WHEN a Crosland Moor man decided to have a spring clean, he unearthed an emotional and historic message from the past.

Bob Burns, 68, was clearing out the loft at his Crosland Hill Road home when he discovered a box he hadn’t seen for decades.

In it were some ancient press clippings and a letter sent from the European Front in Holland during the final months of World War Two.

It was written by war correspondent and former Examiner editor Alfred M Lee, his godfather and father’s best friend.

Bob, a retired central heating engineer, said: “I had completely forgotten about the letter and the newspaper cuttings. I remember getting the letter at my 21st birthday party, but as a young man I didn’t really realise the significance of it.

The nine-page letter composed on various typewriters around Europe was dated February 1945, three months before the Germans’ unconditional surrender and the month before Bob was born. It was addressed: “To the child of my very dear friend. ”

In it Alfred Lee describes in graphic detail some of the horrors he had witnessed. His beautiful prose brings to life emotive scenes from the war and its toll on the people of Europe.

His letter is full of sadness for the loss of life. He writes of tired young men trudging into battle with lifeless eyes, some of them dying before they had ever really lived.

Written on old fashioned copy paper with the odd cigarette burn, Alfred speaks of the people behind the news reports, the human cost of victories, of the young men who died for a hill, a river crossing, a bridge or a pillar box.

He writes of seeing everything objectively, like a newsreel, even when watching 400 men drown when their ship was mined in front of him, or an aircraft explode in the sky or tanks and men being blown up.

He writes with uncertainty about the future, “from a world that is dying so that yours could be born” and says in his final paragraph: “I hope we haven’t let you down too badly.”

Bob remembers Alf and Nellie, Alfred’s wife, as the best friends of his parents Jim and Ethel. He thinks the two men may have met through a Masonic lodge.

The two couples used to go on holiday together. They also were regular attendees at newspaper conferences when Jim and Ethel had to pretend they were the representatives of the Colne Valley Guardian to gain admittance.

Although Alfred met Bob numerous times, he never told him what was in the letter.

Bob said: “Now that I have re-read the letter, it is very moving. It brings back details of what the war was really like and how he and others suffered during the war.”

He intends to hand the letter over to his eldest son, Andrew.

Excerpts from “a letter to an unborn child to be opened on his 21st birthday. From Alfred M. Lee to _____ Burns”“

Holland, February (various dates) 1945

To the child of my very dear friend,

This voice of the past you never knew has come down to you over the long flowing years of your youth with its fond message of affection and goodwill on your birthday.

It comes perhaps as an intrusion, catching you unawares, from a world that is dying so that yours could be born; from a world where there is chaos and suffering; cruel and miserable, endless suffering; from a world better dead for its folly. How, I wonder, is your brave new world we talk about so much?

We are now in the sixth year of a war without precedent in the history of man, a war that has scourged the whole world like a plague, leaving few unharmed, few untouched.

We have destroyed, among us, with varying motives but with similar results, the noble things of man’s creation and we have destroyed millions of people without the slightest regard of their fitness to live.

Your history book will tell you how it all began and how it ended, but unless history is written differently in your day than it was in mine, it will tell you more of campaigns than of them who endured them; more of victories than those who suffered by them; and very little, far too little, of the real tragedy of our times, which was the broken lives of those to whom real, vibrant life was just as sweet at yours is to you.”

***********

“Your history book will not tell you of the dreams this war has prevented from coming true, which is as great a tragedy as the broken limbs and the lifeless men I see every day lying in the snow, the hedges, the streets and the fields of Western Europe.

The boys of your age are packing into these war years the experiences of a lifetime and are old before their time. I see them every day in long lines, their faces impassive, immobile and their eyes lacklustre and sometimes wet, striding the road into the unknown.

They are so very young and should be at their games. Instead, they are trudging into battle, some doomed to die before they have lived. They don’t look very brave and there is no lust for battle in their eyes. That will come later with the upsurge of excitement. But they are brave, or they wouldn’t go on.”

***********

“Only the other morning I went to a straggling Dutch village that was still in flames. We had been fighting the Germans there for two days and at last had burned them out with flame-throwers.

But I saw 2,000 Dutch men and women and children come up from the cellars and shelters of that village after a night of torment under the flames that destroyed their homes. It was not an important place or your history books would mention it as one which was “liberated” – by burning it down. That, my dear, is war.

It had, of course, to be done, and had it been my job I would have done it that way. My point is that in war you have to destroy to set free. We have had to destroy our world to free yours. But don’t ask me why.”

***********

“The children of Holland have legs no thicker than my wrists, and I see scores of them scraping the tins on the garbage heap.

In Poland it is worse, for there a whole nation has been cruelly, brutally treated with millions turned into slaves by their German oppressors, or into worse than slaves. And that goes for many, many countries. The future just dare not forget the past.”

***********

“I hope I am able to get to your party to wish you many happy returns of the day, but if I am not, let this message from a distant past say just this: “I hope we haven’t let you down too badly; may you live happily and well with those you love and who love you.

My best wishes,

Alfred M. Lee”

ALFRED Morgan Lee was a man of many talents.

He was office boy, copy boy, junior reporter, news editor, director and editor of the Examiner, rising to chairman of the board of Joseph Woodhead and Sons Ltd.

But his lasting legacy is as a war correspondent. The vivid reports he filed from the European front during World War Two left an indelible imprint on the minds of his readers.

For the best part of five years after 1939 he wrote about a nation at war, both at home and abroad. His series of ARP reports for the Examiner entitled On the Home Front gained wider attention and a commendation from Whitehall.

They earned him a position as one of the limited number of accredited reporters to return to mainland Europe in 1944, just a step or two behind the invasion forces who were liberating Europe prior to the German surrender in May 1945.

At that time the Examiner was the only regional newspaper of its size to have a man in the thick of the action.

In December 1945 he published a 93-page book As I Saw It, priced two shillings, which was his personal account of the war.

Alfred’s journalistic prowess was recognised even before the war. In 1936 he was one of only 25 Press representatives in the whole of Britain to cover the Berlin Olympics on 1936.

There he came face to face with The Führer and later said: “Hitler and I stared at each other for a moment or two, both of us puzzled as to what to do next.” As neither man did anything, the encounter ended.

Alfred had a wide range of interests. He was a member of the Press Council for over a decade and a keen Freemason, being Master of Concord Lodge and a member of Perseverance Chapter.

He was captain of Crosland Heath Golf Club, chairman of the Huddersfield branch of the Multiple Sclerosis Society and an enthusiastic chess player.

He died in 1975, aged 73. His son, Ivan, was editor of the Examiner from 1976 to 1991.