) used to make me wash my hands alot. Whenever I complained about it, she would say I had to do it to fight the "Germans." For a long time I thought "germs" and "Germans" were synonymous and that the people of Germany were trying to make me sick.

JCB

I'm an American. When I first learned about the U.S. Civil War in school, I seized upon the alternate name "War Between The States" and took it too literally. I got into my head that the war unfolded as every single state going to war against every other state that bordered it. So the entire United States was a big nest of shooting border wars!

Fortunately I held this belief only briefly, but the lasting effect is that I still have a distaste for the name War Between The States.

Lamont D. Sanford

When i heard about Irish Bombers on the news during the 70s i used to think that planes were dropping bombs.

Moose

When I was very young, I used to think that wars were what happened when you got your brother angry at you and he threw a chair at you. I considered myself very lucky to be an only child.

Anon

when i was in elementary school, my father would always listen to movies or videos about war. from that, i used to believe that the civil war was really "the silver war"

ashley

Wen I was 4 or 5, I kept on hearing on the radio about World War III, so I assumed for some time thereafter that there had been three world wars, and the third one ended a few years before I was born.

Mike

Up until the age of seven or thereabouts, I believed that world war two was still on, but I had no idea who Germans were or what the war had been about. I did think though, when playing war games in the playground, that they did have better uniforms than we (the British) had.

Andy H

When I was about 9 or 10 years old I read a fiction novel about a little Jewish girl growing up in the US in the years after WW2. In the book, she would play act with her friends about the war, and specifically, about concentration camps. I had no idea what they were talking about it. But, I assumed that it was something that the author of the story had just made up, and had nothing to do with real events.

Deidre

I once got in a lot of trouble in school, when I was in Grade 5. I was obsessed with battleships, and tanks, and aircraft and all that, which isn't really all that unusual. I was obsessed with World War II at the time, but no one had ever told me about the Nazis and the Jews. One time at lunch hour I was running around with some friends of mine, and I decided to pretend that we were planes from the war. We all got to be British planes, and when I ran into some other people I knew, they became the Nazis, which at that point I think I believed was synonymous with 'German'. Because one of these 'Nazis' was Jewish, my teacher yanked me into the classroom and gave me a stern lecture about how what I did was wrong, and then made me go out and apologize to this child, who (I think) was about as oblivious as I was. The teacher then called my parents at home, and I hid in the closet, because I was afraid they would be mad at me.

I'm not sure exactly why the teacher made such a big deal out of it, when a basic clarification of terminology would have fixed the situation... I'm still obsessed with the Second World War, but I know the difference between Germans and Nazis now. :)

Matthew

When I was small
My father told me about his aunt
Who foretold the event of the Great War
(It was World War I)

She said that one night,
She saw soldiers marching across the
moon.
That story never failed to give me the shivers.

Elissa