The singer achieved superstar status as 'the forces' sweetheart', boosting troop morale with a string of romantic and patriotic ballads. FMTNews VeraLynn
LONDON: As long as there are still Britons alive who fought in World War II, the name of Vera Lynn will open a bittersweet floodgate of nostalgia.
It is impossible to gauge whether the outcome of the war was swayed by songs like “There’ll Always Be an England”, “We’ll Meet Again”, “ The White Cliffs of Dover” and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”. Even her version of the German soldiers’ favourite song, “Lili Marlene,” managed to sound like a patriotic lament, a far cry from the darker sexual undercurrents implicit in the versions by Marlene Dietrich and Lale Andersen — ironically both of them anti-Nazis who became the German forces’ sweethearts.Its appeal to love and stoicism — “Keep smiling through/Just like you always do/ Till the blue skies/Drive the black clouds far away” — made it the perfect war-time anthem.
“We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again,” the monarch said.She began singing in local clubs at age seven and joined a child dance troupe, Madame Harris’ Kracker Cabaret Kids, at 11.She adopted her grandmother’s maiden name Lynn as her stage name, making her first radio broadcast in 1935 with the Joe Loss Orchestra.
For decades, she was a beloved figure at celebrations to mark the anniversaries of the June 6, 1944, D-Day landings in France or VE Day, the end of the war in Europe on May 8, 1945.
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